Personal Computer News


It's The Wooluf

Author: Mike Gerrard
Publisher: Crystal Computing
Machine: Spectrum 16K

 
Published in Personal Computer News #072

Wolf At The Door

Wolf At The Door

You must keep the wolf from the door literally in this low-key game.

Objectives

You soon discover that the eponymous wooluf is merely a wolf with a funny name. You are a hard-pressed shepherd herding your flock into a pen and keeping them well away from the jaws of the wolf.

It's The Wooluf

In Play

The keyboard controls a sheepdog which has ten sheep in its charge, and the action takes place on the one screen that you see, with the sheep starting off at bottom right of the farmland scene. You must get them across the one bridge over the river and up through the woods to the pen at top right.

The wolf patrols the top half of the screen in the main, moving between the various patches of woodland, though it does sometimes venture south.

It's The Wooluf

The graphics of the game let it down rather badly, starting with the head of the wolf that appears at the start and every time a sheep gets nabbed. This is done in bulky block graphics and is most unrealistic.

The sheep look more like little white garden bugs, and they must be prize wool growers as you have to look very closely to see a head. They are also limited to two graphics characters, one facing left and one facing right, and they partly change colour should they venture too close to the river or trees.

The wolf is also very shimmery, which is a disappointment when you consider that the movements of the dog are well done, with it creeping along and crouching down, but the colour overlap is awful - sheep become dark if you put the wolf near them, as does the pen, and the sound too is minimal indeed: a tip-tap when the dog trots along and an unconvincing splash should one of the silly sheep fall in the river.

It's The Wooluf

Another frustration is the lack of control. It's only really possible to take one sheep at a time, otherwise they run off all over the place, and even that one is hard to get going in the direction you want. There are no real instructions, and all you can do is try and vaguely chase the sheep generally in the right direction.

You score points for getting sheep in the pen, but once in, they later return to the start so the game continues till all the sheep have either drowned or been eaten.

The game then ends with a bald statement of your score and high score, and off you go to play again, should you have nothing more exciting to do.

Verdict

A great disappointment from Crystal: counting sheep is, after all, a celebrated method for getting to sleep.

Mike Gerrard

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