Thunderturds II

Post date: 09-Jun-2016 21:52:07

Game by: The Death Squad

Reviewed by: Gab Amore (tidied up and added to by Simon Ferré)

Davey Sludge is back once again, with another brilliant episode of his wonderful saga, starring Scott Faece, the only piece of crap that anyone in his right mind would entrust to save the world, or whatever else he is supposed to do: actually in this case Scott is on a hot pursuit to save Miss Nibblesworth from the evil Dr. Oblivion, who (of course) kidnapped her and intends to perform experiments on her.

What I like about the loading screen is that with all that blank space it wouldn't be too difficult to hide the text that appear when the next block starts loading off the tape, but in this case it overwrites part of the name of the game. Bonus points for that! However, at CSSCGC2016 we're not all give, give, give! Supplying a tape inlay is far too professional for a crap game competition, so those bonus points have been swiftly taken back. Upon closer inspection of the screenshots in the inlay, there are colours that aren't even available on the Spectrum (so reminiscent of the screenshots adorning many a Spectrum game back in the 1980s). This indicates that the screenshots are from a competing system that it called something like a portable piece of equipment disabled people use to go for a poo, the Commode 64. So, you get some points back for that nice touch.

Levels differ for the number of enemies and the arrangement of the buttons. Some enemies will kill you on contact, other will decrease the (already little) time available to complete your task (you need two rounds of button-pushing to escape each room). As always in Davey’s games, the graphics are brilliant, funny and lively: some little jerk (due to character-space movement) is present but it is almost unnoticeable because of the intensity of the action on the screen. The layout of the buttons become quite difficult in later levels, and the number of sprites on-screen can soon become baffling:

When death occurs you get to see this strange animated creature indulging itself with a bit of face-nibbling for a few seconds. The squeamish need not watch.

There's also a rather nice Game over screen:

One could say that this game looks a bit like others from Davey, but you know what? This game (like all the others) is fun, humoristic, and filled with lively characters. So even though Davey maintains that the game is “riddled with bugs that doesn’t play too good” the only bugs I can see insofar are those nasty, little, funny creatures, trying to munch on Scottie’s smelly neck.

All in all, from the crap game standpoint this is a complete failure: grab it while it is steamingly hot and enjoy!

Score: Number two out of many number twos.