Producer: Elite
Retail Price: £7.99 cassette, £12.99 disk
Author: Neil Latarche and Lizzie

It's a hard life hopping through the world and Hopping Mad is full of ups and downs.

The player controls a string of four balls which continually bounce up and down as they move from right to left against a horizontally scrolling landscape. The player can make them jump higher (by pressing fire) and speed up or slow down their movement. The balls collect balloons by bouncing into them; a collection of ten balloons gives access to the next level.

Environments range from forest to beach scene (no time for sunbathing here) and from desert to undersea world. Each stage contains its own particular hazards, most of which burst one or more of the balls when hit. Desert cacti swallow up badly positioned balls; prickly hedgehogs and slithering snakes crawl across the earth, and lethal rooks and bees soar through the air. Extra points are awarded for collecting apples as well as other bonus objects and for jumping directly on to certain obstacles. When all four balls have burst, the player loses one of three lives.

Play skilfully enough and you can bounce through the world, over the sea and out into uncharted regions of space to boldly hop where no man (or woman) has hopped before.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: bright, bouncy and colourful with well-animated figures
Sound: two jolly 128K title tunes plus many varied squirty spot effects

The controls for the game are extremely simple; just left, right and fire, but the balls are still incredibly difficult to control as they bounce through the scrolling landscape. The backgrounds lack detail but are very colourful with the odd spot of colour clash. The sprites move easily and quickly against a smoothly scrolling background. There are a couple of nice tunes on the 128K - it's just a pity that they don't play during the game itself. The idea of bouncing is reminiscent of the ancient Kosmic Kanga but this time the screen scrolls from left to right. Personally, I'd have preferred it the other way round. Despite its simplicity, gameplay is fast and fun but also very challenging as you try to keep up to four balls out of trouble at the same time. The real problem with the game is its repetitiveness and the rather high difficulty. Still it's very playable and keeps you coming back for more; definitely worth a look.
PHIL [84%]

Skipping through the countryside as a series of interconnected bouncing bobbles doesn't sound like the most promising game scenario, but what starts out sounding incredibly silly turns out to be extremely enjoyable. The colourful backdrops are bright and bouncy - as with all Elite games a jolly 128K tune helps you on your sprightly way - and collision detection is totally accurate as you bound recklessly over hedgehogs, lizards and flowers, squashing the innocents as you go. The only missing ingredient is a bit of variety. If only there was a contrasting sub-game, a bit of multidirectional hopping, a two-player option - anything for a little alternative excitement When you've bounced and bounded your merry way through all eight levels of this computerised hopscotch you may feel a little disappointed that there's nothing more. Still - as long as you're not after the game of a lifetime you've got a few enjoyably acrobatic weeks on your hands.
KATI [74%]

The control method of Hopping Mad is very similar to that of Ocean's Wizball in that there's so much inertia it is extremely easy to go out of control. The presentation is excellent, with a tune that sounds like it has come from a children's programme, along with some colourful and jolly graphics. The game itself is terribly hard to play; with some concentration I did manage to get to the start of Level 3 but found it impossible to finish. It's a shame Elite have made it so difficult to get anywhere because the further you get the better the graphics and animation - Level 8 should be a real treat! At least they've chosen the right title for a game where, if you're not careful, you can get killed very easily in the first couple of seconds - and go Hopping Mad!
NICK [76%]

Encore (rerelease)
£2.99

I absolutely adored this when it first hopped onto our screens, and it remains a firm favourite even today. The slickness of the ball-worm thingy (I don't know what it's called!) you control makes the game instantly addictive, and the unpredictability of the nasty things out to pop you gives an extra boost.

The various levels include the easy forest, boiling desert and the almost impossible ice covered level. All your skills will be tested to the full. Colour oozes out of every corner, with detailed graphics in the backgrounds and sprites.

The idea is to collect balloons by bouncing along, trailing a long tail behind you. If any of the balls in the tail hits a rock or spike, or gets chomped by a Venus Fly Trap, it bursts and the tall gets shorter. Once ten balloons have been collected you go onto the next level to try all over again.

Each level gets progressively harder: gaps you have to manoeuver through get shorter and jumps get longer until you wonder how the hell you're supposed to survive! Hoppin' Mad is a classic game. It was a hit when it was first released back in 1988 and is bound (no pun intended) to be a hit again on re-release. It's packed full of action and just frustrating enough to keep you coming back for more. Get your copy today.

Elite
£7.99
Reviewer: Duncan MacDonald

Boing, bong, bong - splat, Curses! Boing, boing, boing - splat! Curses, curses, spit! Boing, boing, splat! Yaaaargghhh!!

In Hopping Mad you get to control a bouncing ball (well, four bouncing balls to be precise), in a sort of Wonderboyish type landscape which scrolls inexorably from left to right. To the right of the screen are your four balls, which bounce alternately (describing a sine wave) (a what? Ed), and the object of the game is to lead your merry rubber troupe safely through the scrolling screens, while eating apples and popping any floating balloons you see bobbing about. Your progress is hindered, however, by various nasties, both ground-based and airborne: hedgehogs, cacti, venus fly-traps (ball traps in this case), sharp rocks, buzzing bumble-bees and sharp-clawed eagles to name but a few. But if you can manage to survive long enough to pop 10 balloons, you get boinged up to the next level (different landscape and flashes) for more of the same.

Controlling your inflatable chums is a tricky business at times. There are just three movements: slow forward, fast forward and bounce. And when you find a ground-based hedgehog scrolling towards you with a balloon above and an eagle behind, can you manage to high bounce over the hog, pop the balloon, and still get all the balls safely down without touching the bird? Answer: probably not but you've only got about three femto-seconds to make your decision... there's no stopping in this game - you can slow the scrolling down but you can't stop it!

The graphics aren't exactly mind blowing, but you could say they are chunky, functional and quite nicely animated.

Hopping Mad is one of those rare games - easier than falling off a log to get into, but a lot (lot) harder than falling off a log to get very far in. We are talking quite addictive here. Quite addictive indeed. Curses. I've just got to go and have another quick go. Boing, boing, boing - splat, Bleeeeeee!

BARGAIN BASEMENT

It's time to tiptoe down those creaky old stairs again. JONATHAN DAVIES leads the way...

Encore
£2.99
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies

"Almost as addictive as banana Nesquik," concluded Dunc when this one fell into his hands a couple of years ago. And it certainly is. What we've got here is essentially a scrolling bouncing ball game which, just for a change, scrolls from left to right. You've actually got four balls to keep an eye on, and they all stick together in a long snakey thing. It's a bit like having all your eggs in one basket, except they're, erm, balls.

There's absolutely nothing you can do to stop the balls bouncing along. All you can manage is to make them speed up, slow down or bounce a little bit higher. This makes collecting things which need to be collected a trifle tricky, and avoiding nasties even harder still. You've actually got to pick up ten balloons on each level in order to progress along onto the next one, and because they tend to drift around a bit this is by no means an easy task. But the really scary part is that whenever any of your balls get hit by anything they burst. And one all four have popped, that's it - end of game.

Easy it's not. You'll need loads of patience. Loads of it. And you'll also need to develop a whole new gaming technique, as Hopping Mad isn't quite like anything else at all. But your patience will be rewarded, as they say, because it's a smart, tidy little game and very hard to hate.

Label: Elite
Author: In-house
Price: £7.99, £12.99 disc
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

Ho, ho, ho! Plenty of zany fun here. I'll be bound! Any game called Hopping Mad must be the sort of whacky, oddball bit of craziness guaranteed to have you rolling about with mirth as you join in the merry fun!

Well, no, actually. Hopping Mad is one of those games that try so hard to be whacky, oddball and lovable that they make you want to jump up and down on them and go out and kick a dog.

Not that the gameplay's bad at all. You control some sort of spherical alien being, hippety-hopping through a series of strange landscapes. Behind you bounces a series of identical balloons - you start with four - and the aim is to steer them through each landscape without coming to grief by hitting sundry spiky things.

The bouncing balls are very nicely done, but the background design is dull, consisting of sketchily-drawn trees, shrubs, cacti and so on. The scrolling is none too hot, either. By far the worst bits, though, are the passing obstacles; wearingly flapping birds, wriggly snakes, splodgy little hedgehogs, strange rotating bars and rising balloons.

Collide with any of these, or with the snapping fly-trap plants, and one of your spheres will burst. If it's one of the middle ones, it makes it even more difficult to manoeuvre your remaining balls.

Along the way, you get bonus points for bursting passing balloons (why? aren't you supposed to like the look of them?) or for eating apples. To do this you must leap higher in the air by pressing the fire button.

At certain stages you may be lucky enough to be transported directly to the next level by hitting magic tokens, but things don't get much more interesting; you simply get a wider selection of lizards, bees, and other obstacles, coming at you thicker and faster.

All this would have been perfectly amusing in a budget-priced game; there's plenty of fun to be derived from learning to control the balls, but the sound effects are lousy and there isn't enough variation in the gameplay to make you want to stick with Hopping Mad longer than the hour or two, which would be par for the course for a budget game. It's all very well trying to put together a flopsy-wopsy cutesy-wutesy game, but it would help if there had been a bit more attention paid to the hard details of gameplay and presentation.

Label: Encore
Price: £2.99
Reviewer: Garth Sumpter

Leap, srroing, eeek! If I had to sum up a game in three words then this meagre trio of words could encapsulate the whole ethos of Hopping Mad. But would anyone want to buy a game that could be summed up so easily? My guess is that they wouldn't but let's have a look at it anyway...

Four balls bounce across the screen from right to left in a line (looking like a disjointed and it's your task to guide them as they sproing on their way by speeding up their progress, slowing them down and using the fire button to make them all bounce higher. So far, so bad but wait, what's that in the distance? Is it a plot, is it a game, no you daft bugger it's just some gnashing plants, some fat birds (I'd hate to stand under any of them 'cos they look full of food and in need of a toilet) some bees who may or may not have been playing with the birds, some cacti, hedgehogs and a load of big balls, all of which prove fatal if a ball catches them. Loose a life and one of your balls blows up (coff, chortle). Points you have to get by collecting balloons and apples.

Well that's it. There's not much to the game and so I'm going to have the problems of a one-armed weight lifter with an itchy bottom to write much more about it. Apart from the fact that I could tell you about the smooth scrolling, the okay graphics, the ease of gameplay: and the mind-boggling boredom of it all. But I won't. I'll just say that Encore have enough good games on their budget label to sink a small wooden boat so either go and find one of them (Buggy Boy, Paperboy etc) or just go out and sink a small wooden boat. You'll have far more fun and capers and be able to get back to Aunties in time for tea and a slap up feed!

Elite's bounce-em-along...

What looks at first sight like a hyperactive caterpillar turns out to be a string of four bouncing balls you have to guide over and through some very hazardous scenery in this lively horizontal scroller. The aim is to collect ten of the small balloons that drift towards you, at the same time avoiding the many flying and earthbound creatures you meet along the way. Touch one of these, and you lose one of your... well, balls. When all four are gone you lose one of your three lives and start that level again.

Joystick controls are simple. Push left to accelerate (increases the speed of the scrolling) and right to decelerate. Pressing the fire button as the lead ball hits the ground gives you extra height for that bounce - useful for catching those higher-flying balloons. Take care though - this also puts you well in range of various seagulls, crows and other airborne predators.

And that's basically the point of the game. Collect the balloons, advance to the next level, collect ten more and so on. With only eight levels to complete, though, the long-term interest is limited.

Nevertheless. Hopping Mad is original, attractive, and really rather fun. It's also addictive enough to keep you coming back again and again until you've cracked it.

Reviewer: Rod Lawton

RELEASE BOX
C64/128, £9.99cs, £11.99dk, Out Now
Spec, £7.99cs, £12.99dk, Out Now
Amstrad, £9.99cs, £14.99dk, Out Now

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 45/100
1 hour: 80/100
1 day: 75/100
1 week: 65/100
1 month: 20/100
1 year: 5/100

Spectrum 48/128 Cassette: £7.99, Diskette: £12.99
Amstrad CPC Cassette: £9.99, Diskette: £14.99
Commodore 64/128 Cassette: £9.99, Diskette: £11.99

HOP AND GLORY

Inspired by Cataball - included 'free' on one of Elite's Trio packs - this imaginative game idea has been expanded and improved on the Commodore 64 by Chris Coupe's coding and Mark Cooksey's graphics. Spectrum and Amstrad conversions have both been done by Neil Latarche (coding) and Lizzie (graphics).

This distinctly surreal game comes to us unencumbered by a convoluted scenario explaining why four balls might be bouncing, in sequence, across various Landscapes. it is difficult to imagine what could motivate four relatively normal looking balls to go globe-trotting collecting balloons. Perhaps there are things in life that are better not known.

Hopping Mad has 14 levels of increasingly bizarre landscapes, all of which require the balls to collect ten balloons before accessing the next level. Collisions can dematerialise any of the four balls and when all are lost a life is taken. There are three lives to begin with, easily lost to such assorted enemies as Venus flytraps, bees and sharp rocks on the first level. Later levels have the balls bobbing on the sea bed, trembling though a haunted forest and basking under a Wild West sun.

Ball-bursting objects change according to the level - from Starfish to ghosts to cacti. Point bonuses vary similarly, with apples being the most fruitful on level one. Even more points can be gathered by quickly completing the game to receive a time bonus. Once a level is finished you start the next with all four balls. Gameplay across the three 8-bit versions (no others are planned) is similar, only varying slightly in difficulty.