1st November 1985
Following the success of Football Manager, Addictive Games has released Boffin. The football game was mainly strategy, but Boffin is pure arcade action. Professor Boffin must travel through a complex of twenty caves. I'm not sure why, but he will need your help anyway.
The route through each cave is constructed from small ledges. The professor can leap between some of these but others must be negotiated by different methods.
Each cave is littered with numerous unlucky horseshoes. The professor has to collect every one before touching the lucky owl. If you have forgotten any horseshoes then touching the owl isn't so lucky.
Movement consists of left, right and jump. The professor carries an umbrella which can be raised and lowered. The brolly is very useful when falling from great heights, and can also be used to reach high objects. As I said earlier, some ledges and even some horseshoes cannot be reached by jumping.
Fortunately the previous inhabitants of the caves were trampolining enthusiasts and they left their equipment. Great heights can be easily reached by bouncing in the centre of a trampoline. The straight up and down jumps are easy. Judging a trampoline jump sideways to a ledge takes a little more practice.
Additional points can be obtained by collecting petri dishes and tripods. An extra life is awarded for the completion of each screen and for every 50,000 points scored.
A game of this kind would not be the same without the bad guys, though there aren't that many around. The game's real difficulty lay in the actual physical layout of the screen. The only hazardous character present is an enormous tarantula. This chap is a real humdinger. He is drawn in superb detail and the characteristic jerky movement of such arachnids - not a programming defect - is impeccable.
Another quite daunting creature is the manta-bat. Thankfully these are friendly and can be used as a living escalator when you can't find a trampoline.
The ladders and levels section of the arcade market is very crowded. Fortunately for Addictive, I feel that Professor Boffin has sufficient originality to succeed against all the competition.
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