Producer: Firebird
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Martin Sherlock

The Happiest Days of your Life is a sort of academic Who Dunnit? with you playing the role of chief suspect schoolboy. The Headmaster has had his wallet stolen and is understandably rather miffed about the whole affair. Because you're known as a bit of a tearaway the blame falls naturally on you. A severe caning, a very sore rump and expulsion are all on the cards unless you can clear your name.

The only way to prevent this chain of events from taking place is by roaming around the school and town, collecting items and taking them to the right place to help prove your innocence.

There is something very strange about this school. Instead of meeting fellow students, all the hero encounters are weird objects which suddenly spring to life when he walks into a room and do their best to keep him away from essential objects. Contact with the nasties results in the loss of energy, displayed on a bar in the status area. Grub can be collected here and there for a boost, but once the bar reaches zero one of the three lives is lost.

As in the MIKROGEN classic, Everyone's A Wally, the hero can only carry two objects at a time, and walking over a collectable item swaps it for one of the objects shown in the status area. This particular schoolboy can walk left and right or jump into the air - useful if you want to avoid swapping objects in a location. A wide variety of items can be found in the game, including chalks, a mortar board, a pound note and a betting slip! Each location has a name - which sometimes helps to identify the task that needs to be undertaken there ... Some of the locations in town are not exactly the sort of place a schoolboy should find himself in - including a pub, betting shop and dingy nightclub.

The aim of the game is to find the headmaster's wallet and maybe collect a little bit of photographic evidence to prove your innocence while you're at it. Making a map would be a good starting point...

COMMENTS

Control keys: O,U,T,E,Q left; W,R,Y,I,P right; CAPS SHIFT, SPACE jump: A,S,D,F,G enter/exit doorway; H,J,K,L,ENTER pause; CAPS SHIFT and SPACE abort game
Joystick: Kempston, Interface 2
Keyboard play: responsive
Use of colour pretty locations but lots of clash
Graphics: in the Wally Week style
Sound: tune at the beginning of the game
Skill levels: one
Screens: 64

This is the first disappointing release out of many from FIREBIRD since the PCW show. It's a great pity as I was beginning to have high hopes for FlREBIRD'S Silver Range. Graphically, The Happiest Days of Your Life resembles the MIKROGEN classic Everyone's a Wally in that all the scenes are similar and they are also laid out in a similar way. The characters are fairly well detailed but animated badly and the sound is dire - there are no tunes and very few effects. I didn't really enjoy playing this one as it is unoriginal and badly presented.

When you get a character in the games market that has been as successful as Wally has, you are bound to find some clones popping up. Happiest Days is a superb copy of Everyone's A Wally but without all the other characters. I hope the programmers won't be angry with me for saying that it's a copy - they should be proud of this game. I'm sure it will be very successful at £1.99. The game features all the quirks of the old Wally games, even down to the colour clash. I'm sure that there's still a market for this type of game, but only in the budget market - Happiest Days may have got it all sewn up before anyone else has a chance, though...

If you are a Wally Week fan, currently sulking because MIKROGEN have abandoned your hero, fret no more. Here's a game in the same mould, only the price is much more interesting! This is a very neat clone of the game style made famous by Everyone's A Wally, and should appeal to anyone who isn't yet tired of the format. There's nothing original here, but lovers of puzzle and mapping games should find this a worthwhile purchase.

Firebird
£1.99

Nowadays, if a game isn't Willy, it's Wally, though to be accurate this one is more Billy! Billy Bunter, that is, because it combines the Skool Daze setting with Wally Week-style gameplay.

Happiest Days Of Your Life though? Yarroo! Not for me. The mere thought of school brings me out in an allergy rash. My only memory of the place is unremitting agony. They pulled my hair. They called me names. They set fire to my duffle coat - while I was still wearing it. And that was just the teachers.

Glad to say this cheap and cheerful offering isn't that painful. Somebody's done their homework and studied previous arcade adventures, so it's quite a comprehensive effort... even if it is cribbed from other sources.

The headmaster's wallet has gone missing, and it's up to you to prove your innocence. That's just the sort of plot that made Greyfriars so colourful. It means roaming all over the crumbling college, picking up and using various objects.

The puzzles shouldn't be too complex, even for the Fattest Owl of the Remove. But it's all quite witty and there are lots of locations, so it'll keep you occupied for a term or two.

There are no fellow pupils to interrupt your efforts, but the school is haunted by an unusual set of objects, such as flying chest expanders in the gym. The art master won't be too pleased with the attribute clash and apart from the opening screen, it looks like this pupil has skipped music class! My report is 'could try harder!'

Still. I've seen far worse, so if you're mourning the disappearance of one Wally Week from the world of games, you could do worse than enrolling for a testing time here, even if it hasn't got true class.

Label: Firebird
Author: Martin Sherlock
Price: £1.99
Joystick: various
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

The Happiest Days of Your Life is another conveyor belt Firebird title put out presumably on the scatter gun marketing technique which can be roughly translated as 'surely one of these things will sell if we put enough out there'.

It's not easy to get much idea of the game from the outside box: 'clear your name to avoid a thorough caning' and 'screen pictures shown may be different machine versions of game' is all you get. The former doesn't make it sound very exciting (except to masochists who may try to lose). As to the pictures, I can say that they are exactly like the Spectrum version of the game.

It's a sort of Skool Daze minus originality meets Wally games with marginally inferior graphics.

Your objective is to wander around the school and environs picking up objects putting down other objects and by putting objects with other objects to get further objects.

For example, putting a tape in the tape recorder gets you a recorder 'running' which may be useful in conjunction with the computer.

There are things spinning around, things bouncing up and down, things wizzing from side to side - all of them sapping your energy. Some places seem to restore energy levels and most of the puzzles require logical association of objects ie taking the betting slip to the betting shop sounds a good idea...

Graphics are fair, quite big, quite chunky though with a sublime disregard for attribute problems that not even Mikro-Gen could equal. It isn't badly programmed but there really isn't anything exciting about it. On the other hand it is a budget title. If you absolutely must have another Wally style, collect-the-bits game I've seen worse and this is cheap.

MACHINE: Spectrum
SUPPLIER: Firebird
PRICE: £1.99

The best thing that can be said about this pretty average arcade adventure is that it's big. Lots of locations, lots of things to collect and shuffle about in the manner of every arcade adventure ever written.

It's set in a school which looks like a private one to me. I guess loads of you out there have been to a expensive establishment, like this - with quadrangles, studies and big musty libraries full of Latin texts. This is definitely not Grange Hill.

Your task is to find the headmaster's stolen wallet. Hang on, maybe it IS Grange Hill...

It's all predictable stuff, served up lukewarm like a dodgy school dinner.

The graphics aren't badbut uninspiring. The puzzles are uninspiring too. All in all a game that doesn't make you WANT to play it. It lacks any sort of atmosphere and you end up not caring very much if your find the wallet or not.

Ironically, if Firebird's current batch of budget games - which include gems like Bombscare and Olli and Lisa - weren't so good the inadequacies of this little offering wouldn't show up so much.

Playing this game won't make you very happy - much like having to go to school really...

Firebird Silver
£1.99

Firebirds latest pocket money game is a schoolboy caper featuring an animated scally-wag out to retrieve the headmasters wallet that he's nicked and then lost. Can he avoid expulsion? This largely depends on your ability to steer him through the school building and grounds searching for clues to the whereabouts of the heads dosh.

All the basics of the game work well enough, the graphics are large and bright and despite the odd annoying attribute clash, quite pleasing to look at. The number of rooms and outside locations is quite surprising and it's quite a lot of fun just exploring. There are no really nasty surprises as the flying energy sappers such as hovering canes and twirling jellies in the school kitchen present little hazard. You can pick up any two objects of which there seem to be an almost unlimited supply. Quite which objects were meant to help you eluded me and all you get from the instructions are some rather cryptic hints such as, "map your way to the secret passage turning over a new leaf en-route."

However if you like problem solving games in the hunt the object type vein this will probably appeal. Well worth the price on presentation alone it may not give you the happiest day of your life or even a wildly exciting one but it you want to settle for an afternoon of quiet diversion this game will do.