Zzap


Cobra
By The Hit Squad
Commodore 64/128

 
Published in Zzap #58

Cobra

The unintentionally hilarious film got the game it deserved with this from Zach "Batman" Townsend. To minimize embarrassment, we'll make this brief. You're Marion (Stallone) Cobretti and must rescue Ingrid (Brigitte Nielsen) Knutsen from the clutches of an evil gang.

There are three stages. The first is the City Scene where you must find Ingrid and escort her to your car. Needless to say the horizontally scrolling streets are filled with gang members ranging from motorbikers to axe-wielding madmen and machine gun-toting hoodlums. Your energy is shown by a decaying beefburger (!) and lives by snake heads.

Initially you have just your fists to fight with, but knives, machine guns and so on can be picked up. Of course contact with the baddies depletes energy, but so does touching civilians - like a man in an overcoat and a granny pushing a pram which explodes!

Backgrounds change for more of the same in the Rural and Factory scenes. The backgrounds are mediocre, the animation poor and jumping is exceptionally irritating as you have to do running jumps to clear the lowest objects. After the exploding prams, the funniest bit is when the baddies are shot as they strangely turn purple then blue before disappearing! Back in 1987 Zzap gave Cobra 13%; it hasn't got any better since.