Producer: Sparklers
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Trik

Oh lawdy, lawdy! The evil and villainous Krudd, a malignant and nasty race of an evil sort, have decided that the latest thing in badness is to swipe away large amounts of the Earth's baby population! Once the infants are swiped, the naughty aliens transport them back to the planet Krudd where the unsuspecting cherubs are quick frozen into suspended animation.

The Krudds plan to sell off the babes as popsicles to the baby-eating Vlurgs From Behind The Moon. Well, a hero is needed and you are that very hero, a wobbling fat blob with a predilection to walking sideways.

Transported into the alien's baby holding warehouse, you must waddle round, collecting babies and saving them from the gory fate lurking just around the corner. Babies are returned home by placing them into the Magic Pram, a mystical object from the planet Muvirkare that teleports any children placed within it back home. For every four babies collected and teleported, a burst of pleasure surges through you, resulting in an extra life - quite handy, considering the amount of lives that you'll lose facing the Krudd babyguards.

The format of Kidnap is extremely similar to a lot of other games - in short it's an arcade adventure in classic Jet Set Willy style. You can go left, right and jump and babies are collected by travelling over them. Around the gaff are a number of deadly nastier all of which must be avoided: their touch is deadly. As with most games of this type, guiding the fatty under your hypnotic control off the screen causes another screen to splash into view. To complete the game, all of earth's thirty two frozen babies have to be magic prammed back to their snug little cots back home.

COMMENTS

Control keys: A-G pause, Q-T continue, P/O music on/off, Z-V left, B-SYM SHIFT right, CAP SHIFT/SPACE jump
Joystick: Kempston, cursor, Interface 2
Keyboard play: responsive
Use of colour: bright, little clash
Graphics: unoriginal approach, fairly tidy
Sound: Manic Miner type ditty
Skill levels: one
Screens: 32

Aargh! Not another Manic Miner copy from a budget label - and I thought Creative Sparks had pulled their act together with Snodgits - it seems not. The game is an obvious copy of hundreds of other platform games - it even has Manic Miner type music. The graphics are small and boring, and the colour is typical of the old arcade adventures with lots of attribute clashes and very inaccurate error detection. I didn't find anything that would keep me playing Kidnap for long: it's a very crude copy of better games of this type.

A platform game: gosh I haven't seen one of these in ages, aren't they rare! The game is based around a fairly novel idea, but alas it feels just like another Jet Set Willy rip off. The graphics are pretty much run-of-the-mill for this type of game; fairly smooth animation, a few nicely drawn characters and lots of garish colours. The sound is fair but nothing special: just a tune and the odd spot effect here and there. Despite this game's many primitive aspects, I quite enjoyed it for a while.

What a pleasant little game, saving frozen babies. As a Jet Set Willy clone goes, Kidnap isn't that bad really: it performs all its tasks competently and smoothly and is hard to flaw. Gameplay-wise though, the market really has seen too many of this type of game. I am sick and tired of finding that so many of the budget games received by CRASH are heavily inspired by JSW. That program really has haunted budding programmers the country over, supposedly all of them wishing to be Matthew Smith The Second. I wish they'd go away and do something original and stop turning out stuff like this.

Sparklers
£1.99

Kkrudd to the left of me, Kkrudd to the right, Kkrudd, Kkrudd, everywhere and not a Kkrudd to eat. The mega-evil (or is it medieval - this game concept's so old) Krudd are the baddies who've pinched all the babies and cruelly put them into suspended animation about their house.

Hence the name of this little gem from Creative Sparks - Kidnap. Hah, I bet all you Robert Louis Stephenson fans out there were getting steamed up with the idea we'd be wandering the Scottish moors? No such luck. Instead, we're inside Kkrudd House and your task is to travel around it, collect the babies and return them to the Magic Pram. And all because you've got to save civilization.

This high-speed platform arcade has thirty-two screens split into four quadrants on eight levels. All the baddies (and there are quite a few thou of 'em) repeat the same circuit, but there are so many of 'em that your little lunar module look-a-like is really gonna have to shift. Luckily you've plenty of lives (well, five anyway) and various ladders and lifts to whizz you away from it all. And, if you don't make one of those death defying leaps beware of the stomach churning plunge to the depths. Like Dumbo you're unarmed and harmless, relying on your reflexes, wits and forward planning. It's fast, furious and fun, fun, fun. And all accompanied by the most frenetic music. Kkrudd, Kkrudd, glorious Kkiudd.

Creative Sparks
£1.99

After a fairly quiet period, Creative Sparks budget range is trundling back into action with a few new titles. Kidnap, one of the first new releases, came as something of a surprise when I loaded it up. It's a platform game (remember those?), and while just a few months ago I might have snorted in derision and chucked it onto the heap of Jet Set Willy clones in the corner, the novelty of playing a simple ladders 'n platforms game after all the mega-complicated arcade/strategy/adventure epics of recent months made a pleasant change.

As with all platform games the 'plot' is pretty meaningless. Kidnap concerns an alien being called Kkrudd who goes around kidnapping babies and keeping them frozen in suspended animation in his home in outer space.

Kkrudd has captured thirty two little nippers and these are hidden away in the thirty-two rooms of his home. You, as the only available Space Agent in the area have been assigned the task of rescuing the little brats... er, sorry, the little darlings, but of course the rooms of Kkrudd's home are occupied by all the weird sprites and traps that we've come to know and love from earlier platform games.

Kidnap isn't the hardest platform game that I've ever played, and in most of the rooms it only took a few moments to work out how to reach the babies. But one nice touch is that in some rooms the baby can only be reached by going off screen and coming back on via an alternative route which isn't always easily found. The graphics are quite simple though they are perfectly adequate for this type of game and animation and use of colour are all quite good.

I suppose that platform games are ideal for budget software as the format and programming techniques are all well established by now. My only real doubts about this game are that it's not as challenging as it could be and that 32 rooms isn't a lot when you think that other games in this style have more than 100 rooms each. Still, for £1.99 it's reasonable value and should divert you for an hour or so.