»12th April 2008

Mega Old School Arcade Review!

So I decided that you might want to read about some old arcade games and see what I have to say about them. This is going to be a sort of review but I decided to give out scores for various facets of gameplay culminating in a WTF Score which reflects how much of a mindfuck the game is. You see, we already know about the good games out there like Pac-Man, Asteroids and Ghouls and Ghosts, so I thought I'd try and track down some of the most mind-bending and just plain bizarre games I could. I really went overboard on this thing, but there were so many games that just screamed out for me to gently take the piss out of them! Enough of this introduction and on with the reviews I say!

Dudley presents Hot Shocker (1982)

Try figuring things out without the help of this screen

The game loads up and I enter my 1982 coins. I skip the usually tedious title screens which tend to feature all manner of horrible computer noises and ugly graphics.
The game loads up and I'm controlling a fat man in a red suit, and I know what you're thinking. No, this guy isn't a plumber, he's Dudley I'm guessing.
Dudley is stood on what looks like a purple spider's web, that's pretty weird I suppose but I start moving the D-pad around to see what happens. Aha! The lines dudley moves over turn red! I suppose this is a variation on the familiar themes of mazes and drawing lines. I proceed to cover as many of the purple lines as I can in red. As I do this, some birds appear on the web, I'm guessing these are 'ghosts' who I should avoid, there is also what appears to be a few balls of electricity on the web now as well, I'll avoid them too.
Power-ups start to appear, one of them looks like a phone. I notice a yellow box thing at the centre of the maze, I bump into a lightbulb on one of the strands at the mazes extremity and Dudley dies. At this point I have no idea what is going on.
I continue for a while more trying to colour in red lines, I start to notice that I get points when I connect up intersections on the web. I pick up some power-up, maybe it was a phone, I can't remember, the birds change colour and I catch them and they disappear. I crash into electrical bursts and game over.
At this point I was totally confused, I had no real idea what I was supposed to be doing, what I got points for, or what the various power-ups and enemies represented.
I decide to restart the game and pay more attention to the title screen. This explanation screen appears.

This sheds a bit more light on the game, apparently I'm a lineman, the world's most dedicated lineman of course. I'm trying to connect phone calls and not run out of wire? That makes sense I guess. Hot spots (?) and short circuits are things to avoid. There's some birds!?

This game is vaguely reminiscent of Pac-Man maze navigation. However, the game has no clear, or particularly familiar objectives. I wouldn't want to have spent any money on this game in 1982 until I'd watched some friends play after which I could perhaps better guess what the hell I was supposed to do. Thematicallly, I'm guessing this game is an ode to the hard working line men (and women) of America, honouring their selfless dedication to telecommunications despite the constant difficulties of hot spots and flightless birds. Well, now I think about it, I bet line men get shat on a lot by birds seeing as they presumably spend a lot of time beneath telegraph wires.

Difficulty 5/10
I largely had no grasp of what I was supposed to be doing, yet the game was forgiving enough to not kill me immediately so I could gain some insight on what I was supposed to do.
Fun 3/10
Navigating around an octagonal web was at best tiresome and frequently I was hopelessly surrounded by the various enemies on screen.
Confusion 8/10
I had pretty much no idea what I was doing the entire time. Even after trying to make some sense of the cryptic information screen I was left wandering around a maze trying to figure out what I had to do besides not die
Obscurity 9/10
I started and ended the game with a profound (and understandable?) ignorance of the plight of Dudley and line men the world over. I've never really considered their work particularly action packed or interesting enough to warrant a frantic arcade game in their honour.
WTF score: 27

Hole Land (1984)

Hole Land was a suitably retarded name to grab my attention. Before loading it up I was envisioning some kind of isometric platform hole-jumping game. Of course, things are never that simple (or fun sounding) in old school arcade world.

This is pretty straight-forward stuff. It's a space invaders style 'bad guys move down in patterns' game. Our protagonist seems to be some insectoid robot thing who can fire fireballs at the advancing monsters. Why Hole Land you ask? Well our brightly coloured hero must fight the lines of advancing monsters on a pockmarked volcanic plain!
Whenever your insect robot thing gets hit little amusing animations play of a little mechanic coming out and fixing the robot whilst the monsters continue to advance. This is both a charming addition to the game and interesting in that 'dying' doesn't break the flow of the game as is so often the case.
Difficulty 7/10
I'll freely admit I'm rubbish at games like this. I don't find it particularly easy firing at horizontal echelons of steadily advancing enemies with retarded names like 'Sifoons' and 'Xagarts'. This is made all the more difficult by the bloody holes everywhere which they insist on hiding in. It's not easy being a monster fighting insecto-bot.
Fun 2/10
Whilst the graphics were pleasing and the sparse musical bleeps and fuzzes were pleasant I don't particularly enjoy this style of game, particularly seeing as I couldn't particularly tell how well I was doing as the monsters seemed to spend most of their time hiding in the holes.
Confusion 1/10
I've seen this type of game before and the graphics were actually well done and so it was pretty easy to follow what was going on.
Obscurity 3/10
Again, a pretty low score here, the insect robot thing as the main character was pretty bizarre, but robots and insects are like that generally. So too could the advancing teams of monsters sort of make sense as volcano-dwelling monsters. This just isn't crazy enough.
WTF score 13
Sadly, whoever made this game clearly weren't doing enough drugs. The graphics were actually quite good--good enough to be fucked up by a preposterous story which was sadly lacking.

Heart Attack (1983)

Heart Attack! 'Cool' I thought, 'Maybe it'll be some kind of surgeory game where I have perform a series of increasingly difficult operations against the clock? No, of course not, that would be good. Calling yourself 'The A Maze Zing HEART ATTACK' really does a lot to make you look stupid. This is a maze navigation game, you have to cover all the maze whilst avoiding the 'chasers'. Seriously, I'm not using a generic term there, that's what the game calls them.
Difficulty 1/10
Firstly, bear in mind I only played to the second level here. The game is pretty slow and I only ever seen one 'chaser' which didn't seem to make any attempt to chase me and just randomly moved around the maze. The mazes themselves feature long corridors and the move speed is very slow. Frustratingly, because you're only guiding a few pixels around a few pizels-width of maze, it's easy to get stuck on corners.
Fun 1/10
This was slow and boring. I died twice because I deliberately crashed into the chaser to see what would happen. I quit out of boredom after the second level.
Confusion 6/10
The only thing which seems to suggest why the game is called heart attack is the way when you use your special ability to stop the 'chasers' (Do they even deserve to be referred to in the plural?) the maze flickers and pulsates all manner of psychedelic colours. Also, the game occasionally belched a garbled noise for no apparent reason. The reason? Who knows, it was 1983 what do you expect? They should have called it epilepsy attack, that'd at least be helpful.
Obscurity 2/10
The generic nature of everything in this game makes it feel like some one day project or something. Maybe the game is challenging or somehow induces heart attacks in later levels... Who cares?
WTF score 10

Guzzler 1983

This is a Pac-Man clone and actually manages to make some sense.
You seem to control some kind of water creature and have to navigate around a maze attacking fire creatures with water, slowly emptying your body whilst picking up steam to replenish yourself.
Difficulty 8/10
I barely played this game but it struck me as quite difficult, but it was difficult in a challenging way and not a retarded, broken way.
Fun 7/10
It's a pretty fairly somewhat imaginative take on Pac-Man and the way you have only a limited number of attacks before you disappear was pretty interesting. The music was kind of nice too.
Confusion 2/10
Sadly, I quickly figured out what was going on here. Nothing psychedelic or random happened.
Obscurity 1/10
As a game this actually works, which doesn't really help this score. It's a pretty standard Pac Man-type game with an unsurprising if interesting twist.
WTF Score 18

Gypsy Juggler 1978

Now this is more like it. Are gypsies famous for their juggling skills? Anyway, in this game you take control of a dancing gypsy which you move from side to side, pressing Button 1 releases an egg from the top of the screen which the gypsy then bounces off his head, hands and elbows back into the air at a particular angle. The eggs soar through predictable trajectories and the player gets more points for juggling more eggs. This effectively makes the game a sort of Pong-Solitaire and is quite entertaining. Each time you bounce an egg the game emits a burbling noise and even better, when you drop an egg it smashes on the floor and a little chick wanders out of it off the side of the screen. As Nathan Explosion would remark: 'brutal'.
Difficulty 9/10
This would be a lot lower if the port I have of it wasn't so broken. Clearly the game is supposed to be played with a smooth analogue control so that you can deftly move your gypsy from side to side whilst juggling the eggs.
Fun 8/10
This could get very addictive very quickly as your gypsy man is posed ever greater feats of juggling to contend with. The gypsy character has amusing animated dancing feet and pointy little shoes.
Confusion 1/10
This game is gloriously simple. Juggle the eggs. Don't drop them. Get points. Of course, is egg juggling some traditional gypsy past-time? How do the eggs not break when he butts them with his head? Why are they juggling eggs that are ready to hatch? Animal cruelty would want to hear about that I'm sure.
Obscurity 6/10
Seriously, are gypsies good jugglers or something?
WTF Score 24

Bio Attack (1981)

Here we go, you control a spaceship that has to fly through someone's body and presumably fight disease or something...
Difficulty 10/10
I'm usually fairly good at these space ship games yet this is just ridiculous. The ship's rate of fire is so slow, the projectiles are slow, you're sent hurtling down twisting arteries that your ship is barely able to steer through and all the while you're crashing into, and getting shot down by enemies.
Fun 4/10
It at least sounds like they thought about the music in this game and the graphics are fairly basic but are tidy. However there's a serious case of 'the ship fucking sucks'.
Confusion 5/10
Why are the enemies little pitch-fork toting devils? Why is a space ship flying down someone's artery? To fight disease? Presumably it's been shrunk? What happens when you get to the heart or the lungs on the little body map? Why am I dying so much!?
Obscurity 7/10
I think this game came out before the film Inner Space (which for some reason never seems to be on TV ever, why is this?) so the whole concept of flying through someone's blood stream with a laser blasting spacecraft is going to be pretty out there surely.
WTF Score 26

Mr Do!

In this game you control a clown who must carve out a maze from a brightly coloured background and pick up cherries. As you pick up cherries in quick succession a scale is played and you get bonuses for completing the scale. Your clown is pursued by continuously spawning monsters who you can crush with golden apples or destroy by throwing your ricocheting ball at them. Riiight.
Difficulty 4/10
Once you've figured out how to make use of the utterly bizarre tools at your clown's disposal it's pretty easy to evade the stupid monsters and pick up all the cherries. Your ball will probably get you the most kills but the golden apples can block off passages which the enemies would otherwise follow you down.
Fun 8/10
The graphics are entertaining as is the music. The game has plenty of sound effects, such as the various notes that form the scale as you pick up cherries, with the most ridiculous being the enthusiastic chiming noise ball makes as it ricochets down the tunnels.
Confusion 10/10
It's easy enough to figure out what you're supposed to do in the game which gives you plenty of time to ponder what the hell is going on, and there is a lot going on. We've all seen cherry power-ups before, but a clown? Golden apples? What are those monsters anyway?
Obscurity 9/10
I have absolutely no idea what they were aiming for with this one, it's as though they had this cool game but decided to just throw a load of random shit together for the graphics. Maybe Mr. Do is a popular Japanese childrens story about the uh- clown who digs through the erm... and golden apples or something.
WTF Score 31
I don't know how anything can beat this

Great Swordsman (1984)

Owned.

In this game you are presumably none other than The Great Swordsman, attending some kind of world fencing championship no less. Strangely, this fencing tournament appears to be being judged by what appear to be five Hitler clones. They could have at least got a Prussian to judge this thing and not some jumped up failed artist from Austria, sheesh.
Difficulty 6/10
As you parry blows and try to figure out the strategy of the opponent you basically have to get in a high, middle or low attack whilst trying to parry the enemy's blows. The game itself isn't so fast so this is a more tactical experience than you usually see in the hammer-the-buttons-as-fast-as-you-can world of early arcade games.
Fun 9/10
It's actually pretty fun shuffling forwards wildly swinging your sword at the initially completely hopeless computer opponents. I actually feel like I could enter a fencing tournament for real now.
Confusion 5/10
There's some strangely distracting digitised shouts between bouts and there's the whole why-do-the-judges-look-like-Hitler thing. However, clearly the makers of this game weren't completely off their faces when they came up with the idea for this one.
Obscurity 6/10
When I saw 'Great Swordsman' I was expecting a Conan inspired slug fest but instead it's actually a SPORTS GAME (the horror).
WTF Score 26

Tropical Angel (1984)

Try not to stare like that.

In this one you control a bikini clad water skiing babe and have to ski around obstacles in some kind of race qualification thing.
Difficulty 6/10
This game starts easy enough with the bikini babe emerging out of the water and skiing around the odd rock. However soon there are a torrent of rocks to avoid and unless you like seeing bikini wearing women falling into the water, but who would want to see that right? Additional difficulty in the game can be found by trying to ignore the way the bikini babe sways her hips. It's interesting to note that the game with by far the best graphics also happens to have a female protagonist in swimwear. Coincidence?
Fun 8/10
This takes the familiar racing format and improves it with an original idea, i.e. setting it on water, and also by including prodigious amounts of T&A. For additional fun, and maybe even points (I can't say I was checking at the time) you can press B and your bikini babe hops round on the ski to give you a splendid view of her 1984 pixelated front. It seems Lara Croft was late to the party, by which time our hourglass heroine was already wasted on punch and attempting to sing along to Gloria Gaynor whilst stood atop a table.
Confusion 3/10
One nagging question about the game is how the speed boat manages to weave between the deadly rocks at such considerable speed whilst bikini babe is sent ploughing into them and into the drink.
Obscurity 7/10
This game is just genius. "Okay guys, I'm liking the brainstorm ideas we had for 'legitimate reasons to stare at a woman's ass'"
WTF Score 24

"You're not paying attention are you!"

Disco no.1 (1982)

This one is truly bizarre. You control some rollerskating dancer at a regular disco (i.e. you're not supposed to wear rollerskates to this place which makes you question how much attention the doormen are actually giving to their job) and you are tasked with erm... encircling dancing women with the trail which your rollerskates leave behind, for points presumably. You can pick up martinis from the floor (so you're also a drink thief) again, I'm assuming for points. Sometimes the screen flashes green, perhaps when you pick up so many martinis (or maybe absinthe, I really can't tell) and in this mode everyone else moves slower making it easy for you to do whatever it is you do to those hapless women. The only other person in the disco with rollerskates is a shifty looking man in a blue suit who I assume is a gangster, if you crash into him I think you lose a life, I have no idea what his relevance to the game is. Your constant, relentless foe appears to be a cleaner, who is clearly pissed that you're leaving marks all over his otherwise pristine dance floor.
Difficulty 8/10
Your guy's roller skate trail is fairly short so it's pretty hard encircling the women, the janitor guy was pretty much always following me too and I seemed to spend more of my time dying.
Fun 3/10
The central point of this game seems to be the encircling the women thing which wouldn't be a problem if the janitor guy didn't ruin everything all the time. The graphics are pretty fun and there's some bizarre bleeping music too so it's at least pleasant when it washes over you in that hazy old school arcade game way.
Confusion 9/10
This game is all about the confusion. Why are you on rollerskates at a regular disco? Why is a rollerskating gangster ambling around whilst the janitor poses a far greater threat? Why when you encircle the drunken women does the trail become a box with a kiss on it and the woman disappears?
Obscurity 7/10
This isn't like any disco I've ever seen before. Also, I don't know why I'm supposed to empathise and root for a rollerskating, drink stealing, woman harassing arsehole at some 80s disco, I mean no one likes that guy.
WTF Score 27

Wizard of Wor (1980)

This psychedelic nightmare is a sort of Pac-Man meets Quake deathmatch. I'm not exaggerating that much. In this game you are a yellow spaceman with a laser gun and a jet pack. You have to traverse a maze, shooting aliens and the mysterious blue spaceman (presumably your mortal enemy, maybe he bullied you at school or something or called your wife a filthy, filhty whore or something), all these activities presumably net you points.
Difficulty 4/10
Surprisingly, this isn't all that brutal. Whilst the despicable blue spaceman seems to have some very quick reactions at times and can snipe just shoot you regularly from miles away about a quarter of a screen away; he is also a raging idiot at other times and an absolute pushover. The aliens that blunder around the maze seemed to kill me a lot more, though they don't come back like the blue spaceman does.
Fun 6/10
The ruthless murder of the cold hearted and utterly repugnant blue spaceman is fairly entertaining. Amusingly, the spaceman cocks his leg forward when he fires his laser gun, which sort of looks like he's jacking off, in a weird pixelated way. The graphics also need little encouragement to turn all crazy colours and pretty much every action aside from walking and shooting/masturbating results in a flurry of bright colours to appear on screen.
Confusion 9/10
Most of the confusion comes from the seemingly random psychedelic shit that happens at various points, the game itself is fairly easy to grasp and whilst your motivations for killing the blue spaceman aren't particularly clear, the systematic genocide of the alien bad guys seems fair enough. Strangely, the maze looks like its in space, which adds a whole new level of crazy to the game, why the hell are these guys in this maze in space? Are those extra lives at all or just more men waiting to march to their deaths Cannon Fodder style? Also, what the hell does the name Wizards of Wor have to do with anything in the actual game? Wizards are generally recognised as being beardy old men in pointy hats and cloaks, not laser gun wielding spacemen, and wor? That's not even a word! Is this game is in fact a sobering reflection on the futility wor?
Obscurity 6/10
Spacemen, lasers and aliens aren't so hard to deal with, I just can't get what a maze is doing in space, I mean why can't the maze be on a space station or something? What are they all standing on anyway?
WTF Score 26

Aztarac (1983)
Unfortunately for Aztarac it is probably the best game of the bunch and thus has to work harder to sow the seeds of confusion. Of course I'm sure you still want to find out all about it right? Not only does the game have an actual story, but it's also coherent! You are the pilot of a space ship and you have to defend space stations from marauding alien fleets. And bizarrely for an old arcade game, the game itself tells you this between levels and you don't have to simply infer it from whatever the hell is going on. The game uses vector graphics (which I have a major hard-on for) and is thus all smooth animation and action. You move your ship around with the D-pad and fire with A, you can see a radar view by holding B and can rotate the turret (awesome) once you configure the controls properly.
Difficulty 6/10
The easy fleets of green ships are easy enough to take out but the progressively harder red ones, through to the terrifying blue and pink ones move forward in huge formations and fire a hail of unerringly accurate lasers at your craft if you're foolish enough to linger within their quite wide arcs of fire.
Fun 10/10
I love vector graphics and these ones are particularly good. Colourful to the point of psychedelia and with some really cool explosion effects. Being vectors, the movement of the units is smooth and fast. The sound is a bit of a let down consisting only of vague hissing noises for explosions and bleeps for lasers. However the sheer enthusiasm of the flashing text between levels more than makes up for this. Blasting the alien fleets with your ship's turret is great, independant turrets in games just rule period.
Confusion 4/10
Sadly, the game actually takes take between levels to tell you that for example you're defending the Aries space station, so you're always burdened with knowing precisely what you're supposed to be doing. The space stations themselves are actually just four diamonds which is more than a little strange and it's also not entirely clear why all the ships from a fleet disappear once one has made contact with the space station.
Obscurity 1/10
Again, the fact this game is actually good and reasonably sensible means that I can't really give it many points here. I mean aliens and space ships are just too easy to fathom, they should perhaps have made the enemies frowning faces and told me simply to 'defend the diamonds'. That would have been more of a mind fuck, though probably not half as good.
WTF Score 21

Burger Time (1982)

Raped to death by peppers and egg things

I was trying to keep this review from becoming too long but this game is just too fucking brilliant not to be included. You're either a very small chef, or you're a regular chef trying to make a very large burger. Either way, as you climb up and down the ladders you are pursued by what look like peppers and fried eggs who are trying to kill? viciously rape you. To try and stop your assailants you can throw what looks like salt or pepper over your head: to no effect. To create 'the perfect burger' you have to run over the oversized/regular sized ingredients which make them fall down onto the platform below. I'm not sure what happens when you stack up enough ingredients because I couldn't get that far.
Difficulty 10/10
Despite being able to throw seasoning about there seems to be no way to stop the peppers and eggs from catching you, which isn't hard considering how slow your rather portly chef climbs up those ladders. I died in this game almost continuously.
Fun 3/10
I struggled to work out what the hell was going on, whilst the graphics were fairly well done and entertaining, I couldn't live long enough to make any noticeable progress.
Confusion 10/10
Confusion reigns in this game. I had absolutely no idea what was supposed to be happening or how I was supposed to win. Was it even possible to win or is 'the perfect burger' something that man can simply never attain?
Obscurity 10/10
Again, this game is so off the fucking wall it's pretty much got this entire contest (it started out as a review) wrapped up. Giant peppers and eggs? Gigantic burger components suspended on some kind of scaffold linked by ladders?
WTF Score 33
We're pretty much going to have to see actual drug use in game for something to beat this I think.

Cheeky Mouse (1980)

KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL

This game is the most brutal so far. You are some guy with a hammer who only exists to kill mice. Killing the mice feeds you, it makes you happy and you must kill more mice, more, more, more. The mice run out of holes and eat through the floor to the cheese beneath. Hammer man has to stop them the only way he knows how.
Difficulty 8/10
The MC of Hammers really isn't that quick on his feet and there are a lot of mice, very soon the Hamster is surrounded by mice with the floor eaten away by the voracious army of rodents. Soon Rogers & Hammerstein will look on as they eat the cheese beneath his feet whilst he can do nothing about it.
Fun 6/10
The graphics in this game are bad and are hilarious, but they are not hilariously bad. The music is I'm guessing an approximation of brutal death metal using only the highest pitch squeel the hardware can muster and a good ten years or so before the music even exists. The merciless slaughter of the mice is deeply satisfying, both for the player and for our rodent hating hero.
Confusion 8/10
Why are the mice so big? Why does the hammer man smile so when he hammers? Why is the cheese under the floor and why do the mice descend from presumably the ceiling like something out of Aliens? What the hell is going on with that music?
Obscurity 7/10
Mice like cheese. Sure. But seriously, just put the cheese in the fridge or something or at least buy some poison or get some mouse traps. Hammers? It's a bit of a messy way of doing things isn't it?
WTF Score 29

Zoo Keeper (1982)

You are a zoo keeper who looks suspiciously like Mario! Animals are trying to escape! Use your bricklaying skills to stop them! Jump over the animals to uh- to get points! Pick up beer for points or for the screen to turn blue or something!
Difficulty 5/10
You run around the edge of the animal enclosure all the while building up walls, occasionaly what looks like beer appears which gives you a net which lets you catch animals on the outside of the wall. It's not hard to play, it's just hard to know what's going on.
Fun 8/10
The sound in this game is terrifying, imagine trying to emulate the sound of zoo animals using a really shitty bunch of electronic components? Random noise? Check. The graphics are reasonably good, but weird shit happens for no reason sometimes and there are some bizarre effects such as the pixel explosion thing which moves out from the end symbol to signal the end of the level.
Confusion 8/10
I just ran around pressing jump occasionally and picking up the beer things. I crashed into one of the animals and nothing seemed to happen, I somehow beat the level.
Obscurity 9/10
That's just not what zookeepers do on a daily basis. I went into this expecting a careful management sim and instead I was bombarded by noise whilst I watched Marioclone run around a walled area, sometimes upside down whilst zoo animals eaten away at the bricks. I'm completely perplexed.
WTF Score 30

Crush Roller (1980)

This is an unashamed copy of Pac-Man right down to the similar sounds. However, it also manages to make even less sense than Pac-Man. You control some red swoosh and navigate around a maze which has overpasses and underpasses whilst some coloured things pursue you, the maze itself has unrelated graphics in the spaces. The name makes absolutely no sense within the context of the game, I mean if I was going to make a Pac-Man clone called Crush Roller, I'd make the player character a bulldozer tasked with 'tarmaccing the city in time' I mean that would make sense at least.
Difficulty 8/10
I'm notoriously bad at Pac-Man games and this one is harder than usual seeing as there doesn't seem to be anything resembling the 'power pills' from Pac-Man.
Fun 5/10
This is as much fun as any other Pac-Man clone minus the fact you don't have the faintest idea what you're looking at.
Confusion 10/10
Whilst the game mechanics make sense because we're familiar with Pac-Man, the graphics and the name make absolutely no sense. Now pretend you don't know what Pac-Man is and you have total and utter confusion. Also, the music is a constant barrage of disonant atonal noise, and I'm not getting mixed up with the sound effects.
Obscurity 10/10
I don't know what else to say, I can't get a handle on this at all. Cats? Cars? Red swooshes?
WTF Score 33

Chicken Shift (1984)

That name really has to be one of the best names for a game ever, you little chicken shift mothersucker! This is a game that tries so hard for you to want it to make sense. You control various ramps, levers, barriers and what not which funnel chicken eggs at various stages of hatching to the next level and no doubt ultimately into a tasty omelette. The game is a sort of multi-tasking juggling act sort of game as you are say given two pipes which eggs will roll down, but only one joining pipe to stop them from falling out and splatting.
Difficulty 6/10
As more and more eggs roll out, things quickly get very taxing. I got as far as the second level where I failed to guide the wandering eggs out of the window.
Fun 9/10
Due to the fact it's a pretty original idea for a game and that the graphics are really good, this game is a lot of fun to play. Keeping track of the progress of the eggs as they slide and roll around the various parts of the level is pretty cool. It's sort of like a lemmings game except you control the level itself as opposed to the individual lemmings.
Confusion 5/10
Once I'd gotten over the 'holy shit I'm in some sort of egg factory' I quickly got the hang of what was happening thanks to the decent graphics. Had this been only a few short years earlier and I'm sure the graphics would be terrible and the sound worse and I'd have absolutely no idea what was going on.
Obscurity 9/10
I'd loved to have been there when someone pitched the idea of 'some kind of chicken coop game where eggs roll down pipes and you have to stop them splatting, oh yeah and helping eggs escape from a kitchen, dude that'd be so sweet!'
WTF Score 29

Honourable mention goes to:

Blue Print (1982): A game about a clown type figure in a village who must enter houses and collect bombs and shoes and things.

Qwak (1982): Sadly not an early attempt at Quake but instead a sort of electronic sliding square puzzle where you have to guide a family of ducks through a mid-west agricultural setting to safety.

Thief (1981): Guide a strange tank-like vehicle through a maze picking up dollar bills in this painfully psychedelic and flashing Pac-Man rip-off!

Journey (1983): Help the various members of Journey to recover their instruments by piloting a beetle to one of five planets! Bizarre digistised photograph faces making each band member 'recognisable' and lots of bizarre mini games. I'd have given this a full write up if I'd found it earlier. Truly bizarre.


Well I ended up doing far more games than I initially expected. Annoyingly, every time I thought I'd just have a break and try to find a good game to play I'd actually chance upon another gem of a complete mindfuck game. Perhaps I was missing the point of trying to make sense of old, old arcade games, or perhaps then I'd be missing the point that it wouldn't be as funny if I didn't assume they were meant to make some kind of sense. So who's the winner? Well I thought this was a review... Erm, well I guess the winner is the one with the most points, so that's... Look, I don't think I added up the scores properly anyway, so you should probably just decide whether or not you fancy trying to bend your mind around any of these games which I spent all this time writing up for you.

Oh man, such a gigantic blog update, I'm off to play Columns or something DF.

Extar, over, out.

I don't want to even think about how many typos slipped into this one.