REVIEWS COURTESY OF ZXSR

Maze Mania
by Ed Campbell, Mark A. Jones, Ray Jones
Hewson Consultants Ltd
1989
Crash Issue 68, Sep 1989   page(s) 41

Hewson/Designmaker
£9.99

Flippo, a small round creature who could easily pass as an orange in a crowd, is the star of the brill new game from Hewson, Maze Mania. As you might have guessed from the screen, the basic idea is that of Pacman, but before you start moaning, Maze Mania has got something different to offer. Instead of gobbling up dots Flippo uses his size ten boots to flip over paving slabs.

Some slabs have a mind of their own and flip back, though another boot from Flippo usually does the trick. The game is split into 16 levels of maze, each with a different theme. Level one is made up of tubular bells, two is a vegetable garden, three - well, find out for yourselves!

Life would be easy for little Flippo if it weren't for the nasty aliens gliding around the mazes who aren't too keen on the citrus fruit vandalism. They bash poor Flippo at every opportunity. Another thing to avoid is a trip out to space. Black holes abound in the maze, and these need to be jumped. Luckily there are floating icons to help our hero, giving extra points or power to jump on the aliens and kill them.

The idea of Maze Mania may be a simple one, but it is totally addictive. Lightning reflexes are a must to get out of the tricky situations and jump the black holes. The graphics are neat, with plenty of colour in every maze (especially the garish vegetable patch level!), in fact so abundant it can be very hard on the old eyes after a while, but the jolly tunes and effects will take your mind off this. Designmaker have done an excellent job on Maze Mania. Get it for a simple but addictive arcade romp.

NICK [82%]


This is a fairly basic maze game, I must say. The graphics are good and the presentation is slick, but the essential idea is...well a bit old, really! That said, Hewson have managed to make the best of a tired theme; all the playability imaginable in a maze game has been squeezed into this, which isn't an immense amount, but it'll do. Graphics are really appealing, and I think that makes the game a lot more enjoyable.
MIKE [72%]

REVIEW BY: Nick Roberts, Mike Dunn

Presentation87%
Graphics85%
Sound81%
Playability81%
Addictivity76%
Overall77%
Summary: A fun and enjoyable arcade romp, with smart graphics.

Transcript by Chris Bourne

Your Sinclair Issue 46, Oct 1989   page(s) 52

Hewson
£9.99 cass
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies

Hewson seems to have been a bit quiet on the full-price front recently (or maybe I'm just being unobservant), and since its stuff is practically always received with outstretched arms and slavering chops, Mazemania is virtually guaranteed a place in the history books. Another easy chart-topping Megagame, scooping up every award going and inspiring a stream of budget clones.

Or is it? (Sinister chords...)

Flippo the hedgehog (not a good start) appears to be in some kind of Pacmania-like scrolling maze, being pursued by a plethora (hang on - my teef have come out Scrilch! That's better) of baddies. To escape he has to run about flipping over the tiles that make up the floor, which is much more aesthetically pleasing than eating dots I reckon, and gives rise to a variety of 'flip' jokes which we'll pass over for the moment.

Luckily there's absolutely no explanation to the logic underlying these activities, so we can dive straight in and examine the important bits.

The graphics and sound first, I think. Yup. Pretty good. Nice and colourful (those are shadows, not attribute problems. Honest). Fast scrolling. The best bit is probably the tiles-flipping-over effect. And the worst bit? The music on the title page, which sounds horribly like the 'hold' tune on the YS phone system.

As well as just the usual 'flip and forget' tiles, there are others that need a little more persistence. Some flip back if you run over them again, which can be rather annoying, and others need to be approached from specific directions or flipped twice. There are also icons drifting about which will give you the usual extra lives, energy and points if collected. Predictably, some also act as power pills and let you pounce on your foe for a change.

The trouble is, that's it really. For the first few goes the game is great fun, and that flip-effect sends a sort of tingley feeling running down your spine. Then gradually it dawns on you that mazes perhaps don't hold quite the thrill that they used to, the scenery starts to get very familiar, and so on. And from what I've seen there are few surprises in store on later levels, apart from faster, meaner baddies and more fiddly tile layouts.

All the same, though, Mazemania is a good, honest, little game which I'd certainly come back to occasionally. It's just that, at one pee short of a tenner, I doubt it will stand much of a chance against the big licences, coin-ops and so on that are currently fighting for the number one slot on the prestigious YS chart. Hewson would have done better to have stuck to Plan A and released it on its budget Rack-It label.


REVIEW BY: Jonathan Davies

Blurb: Your energy indicator. A void. Avoid. (Ahem) A tile awaiting flipping. A pile of squidgy intestines. Flippo. There was an icon here a second ago, but I screenshotted just too late. An inspirational message. A posse of baddies in hot pursuit.

Life Expectancy74%
Instant Appeal83%
Graphics79%
Addictiveness65%
Overall70%
Summary: Punchy little maze game, but which might lose appeal due to its repetitive levels.

Transcript by Chris Bourne

Sinclair User Issue 91, Oct 1989   page(s) 84

Label: Hewson
Author: Designmaker
Price: £9.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: John Cook

Hewson generally knock out some cracking stuff, don't they? Cybernoid, Exolon, Uridium - Hewson games have had more SU Classics than most of us have had lukewarm dinners standing in the rain on one leg. And the latest offering from that esteemed company is Mazemania.

Remember Pacman? That was maybe the first maze game ever and had you gobbling up dots around a maze, while you had to avoid the nasties.

Then there was Pacmania. It was just like the original Pacman, only it was in isometric perspective, you could only see the bit of the maze immediately around you at any one time. This was a real pain in the botty, as if you had missed a single blob somewhere, you had to frustratingly search through to find the missing one - instead of being able to see it immediately, just like you could in the original. Oh - and you could jump over the monsters.

Mazemania is a bit like the latter, only viewed from above. Flippo - your cutsie sprite - has to traverse through some colourful mazes, flipping over the tiles (essentially the same as eating the dots), avoiding the monsters. When you have succeeded in flipping all the tiles on one level, you have to find the exit square which will take you to the next.

There are other fiddly bits to it, of course. Black holes that you have to jump over... If you fall down you flip back to the original colour - and I have a feeling they might alter bits of the maze when you walk over them, too.

Icons can be bumped into which give you extra points, extra energy (for it is energy you lose if you bump into a nasty), an extra a life, or the ability to jump on nasties and kill 'em. You can jump over the aliens to avoid being drained of that oh-so-precious energy, and to avoid our friend Flippo from a grisly and untimely demise.

The final difference is that you have an energymeter and when you bump into nasties, you don't die immediately, but lose a bit of energy.

But the fact that you can't see all the maze at once (same as Pacmania, y'see), makes the game - for me - a bit of a pain to play. There is a way out of this - you map the levels carefully - but it does take a lot of the spontaneity out of the thing if you do.

On the plus side, as usual, the technical implementation of Mazemania is flawless. Super scrolling, fabby graphics - particularly on the second level - great playability, the works. And the game has a certain niggling addictiveness that does get to you after a time - 'though for others it might just amount to niggle!

But for 10 big ones, it's one of those games that it would be better to try first, to see if it's going to grab you, rather than rushing out to buy straight away. Worth looking out for though, particularly for maze game and mapping fiends.


REVIEW BY: John Cook

Graphics85%
Sound72%
Playability70%
Lastability80%
Overall74%
Summary: Pacmania-ish gameplay, but in plan view with a few knobs on - worth a look.

Transcript by Chris Bourne

C&VG (Computer & Video Games) Issue 95, Oct 1989   page(s) 84

Hewson
Spectrum £9.99

PacMan-style games come and go and, as the saying goes, here comes another one. This time the scenario reads that Flippo, a kind of hedgehog with two legs cut off, has to find his way out of the Mazes of the Upper Plane.

He does this by walking over tiles, which then flip over and change colour. Once all the tiles in the current maze have been flipped correctly, he can leave for the next via a mysterious flashing teleporter.

Things aren't as simple as they first seem, though. Our flipping friend only has a limited amount of energy, and there are plenty of aliens around willing to do him in. If he gets caught too many times, he loses one of three lives. Fortunately, extra lives are available in the form of Flippo icons; you can also pick up a lightning icon which gives you extra energy, and a fist, which allows you to stomp on lots of alien heads without losing strength.

In addition, there are some tiles which change colour every time you flip them, and others that can only be turned when walked over from one direction. And woe betide the Flippo that falls down a hole, for his life is quickly snuffed out.

And that's all there is to it, Flippo is very similar to US Gold's Skweek, but unfortunately Skweek is cuter, has far more levels and a greater variety of bonus icons. Although it's a nice enough game, Mazemania is just too repetitive and simplistic for the price.


REVIEW BY: Gordon Houghton

Blurb: UPDATE Other 8 bit versions are still under development for the same price as the Spectrum, and the 64 version promises an additional bonus section. On 16 bit the game hasn't yet been started and no prices are available, but it should feature twenty levels.

Graphics57%
Sound27%
Value23%
Playability41%
Overall42%
Summary: Like most PacMan inspired games, the action is initially appealing; this is also helped by a cute main character and reasonably fast-paced gameplay. However, with so few and so similar levels it doesn't hold much lasting appeal.

Transcript by Chris Bourne

The Games Machine Issue 23, Oct 1989   page(s) 97

Spectrum 48/128 Cassette: £9.99

From the title and the fact that the hero is round and frivolously named Flippo, it's clear that this is another jolly little game inspired by Pac-Man. Here its mixed with the Crazy Painter/Arnidar theme; the tiles making up each maze corridor show a different colour as Flippo automatically flips them as he passes by.

The obligatory hero-chasing bad guys make Flippo's job a challenge but he can leap over their hapless heads with a well-timed single bound and pick up speed-inducing icons to show them a clean pair of heels. Jumps are also necessary to cross black holes and starry voids otherwise liable to take one of Rippo's lives.

After level one - Tubular Bells - is completed by flipping all its tiles, level two (The Vegetable Garden) can be directly accessed in subsequent games with use of Mazemania's password system.

There's a pleasant ditty on the options page but it's the preceding loading screen which is more indicative of the game. Like the screen and maze borders of the game, it uses several colours, restraining themselves within character blocks, and the Spectrums bright colour command. The result is a patchwork quill of unsavoury palette that can displease and distract the eye in mid-game. On the plus side, four-way scrolling is both fast and smooth and busy sound effects help gameplay.

The game concept certainly needs helping along: Skweek (TGMO21) was too simplistic for recommendation and Mazemania is nothing more than a cut-down version of that recent US Gold release. Old-fashioned and limited gameplay - just a matter of dodge and jump - this is much better suited to a budget price tag.


REVIEW BY: Warren Lapworth

Overall46%
Transcript by Chris Bourne

All information in this page is provided by ZXSR instead of ZXDB