It's cat vs. dog in the battle of the 'toons
GARFIELD: A WINTER'S TAIL
(The Edge, 1990)
Time for some more gritty content on this site – two games that just demand to be taken seriously, none of my usual silly jokes this time round. This is serious stuff people, two gut-wrenching tales of grim post-apocalyptic survival that will touch your heart and change your lives forever. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll sit patiently waiting for them to load. Coming to a screen near you. This year. Well, 34 years ago. Gulp.
The last time I reviewed a couple of cutesy games, namely Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands, practically no-one read it, so I’m taking a bit of a risk here. Are Spectrum owners too darn mature to be playing games for kids? Oh wait a minute, we do that all the time and everyone’s always telling us to grow up… oh yeah. Well I don’t wanna, so ner to that! (*blows raspberry*)
This particular battle is to determine which is better – ZX cats or ZX dogs. I’m a committed cat person myself, but I do also like nice, docile pooches too. Not small yappy jumpy ones though, they’re a nope for me. On the Speccy I can’t recall many games involving our four-legged friends, unless you count wulfs I suppose, it’s all moles and stoats and psycho pigs.
Garfield has previous, so let’s start with him. In 1988 the edgy The Edge released the lethargic feline’s first Spectrum adventure, “Big Fat Hairy Deal” and it was a big fat, hairy hit. Sinclair User went doolally yet again with a 10/10 Classic. Is anything in life really that good? Crash thought a 90% Smash was more like it, and I’m inclined to agree, while Y.S. were clearly dog lovers, giving it 7/10. But overall the consensus was that a sound job had been done.
Two years passed, as they do, and those crazy Edgerunners thought they’d better do a follow-up, though oddly I don’t remember it from the time at all. They got a different crew to do the programming, including a certain Clive Townsend apparently, and the result was an entirely different type of game. Or games really. Garfield was about to become an action hero, which I’d imagine wouldn’t have pleased him even slightly.
The ginger one has been eating the contents of Jon’s freezer, which sounds a bit hard on the teeth, and he’s gone and fallen asleep for his 10th nap of the day (always the best one) right in front of it and left the thing open, the careless cat. He sleeps and he dreams… of things cold, wintry and vaguely food-related. So begins your journey into the mind of a mog, quite a chilling thought in itself. He imagines himself skiing in the Alps, visiting a lasagne factory, then a chocolate factory, then skating on a lake in Switzerland, making his way across to eat more chocolate, it seems. Greedy boy!
First impressions are that the loading screen is rather nice, wonder if Clive did that one? Then we see the eponymous hero lying in his bed in front of the freezer. You can choose which level to practise here, but to play the game properly you have to do things in the ‘right’ order, starting with a trip down the slopes. I’m sure someone else ‘went skiing’ at some point before this, but I can’t remember for the life of me who… Thankfully there’s no road to cross this time and you don’t look like a terrifying freak. Garfield can’t get rid of his nemesis Odie, who’s even dogging him (pardon) in his dreams. He races down the slope alongside, getting in the way admirably as he so often does.
This bit looks great in stills, with the characters large and, well, characterful. But things do move rather slowly, but much better if you boost the speed with an emulator. You can jump over obstacles easily enough, and you need to ensure you don’t get hungry on your run, otherwise you’ll wake up and it’s game over. So helpful folk at the side of the track will offer you pizza regularly, which you have to munch before Odie does. The inclusion of Odie is a bit weird – he stays the same distance alongside you all the way, and at first I thought I could guide him into obstacles, which would be a laff. But sadly he just jumps over them on his binlid. He’ll generally eat the snacks on the left side of the screen, while you eat the ones on the right. This part really isn’t too hard, so eases you in nicely I guess. Just don’t fluff the big jump at the end or you’ll have to start again.
Next stop is the lasagne factory, where you bash some keys fast and watch Big G munch some food. It’s a cut-scene really, just to lead into the chocolate factory, which must be next door. I’m sure Iceland did a chocolate lasagne once, didn’t they, maybe they were made here?
So our mog’s had his main course (pizza, lasagne), now he fancies himself a bit of dessert. So it’s off to the chocolate factory, hopefully Willy Wonka is on leave though to cut down on the weirdness. Garf has to find the chicken that lays the chocolate eggs, but first has to ensure that the liquid chocolate runs to various other chickens in the place by re-directing the piping so it all goes the right way. If this sounds bizarre, it is but not in a very interesting way sadly. You wander round, eat a bit of discarded food, occasionally catching a lift or escalator, changing the direction of any pipes you pass, and regularly kicking Odie’s canine butt to pass time (a great animation sequence, which first appeared in his previous adventure), but it’s a rather slow bore on the whole. And it takes forever to get anywhere with it, there’s no way a fat ginger cat would have the patience for this, not even in his dreams.
The last part sees our hero attempting more of U.S. Gold’s Winter Games. Not the Hot Dog though unfortunately (easily the funnest one in that compilation), but just some skating on a frozen lake. He can jump objects and has to negotiate the maze to reach the far side of the lake, where he can end his travails in some way. This part has some pretty decent graphics again, and is enjoyable enough for a while, if you don’t mind mazes too much. I still couldn’t do it, so cheated and resorted to watching Youtube for the end, which looked colourful and confusing. Something to do with waving chickens in the air and sticking a deckchair up your nose.
So three sub-games then, with none particularly standing out in any way, but none of them sucking eggs either. I don’t want to judge too harshly, as on the whole it’s quite a brave effort to make an action game out of such detailed characters, but the overriding impression is that the arcade-adventure approach is probably more the way to go. Big fat cats just aren’t into extreme sports, they’re above that kind of thing.
SNOOPY
(The Edge, 1990)
Enough catnapping, onto everyone’s favourite beagle, Snoopy. Who doesn’t look even slightly like a beagle to my eyes, but he sure is cute. Charlie Brown and his adventures always seemed quite different to the usual cartoon stuff we used to get in the ‘80s. Everyone seemed quite laid-back and relaxed, world-weary even, which gave it its own unique vibe. So would the Speccy be able to convey that unusual sense of humour with this game, which came late on, 8 years after the computer’s release?
One of the Spectrum’s unsung heroes was the main name behind this game, Christian Urquhart. He produced titles throughout the Speccy’s lifetime, from (deep breath) Transversion in ’83, through Hunchback, Eskimo Eddie and Cavelon in ’84, Robot Messiah in ‘85, Action Reflex in ’86, Xecutor, Gunrunner and Star Runner in ’87, The Bobby Yazz Show, Soldier Of Light and Yeti in ’88, Dragon Spirit in ’89, then Snoopy and Little Puff to finish off with in 1990. He did his time alright, and his games were nearly all very well received and tended to be highly polished affairs. Apart from Hunchback, but we’ll let him off that one, I'm sure somebody liked it.
Onto Snoopy then and what’s the deal here? Well, it’s serious ‘cos Charlie Brown’s pal Linus has lost his ever-present blanky and it’s made him cry. Snoopy has kindly offered to try to find it for him, though why no human could attempt this I don’t know. He’s only got 45 minutes real time to achieve this task for some reason, so don’t go and make a cup of tea at any point during it or you’re screwed.
This game has multiple endings according to the inlay, as the blanket can be in ‘at least’ 2 different places - quite the ‘modern’ thing eh? I remember when games had just one ending and you never lived to see it. Nowadays each one has 8 or 9, and you nearly always end up with the very worst. I’m looking at you, Oddworld games, they really take the biscuit. All that effort and at the end you get abandoned by your mates 'cos you didn't rescue 100% of them. Grrrrrrrrr.
Snoops can pick up objects and interact with all sorts of characters from the comic strip much in the way his brother from a totally different mother, Garfield did in his first Spectrum caper. This is one game which really does look great just in black and white – you could do a ZX81 version and probably get away with it. The inlay makes great play of this being a 100% interactive animated cartoon, but also claims “When you want Snoopy to do something, just sit back and watch, as the action is fully animated before your eyes!” So I did nothing for a bit, and nothing happened, so that’s a load of tosh, but hey.
It's good fun just wandering around and admiring the scenery. You can fire a catapult at things, though not people sadly, throw a beach ball, catch a frog in a jar (spoiler) munch various munchables, and it all looks great. Even the slightly slow pace of movement doesn’t really matter, as it kinda suits the beagle’s laid-back demeanour. There aren’t a huge number of screens, so in terms of a point-and-click type challenge, hardened gamers will probably complete it before too long. So it’s a little strange that there are two quite different ways to complete it, both relatively short, when it might have made more sense to string them together somehow, and make that the only solution. If you’d shelled out a tenner on the game, you may think similarly.
But this aside, Snoopy is great fun. The graphics couldn’t be better on the whole, although if we’re being picky, when Snoopy jumps while carrying an object, the object disappears. Colour is strictly monochromatic, but it would look wrong otherwise. And it’s very quiet apart from a bizarre little tune on the title screen – nowadays you’d probably expect a continuous tune, but then we’re quite spoiled aren’t we? Gameplay is straightforward, and this is one of few Speccy games that my kids rather liked to watch, and didn’t make any sarky comments about, so that’s got to count for something!
Just one major complaint though – no Woodstock! This is an outrageous travesty. Maybe the game makers didn’t want it to end up being an 18 cert, with his shocking language and all… They probably left it to C.R.L. to make a text adventure about him instead, they were all over those X-rated affairs.
So sorry mogs, the dogs win this round. But no doubt those nefarious felines have something up their furry sleeves, with which to gain some evil vengeance. Don’t be taken in by their cute looks, you just know something’s brewing in there… "Don’t hurt me, Fluffy!!!! Nooooooo!!!! Getoffameeeeeeee!!!"
CARTOONESQUE CONCLUSIONS
GARFIELD: A WINTER'S TAIL 63%
SNOOPY 88%
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