Potty Planter is a mirror image 'Pacman' game, which is to say, you must guide your man about a series of mazes, dropping dots on the way, while ghosts chase you. Instead of four power pills and several ghosts, there are many such brown 'pills' dotted about and only two ghosts. As soon as you eat a ghost, another appears. The pills are only effective for a few seconds or for one ghost, which ever is the sooner. Bonus twit lie all over. There is a wrap around tunnel horizontally, and an exit gate at the bottom right-hand corner which must be reached when the last dot has been laid.
Occasionally a bird tries to eat your dots.
Comments
Control keys: Q/Z up/down, I/P left/right, quite well placed
Joystick: none
Keyboard play: fairly responsive but not sufficiently so in a tight spot
Use of colour: good
Graphics: small, jerky but good maze
Sound: reasonable
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 3
Comment 1
'Once the maze has been covered by dots you make your exit through a door and into a different maze. If the bird tries to eat your dots the only way to prevent it is to eat it. YUK! The maze is drawn very well but characters such as ghosts and yourself are not. Also the movements are written in BASIC, which makes everything a bit sluggish, and it can take as long as five minutes to complete a maze. I can't really recommend this game, though if you like arcade games and have slow reactions it might suit you.'
Comment 2
'The graphics are small and jerky. Some form of data corruption must have occurred on loading because the shapes of the moving characters did not seem right: a mess in fact. A fair to average arcade game.'
'It took an astonishingly long time to load - I began to think it was a Commodore tape! The resulting program hardly seemed worth all that writing to me. As a 'Pacman' it doesn't have the grace of the original; as an arcade game for the Spectrum today it doesn't have enough originality or quality in the graphics.'