Big K


Tiler

Publisher: Interceptor Micros
Machine: Spectrum 48K

 
Published in Big K #9

Tiler

What ho! Has somebody come up with a game where you have to edit a computer mag? This should be pretty gory stuff. But no, all you have to do is tile the roof of a house. Easy? Well, actually no, because the house belongs to Rob Rubbers who can't stop bouncing around and if he bounces into you, you get squashed. There are three high-res screens, the house, the garage and the garden. The tiles are on the garage roof which is reached, for choice, from the garden. Different levels are connected by one-way stairs and you have to collect keys to pass from the house to the garage and the garage to the garden. All in all, filling your hod becomes a pretty fraught enterprise.

There are three criticisms I'd make; neither of the figures, the tiler or Rob Rubbers, is as well defined as the background and the tiler especially can get lost against it; Rob doesn't bounce, as far as I can see, according to the physics that I was taught, so it's impossible to predict his trajectory; and when you move from one screen to the next, you have no way of knowing where Rob will be so, there's a good chance that you'll walk straight into him, unless you're very quick with the Panic button which will take you to an adjacent screen. Even so, an enjoyable game and interesting to see one with at least one foot in the real world.