Electron User
1st October 1986
How on earth can you make a game out of a curry? The clue lies in the last three letters of the title, and your aim is to become "flushed" with success. The storyline concerns Raj, who runs an Indian take-away, but has eaten one curry too many and is now in urgent need of relief. The vital facility he requires is deep in the cellar under the shop and your job is to guide him to it.
Finding the route is not too difficult. You start at the top of each screen and work your way to the bottom. Your controls are just left and right - you fall from one floor to the next. To make the journey, you have to cross bridges which vanish quickly and, in some cases, unpredictably. You also have to cope with lifts. You can fall on to them while they are moving downwards, but you will lose a life if you fall on to a lift which is rising to meet you.
Apart from having to judge the moving platforms, you have to steer Raj through collections of animals that bounce up and down on elastic threads. Fortunately, they move in a well-ordered manner and you soon learn how to avoid them.
If you load the game but don't start playing it straight away you'll get a display of the twenty rooms in turn. It is well worth the time looking through all of the screens so that you can learn the hazards before you are plunged into them.
You will also be able to enjoy the good quality scenery, the pleasing plinky-plonk sounds and the humour in the room names.
Vindaloo is a nice idea and most of the programming is good, but playing it proved something of a disappointment. It could be that Raj, who looks like an Egyptian mummy with a rucksack, flickers horribly, or it could be that the dissolving pathways just have me beat. Or perhaps it is that the whole game is too slow - Raj moves at the right speed, but you have to spend too long waiting for the bridges, lifts or elasticated animals to be in the correct places. Whatever it is, Tynesoft's Vindaloo is not for me.
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