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Marble Madness goes all rock 'n roll...

Things nearly took a disastrous turn for the worse the other day. After a day spent watching the entire screen spin around, some painters came to do the Amiga Power office windows and filled the office with horrible solvent vapours. The nauseous combination of my field of view filled with garish colours slewing round in circles and my nostrils filled with paint fumes very nearly made it Cam's Bad Day, I can tell you. So that's lesson number one then - don't play this game while under an atmospheric haze of industrial thinners.

Tales of impending vomit aside, Bob's Bad Day is a puzzle game in the same tradition of, well, nothing at all really. To claim it was derivative of anything, you'd have to reach as far away as a game called On The Ball for the SNES (Or the bonus game from the original Sonic The Hedgehog), which really is getting a bit vague.

The story concerns the hapless Bob, who manages to upset a wizard and have his head magically wrenched off. His body gets zapped to Level 51 and the head starts off at Level One, and to get back together again, he's got to work his way through all 100 levels. It's a crap story (with some particularly shaky maths), but it does go some way in explaining why programmers spend their time making the screen spin around rather than, for example, writing romantic historical fiction.

To explain how the game works, it's best to run out into your garage and make a mock-up visual aid. Build a maze out of wood and then fit it to the wall by hammering a nail through the centre. Using a marble as a surrogate Bob, you can see that by turning the wheel, you can make him move around. But that's enough of these Why Don't You? antics - back to the game.

You've got a time limit to collect all the stars and then make it to the vortex but after a few levels of just rolling around, all manner of confusing and stimulating horrors are thrown in your path. These some in two forms, the simplest ones being the actual physical nasties that lurk in the maze, where strange creatures hurt you and large spiky cogs grind you up until you burst. These hurt, but it's the power-ups that cause permanent brain damage.

Can you imagine left gravity? I couldn't until it happened, and even then it took me a few minutes to work out that Bob was 'falling' to the left of the screen. No sooner have you got used to that, then you hit another power up and start 'falling' up. And then the left side of the joystick goes numb, so you can only rotate anticlockwise, and then your head explodes. The game messes with your head so effectively that you get in a right state, spinning uncontrollably as the time ticks away, and screaming at the screen as Bob once again gets teleported onto a mass of cogs.

Now here I am getting all excited about this, and you're looking at the screenshots and thinking: "That doesn't look very impressive," and you'd be right, because it's a bit of a plain Jane of a game, but so what? It plays brilliantly. You do run the risk of falling over or feeling a bit queasy after extended play, but hey, it's well worth taking that chance.

Uppers: It's original, odd, packed full of weird ideas and strange power-ups. It's the only spin-'em-up on the Amiga, and I'd lay money on it being the only one that proclaims "I have a thrusting ability" when you pick up a power-up.

Downers: The game life depends on how long it takes to complete the 100 levels, as you're unlikely to play it through again. Maybe some difficulty levels would have been a good idea. Oh yeah, it makes your head spin after a bit too.

Bob's Bad Day is a gameplay triumph, and the sparse graphics really don't matter. Just play it, okay?