Move over, Xmas pud, it's Plum Duff!
PLUM DUFF
(Bug-Byte)
Plum Duff, according to Google, was "one of the fortifying puddings of Old England" and an early festive treat before Christmas Puds started trending on the medieval internet. Nowadays even the Christmas Pudding itself has largely been replaced by a Colin The Caterpillar cake, if you're lucky. It's sad in a way, but to be fair, after experiencing 51 Christmases myself, I'm pretty sick of it too. So a plummy alternative might be quite refreshing, and would probably keep you regular into the bargain.
This is possibly the only Spectrum game named after a dessert then. (Thinks) Apart from Cookie perhaps. And Wet Set Jelly, but that's a stretch. Anyway, moving on, Plum Duff was filmed before a live studio audience and was written by Jas Brooke, with graphics by Lyndon Brooke. (Audience applauds)
Previously on Plum Duff... how many times has this happened over the years? Old Saint Nick has gone and had one egg nog too many yet again and has relinquished his festive responsibilities shamefully at the worst possible moment. It's amazing we still trust him with the job really, he's got real problems and ought by now to have checked himself into the L.R.C., the Lapland Rehabilitation Centre, tout de suite. So now apparently it falls upon you, his underpaid and unheralded understudy, as the obvious replacement Santa, to go and deliver all those prezzies to all the world's whiney brats. Waaaaahhhhh!
There are allegedly 32 such tykes who need to be given the correct gifts. They give you uncryptic clues as to what they're after, such as "I wanna football or else I'll kick your head in", just like real nippers do. But first of all you have to fly through the skies at breakneck speed and career down people's chimbleys. Presumably due to a lack of proper training you belt off uncontrollably at top speed like it's reindeer mating season. Various enemies litter the skies annoyingly, like Christmas puds, jellies and Stars of David aplenty (nice to see Hanukkah represented... I think) but you can chuck snowballs at them and they'll vanish. Trouble is, these snowballs defy gravity, hang in the air and can kill you too if you fly straight into them. So best not to use them at all probably. Ho hum.
Once you've smashed yourself and your coursers onto someone's rooftop, and clambered down their chimney, the real Santaing can begin Walk around, locate a prezzie which the kids already seem to have, take it away, then give it to some other kid. An unusual method, but I guess they would have moaned otherwise. You have to avoid contact with the littlies too, as they wander around in a highly inconvenient manner when they should all be tucked up asleep. And they drain your energy relentlessly, just like the real thing. So grab the prezzie quick and get back on your sleigh sharpish, Mr. Cringle.
Isn't it nice when games have a bit of humour about them? Plum Duff has personality by the bucketful, I'm happy to report. A colourful loading screen with some great speech when it loads, which sounds like Peppa Pig's dad shouting "Merry Christmas everybody!" followed by a title on the main menu declaring "Plum Duff by Jas C. Brooke. Prepare to die!" Very festive, sir!
And the game proper follows in similar vein. It's crammed with in-jokes that remind me of the great lines in that old classic, Trashman. Messages pop up to help and hinder you as you go. There are bad Christmas cracker jokes ("Are Yuletide ducks Quistmas Quackers?"), retro-tastic in-jokes ("12 reindeer for sale - upgrading to a C5"), amusing breakings of the fourth wall ("Hey look Bill, another useless comment") and odd religious preachings ("And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1.14)". Not to mention Derek Brewster's Adventure Trail style alphabet code clues. So I won't mention them.
The mirth count is high then, so that's good. This game has one other outstanding feature and that's its music. Mr. Brooke went on to become a part of Binary Sight & Sound, providing choons for such as Combat School, Motos and Rastan. And it's clearly his forte, as Plum Duff boasts a cracking Christmas jukebox of no less than 7 festive classics, including surely the only time Nat 'King' Cole has been heard on Sir Clive's baby. It's great stuff, so I hope you went and put 128k mode on, or you'll miss out.
Well this all sounds very merry, doesn't it? But since these "The Games That Time Forgot" features always cover five games in ascending order of goodness, how come Plum Duff seems to be only in third place? Well, sadly the game doesn't quite play as well as one would wish for. The rooftop flight part is just a little too fast and tricky for my liking, reminding me of the horrors of Crosswize, so your five lives tend to get wasted fast there. Conversely the indoors bits run rather too slowly, a shame since they look the business with nice colourful sprites and settings. This makes things a bit of a slog and I for one never managed to get the right toy to the right house ever, the odds seem so stacked against poor Super Sub Santa.
But if we're talking Speccy Christmas games, the bar has never been set particularly high, so Plum Duff can be considered one of the season's more worthwhile efforts, if only for its audio excellence and general joie de vivre. Where else would you get jokes about a young Oli Frey asking Santa to bring him some new art supplies to set him on his path to Spectrum immortality? It's heart-warming, nostalgic moments like that which make us so keen to keep the memory of this old machine going. "And that", as a wise old wizard once remarked, "is a comforting thought."
PUDDING POINTS
57%
THE GAMES THAT TIME FORGOT: 1985 EDITION
3rd place!
Commentaires