Previous Next

The five games each relate to the five voucher winners, Charlie, Augustus, Violet, Veruca and Mike. All of you will know that all of the others perished (for a while) due to a combination of nosiness, greed and gluttony. Charlie, being a kind-hearted sort, has taken on the challenge of rescuing his foolish companions.

The game on side 'A' is divided up into four parts. Each one is a single screen arcade game relating to the events surrounding the demise of Charlie's four companions. Augustus Gloop is trapped inside a network of pipes and you must guide him to the bottle by closing off sections of the pipe. Violet Beauregarde is having a bad time with a load of blueberries. The berries are raining down from above and you must deflect them into the juicing machine. Only when the vat is full will she be safe. Veruca Salt has upset the squirrels and they are after her blood. The only way she can avoid being caught is to poison them all by placing poison nuts in their path.

Careful though, the poison only has a very short life. Meanwhile Mike Teavee, the nerd, is trying to pinch all of the Wonka bars off each of the five platforms in the warehouse. Not in itself difficult, except that the cameras are after him firing their lethal shrinking ray. Being able to hop on the inter-platform lifts may not be enough to save this wally…

The fifth game, which is loaded from the 'B' side, is the final part of the story. If you are successful in the first four games you will be given a code which allows you to play the main game for real, otherwise you'll be stuck with the practice mode. Charlie's objective is to collect the six gold keys which will allow him into the glass lift. To do this he must work his way through 43 screens avoiding being squashed by platforms, sweets, marshmallows and the like.

And they all lived happily ever after....

Control keys: 6/7 left/right, 8/9 up/down, 0 to fire
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: poor response
Use of colour: pretty tatty
Graphics: dated and slow
Sound: nice tunes
Skill levels: one, with practice mode for the fifth game
Lives: between three and twelve
Screens: total of 47

'When I received my copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I thought that it might be something a bit special. The packaging was excellent, including a free book. But what a disappointment! The graphics on both sides of the tape are very flickery and do not flow at all, although the colour and sound brightened things up a little. The keyboard selections were not very good and. to make matters worse, the game did not respond well to keyboard play. I am sorry that for £9.95 the games did not do justice to the packaging'

'You might think that almost a tenner for a game is quite a lot. Some people moan about Ultimate's prices but they do produce rather good games. This package includes four arcade games and a son of arcade adventure as well as a book. The arcade games are not at all special. While the graphics are reasonable the games are not very playable. The graphics in the adventure are OK but again not inspired by any means. The game itself is pretty hard - perhaps too hard, because l think if this game has any appeal at all it must be to the little ones'

'I didn't like any of the games presented in this package. The standard of the graphics and the sound is poor. The graphics are jerky and hard to follow. I found it very hard to move the characters in any of the games, probably because the keyboard responded so badly. If I had to pick one out of the games it would be Augustus because it was pretty original. A shame that what looked like being good value turned out so badly.'