Commodore Format


Bouncing Heads

Publisher: Zeppelin Games
Machine: Commodore 64/128

 
Published in Commodore Format #14

Bouncing Heads (Zeppelin Games)

Take Pacman, add a large helping of Bombuzal, make it too hard and tedious and you'll probably have something not entirely unlike Bouncing Heads. You play a head - a bouncing head no less - which has to sproing around a thin walkway, picking up pairs of lips and avoiding or shooting opponents. The idea is to collect all the lips on any one level and get to the exit.

There are zap tokens scattered around which can be collected and used to destroy opponents. They are in very short supply though so frugality is a must [It may be a must but is it a word? - Dep Ed]. You can also conserve your firepower by plotting a route that avoids opponents to a large extent.

Even so, you'll have to come into contact with a nasty sooner or later and they're unbelievably fast. If one comes near, blast it.

Bouncing Heads

That's about all there is to it on level one. But get past that and things get hairy. Later, there are all sorts of devices to make life difficult. There are switches that make muddy, impassable walkways fit to walk on. But this also means that any nasties that were cut off from you can now home in.

There are ice patches, one way tiles, deadly tiles. In fact, there are so many things going on it gets a bit difficult to tell what you're supposed to be doing. There are many good ideas in this game. The trouble is, when they're all bundied together it doesn't really work very well. I'm convinced that even if the programmer had made the nasties stationary it would still be a hefty challenge to plot your way successfully through each level.

Frame Rate

It's tragic that a game with so many good features should, in much the same way as IO, be far too hard to enjoy.