PXT - A Beginning

Post date: 02-Jan-2017 23:57:01

Game by: Ivan

Reviewed by: Simon Ferré

This game was submitted to me on Christmas Eve. It is the last game to be reviewed, and then I'm only just over a week later on the case. That has to be a record for me.

Still, not only was I sent an email with some lovely text (which I will copy and paste below), we were also sent a love festive greeting:

This seasonal greeting will not bias me in reviewing the game, but it's a nice gesture. If I was being pedantic, I'd say there are too many stripes and not enough keys, and it looks like something my cat could have done better at, except I don't have a cat.

So, on to the game itself. The lovely tape image had a loading screen for the game. Wooo, how exciting. It's not half bad either:

Can you tell what it is yet? If you've never seen the inside of a spectrum before (why not), you'll have to go and unscrew your case and take a look now, but I warn you - those keyboard membranes were pretty flaky in the 1980s, and time hasn't been kind to them, so if you mess up your keyboard membrane don't come looking for me. They are available to buy new these days (I believe there's at least a few places that sell newly made ones) so you're on your own there.

Following this lovely loading screen comes a rather odd intro screen with barely legible writing on it:

Wait - it's the same as the loading screen minus the colour and graffitied with some illegible scrawl. The writing could have been in colour to make it stand out a bit, but no, it's all in monochrome. This is accompanied by some rousing music, which isn't too bad, but doesn't last long enough and repeats forever, thereby making you want to take out your eardrums, but still, it does go off by the next screen which is full of badly word wrapped instructions:

And there's that awful font again. It honestly took me about 5 minutes to get through this screen of text, and for most of that time I struggled to make out the fact it said Zed 80 - as in eighty. Deary me! There are a couple more pages of similarly badly spaced text to get through (which I won't repeat here) including information on the keys to use and the colours of the in-game elements, and then it's on to the game good and proper - which is accompanied by another delightful nerdgasm inducing background:

Now I'm not sure what sort of circuit board this is, but I'd be surprised if it ever worked. There's gaps in the traces left right and centre. If anyone identifies the circuit board in question, you're more of a nerd than I will ever be. Now, those coloured blobs that are messing everything up are the in-game characters. You move around (the black blobs) collecting the magenta blobs, also collecting powerups (green blobs) and using them by pressing the use powerup key, while at the same time avoiding the red blobs and the cyan one.

Is that good enough for you?

The directional controls seem to have to be pressed as early as possible in order for your character to move that way, otherwise it misses the column or row you wanted and takes the next one. This usually means you mess up collecting a magenta blob and have to faff around trying to get to it again. Unfortunately these controls behaving in this way really spoils the game for me, although I did get to level 2.

Oh, about that - you move to the next level after picking up all the magenta blobs, but if one has been covered up by a red blob you can't see it anymore, so when you think you've finished the level you're still moving around wondering what's going on. I died several times, and when that happens your score is shown, along with the high score and you get to try again.

There are elements of this game that really are original. There are rumoured to be several different power-ups available. I have only had a couple and I really wasn't sure what they did. They're all green, and it would seem that when you've picked one up the next one that appears is in the exact same place as the first one was, so try to plan your route around the screen so you can reach that character square again.

More responsive controls would have made this actually quite a good game - almost worthy of a budget label back in the day. As it stands, though, there's just enough wrong with it to make it fit right into the crap games competition.

Score: 64-bits out of Z80.