Previous Next

Just a pair of dudes (doods, perhaps?) with rubber tubes and anti-social attitudes: that's Biff and Jet, heroes of this jolly coin-op conversion. There's nothing this merry due enjoy more than sailing down the river in their inflated car-tyre inner tubes, slurping down a few six-packs of the old liquid refreshment and lobbing the empty cans at unsuspecting fishermen.

This ain't no party, though: not until you complete the course, at any rate. This is serious Toobin', with gates to be negotiated in slalom canoe fashion in order to score points. More serious still, if you dawdle too much the big bad 'gator appears to hurry you up, so if you don't paddle pretty sharpish he'll chomp large pieces out of your ass.

You follow the course of the river, scrolling vertically down the screen, controlling your tube with the joystick or the keyboard. The control method is somewhat Asteroids'like and a touch awkward to get to grips with at first: it involves paddling left or right to turn the tube round and then forwards or back to move it, with the added bonus of a touch of inertia as you drift through the water or bounce off the river-bank. Control off the keys sounds like a good idea, but is actually tougher to get to grips with because, weird as it sounds, there's no key to go straight: you have to press Left and Right together!

Once you've sussed the controls, you can whizz happily down the river, collecting such goodies as beach balls and lunchboxes to give you a bit more oomph, patches to repair your tube (giving you an extra lease of life), the letters of the word 'Toobin' for a handy little bonus and, of course, cans to lob around with a press of the fire button.

Rack up the score by whizzing through those slalom gates, but watch out for the obstacles that puncture your toob and sink you: branches, whole trees that collapse into the water, fishermen's floats. Fortunately, you can dispose of some of these by lobbing a can at them, a particularly worthwhile exercise with the bits of bush because they turn into collectable goodies.

Further on down the river, things start to get really interesting. The innocent fishermen are replaced by duck hunters with large and dangerous weapons, water-snakes abound and deadly mosquitoes bite. Even more shocks await the other side of the various free-fall connecting sections, where you find yourself on Mars being picked on by marauding aliens, in Hell where the hands of the dead grab upwards out of the water, at the Antarctic under attack from suicide penguins, or suddenly amongst the Egyptian monuments of the Nile.

Toobin's by no means a bad representation of the coin-op. Graphically it's quite jolly, with bright colours and a cheerful style of drawing, giving a suitable mix of cartoon humour and antisocial violence. The downward scrolling is smooth and the sprites whizzing around the screen are small but fun, except for the dudes themselves, who are, er, big and fun. The little spurts of water as the dudes paddle their tubes are quite sweet.

Only two real problems: firstly your Toober can get stuck behind the score panels, top left and right, in which position it is obscured totally: and secondly, some of the smaller objects flying around are a bit lacking in detail, which makes it hard to tell whether you should avoid them or collect them.

The sound is limited to a couple of different tunes, one in a bouncy Spanish style and one slightly more creepy for the weird stretches of river. Not too bad for the ST's limited sound chip, but ultimately more irritating than enjoyable.

Toobin' is an enjoyable little game, with an entertaining and refreshing anti-social attitude and some witty ideas. Where else can you lob tin cans around to dizzy the heads of land-lubbers, or meet suicide penguins? The progress through the levels is interesting, made varied by the choice of left or right courses on the connecting stretches which take you to different places.

Although it won't be too long before you find yourself reaching the beach party at the end of the game, there's enough variety in the levels to keep you whizzing through in search of better scores, different scenes or those elusive letters.

Finally, it really does make the game a whole lot more fun if you take advantage of the two-player option. Not so much because you co-operate, but more because you get in each other's way. Bouncing the other player down the screen for a close encounter with a green blob of pollution gives real cut-and-thrust to the game!