Zzap


Six Appeal
By Ubisoft
Commodore 64/128

 
Published in Zzap #75

Six Appeal

This is an out-and-out arcade compilation, with MicroProse's Rick Dangerous being probably the best of the bunch. There are 85 screens, each packed with all manner of traps and evil baddies. So far so average, but Rick Dangerous has a good sense of humour with nice comical effects and the traps are well structured for maximum hookability.

Graphics are small but perfectly formed and the Satanic Film Planners loved it. We gave it 73% in Issue 52, but if you're not tired of the platforms-and-ladders style action you could well like it as much as the Film Planners!

Also from MicroProse is P-47 (61%, Issue 60), a coin-op conversion wherein a single fighter-bomber is pitted against the entire Japanese war machine in a WWII themed, horizontally-scrolling shoot-'em-up. Although reasonably playable, the eight levels are overlong and repetitive. Okay filler material, though.

Puffy's Saga (37%, Issue 66) from Ubisoft doesn't have a coin-op label on it, but the basic gameplay is a fairly straightforward reworking of the overhead-view Gauntlet concept, with big mazes, lots of locked doors, treasure and various baddies. Gameplay is unoriginal and graphics mediocre, but the main problem is the abysmal loading which takes forever - even on disk. For a heavily multi-load game like this it's fatal.

Also in Issue 66 was Dinamic's Satan (43%) and, once again, there's the standard two loads, two games really, with the completion of the first giving the code for the second. It's a lot like Black Tiger, with lots of pixel-perfect leaping between platforms and extremely vicious baddies which make for hellish gameplay.

The last two games are a lot more interesting, if only for the fact that they missed out on a Zzap! review first time round. Twin World is one of those cutesy, Mario Bros-inspired games with plenty of platforms-and-ladders, hidden sub-levels, a fair bit of shooting and some simplistic puzzles. We liked it a lot on the Amiga with lots of varied levels and some nice graphics (78%, Issue 57). Unfortunately on the C64 the graphics are rather disappointing, especially the sprites, and this takes away from the game's fun quite a bit. Nice filler though.

Pick 'N Pile is a really simplistic puzzle game where you get rid of various baubles by ensuring lines of the same-coloured things fall on each other. There's various bonus objects to multiply scores and so on, yet despite or because of its simpliity it was quite mesmerising on the Amiga. Graphically extremely simple there's no reason why the C64 game shouldn't have much the same appeal.

Recommendation

Although there's no single brilliant program here, there's an interesting range of games which make it worth investigation.