2008 Competition Results: (6:We Like It Retro)

1st Place – Spare A Thought For The Little Guy – Total: 314

Ian:

Life’s a bitch, and then you get made redundant. And then it gets worse! So starts the tale that this game tells. Having lost his job, your player avatar goes home to tell his family the unfortunate news and ends up without a job, wife or kids – Mrs Little Guy even rubs salt in the wounds by informing our hero that she is moving in with his ex-boss. Charming! His only hope of achieving anything in this life is by signing a pact with the devil to collect 100 souls.

Souls are littered around hostile landscapes, appearing as horned bouncy balls type beings. Collect all the souls on each level and leave through the exit for more of the same, only harder.

This game has a brilliantly retro graphic style with all major characters rendered in colour, but everything else is in monochrome. The player is also wonderfully animated. A special mention must go to the death scenes as our avatar cops it in a variety of inventive and fun ways. Lovely stuff.

Sound too is good, with a lovely SID style rendition of the Merle Travis classic “16 Tons”, made famous by Johnnie Cash, on the intro screens.

While the game is lovingly designed and realised for the most part, some of the gameplay aspects are annoying. The control method for one thing is an odd choice – why not just use the UP and DOWN CURSORS instead of A and Z? Another thing that is totally unfair is that the player is vulnerable to getting killed the moment he reappears after dying. Why not make the character invulnerable for a second or so after death? I lost count of the number of times I lost multiple lives as a result of this.

A lovely game, with several significant (but easily fixed) flaws that I’d like to see sorted in an update. Please make it so.

83%

Geekay:

To quote the late Bon Scott, “Hell aint a bad place to be”.  This is exactly the case with this little gem of a platformer.  And like the bands music, this game doesn’t deviate away from what it’s good at – this is a simple game with no frills apart from the sheer gameplay it offers.

The game is furnished with a strange, but effective graphical mix.  The main sprite character is definitely C64 looking but the rest of the levels, and animations are all pixelled and monochromatic which resembles something more like the Spectrum’s bastard child with the ZX80. That’s not a criticism – I like it very much indeed. The game itself is your classic collect and avoid platformer which isn’t dissimilar to the great Chuckie Egg.

There were many platform games released back in the day.  Most were poor attempts riding the crest of the wave during Manic Miner’s success.  If this was released at the same time, I wouldn’t say it was an inferior copycat.  It has its own character and signature.  It’s a flavour, although familiar, you haven’t quite tasted before.  It has style, groovy style and a car that just won’t stop.

I enjoyed the simplistic abridged introduction into the main characters fiasco.  This game doesn’t take itself seriously, and that is a redeeming quality that assures more enjoyment from it.  The fun only lasts so long though, as after about level 4 it gets fucking brick solid and I was making the dialogue on Full Metal Jacket seem like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

This game takes this years biscuit for having the most contagious tune.  It’s been whirling round my head all day long. It suits the game really well.

Yeah, this is good old fashioned platforming fun folks, and I don’t remember any other platform game that features decapitations. No, Barbarian wasn’t a platformer.

84%

Oogy:

Poor wretched lost souls. Thrown about the place with nowhere to go, and nothing to do about it. Luckily I am a good guy, and in an attempt to better myself and my life, I decide to collect them and make them… er… not so lost anymore. So what if I had to sign a contract with ol’ Bealzabub?

This isn’t a bad collect-em-up by all means, but there are some real design-flaws that make it harder than it should. First, the bonus counter decreases at a bit of an alarming rate, and once it is depleted you loose a life. Not a very forgiven situation. More unforgiven is that fact that you spawn back to the start location, and if there happens to be an enemy there, you loose another one. Oh boy.

As for the controls, they are a bit silly and cannot be re-defined. Left- right cursor to move, I get that. Space to jump. Sure, no problem. But a and z to move up and down ladders? What was wrong with the up- down keys, since you use them to move horizontaly anyway? A poor design flaw if I ever saw one.

Despite all that, the game isn’t as bad as I make it sound. The graphics are minimalistic but well designed, and the animation (including the death scenes) are very well done. The music is pleasant and unfortunately there are not alot of sound effects, except when picking up a lost soul. And the difficulty level shoots way up on the third level, where just about anything that moves kills you (and there are alot of them about), and you end up having to wait alot for enemies to walk through before you can climb up. Most of the time the bonus runs out and it’s hello Hades for the Little Guy.

74%

Spray:

Bloody Hell! Actually, very bloody. In so many more ways than one could imagine Hell being bloody!
Spare A Thought… sees our hero cast into the very depths of the underworld to harvest lost souls after signing a pact with the Big Red One himself.

Now, those who know me well enough to know will know that I’m not a big fan of platformers so it was with not a small amount of sighing and cursing that I sat down in front of this game for the obligatory 15 minutes of testage, only to discard it at the end as another Manic Miner and be done with it.

This game, though, draws you in. It’s well constructed levels give a nice balanced game, even to those as uncoordinated in the runny-jumpy department as myself and the graphics are just lush. Auraly, I was also impressed with the tuneage.

The ‘Finger Twister’ I’m getting so used to from judging this compo is also in evidence here, it has an odd, if not bad keyboard layout and no redefine option, but above and beyond that, I really can’t fault the game.

It’s devilishly good… BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA… etc

73%

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