Commodore User


Oh No!

Author: Mark Patterson
Publisher: Silverbird
Machine: Commodore 64/128

 
Published in Commodore User #55

Oh No!

It is the year one million and gold and diamonds are no longer the most precious substances. These days the ideal gift for a girl is an ox. Ox as in incredibly dim animal, bovine creatures being even more valuable than loads of money. It's your job to protect a herd of these animals, since rustling has replaced doing Securicor vans as the most lucrative form of crime.

The rustlers come in a variety of craft, some of which multiply, others just make a nuisance of themselves. And then there are the cow snatchers. These lower themselves gently over your bovine flock and whisk them off the side of the screen.

Your valiant efforts at playing nanny are aided by your craft, the latest nu-wave herd mobile. Not only is it equipped with forward firing lasers but also a sort of boomerang with a tracking device which is blasted from the back of your craft. However, it's not easy to control. To manoeuvre, you have to twiddle the joystick to rotate your craft in the right direction, the accelerate by holding the joystick in that position.

Oh No

Your craft never stops in this game. A gravitational force pulls from all sides of the playing area (roughly a 2 x 2 screen grid) throwing you about a lot.

The game is split up into nine planets, each with ten zones, which gives quite a large playing area, but Oh No! is not so hard that you can't get far. In fact, shortly after mastering the basic control of your ship it becomes fairly easy.

If you found yourself losing more of your herd than you bargained for, never fear. It is easier to look after one or two rather than ten. After if you shoot one of the special aliens it will leave you behind a special package of an extra cow.

Oh No! Falls into the class of shoot-'em-up but it is a very nippy little game and it merits playing. The scrolling is very nice, a bit like a scaled down Paradroid. The graphics, though well-defined, are below average, but with the scrolling and the action this is hardly noticeable. The sonics are pretty good with zip-zap noises and a very nice jingly title screen ditty.

Oh No! cannot compete with some of the high quality budget titles and releases around on the market at the moment. It just qualifies for the above average category, and in fact started to drag its heels after a while with the same things being repeated over a variety of sometimes garishly coloured backdrops. Not very appealing for the price, and a disappointment for what is the first in the Sensible Silver range of games programmed by Chris Yates and Jonathan Hare of SEUCK and Wizball fame.

Mark Patterson

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