Previous Next

This version of the game is not particularly user-friendly and suffers from a profound identity crisis. It is first of all the game that dares not speak its name, which of course should really be P-man. And in fact this is just a fourth re-hash of that tired old arcade game, but on the body of the cassette it proclaims itself as Gobbledegook and tells you to load and run it under that name. You could waste a lot of time trying, but eventually a close study of the cassette case will reveal that the magic word is not as you were told but in fact Gobblegook - that is, without the central 'DE'!

Even then your troubles may not be over, since the volume level for loading is very critical. But persevere, and you will be rewarded with a maze full of dots, a voracious mobile mouth to consume them, 'gooks' to eat the mouth if it is insufficiently nimble, and 'powerpacks' which if consumed enable the gobbler to eat gooks for seven seconds. You have two levels of cannibalistic difficulty and three lives, one of which the on-screen instructions say you "lose" every time a gook eats the gobbler.

If you are either very young or very new to computer-games you will be struck by the marvellous originality and ingenuity of all this and delighted by the continuous noise emission which accompanies it. The game makes up with speed what it lacks in colour and the players' scores are recorded on screen. Even experienced arcade players will be kept hard at it manipulating the Ace's rubber keys to improve their scores.

A good implementation, once you have it running, but pricey for what you get.