Reviews

A-Maze. In this a-mazing game you're a paintbrush trapped in a grid composed by dozens of squares, and you're chased by another something.
It's like a chess game without turns: you must wait, but you can move when sliding holes passes along the lines around you. You must reach the colour can at the other corner of the screen, and once you sweated all your way until there... you have to visit every single square of the grid in order to paint them all and finish the level. Which is very paintful, because this kind of gameplay, with the grid and the holes, makes it rather intricate, and it's easy to grow impatient - a painting game is usually something fast and frantic, and that's its most suitable shape [for example, An'F Software's Painter, released in 1983]. 2/5

Alternative's Dead or Alive also had a B-Side game with it, this one, a game released one year earlier by K'Soft who are known to me for that dreadful Skuldugery game where you had to move the character AND the screen during the game. It's a simple looking painter style game, move your brush to the paint and then paint the entire grid afterwards, what can go wrong? Turns out, everything. So you're the brush in a grid filled with squares, but you can not move to another square until you can go through an open gate which a series of them move around the grid. While this is going on you are up against a glowing circle type thing that kills you with one touch, and you wait for the one gate you need to progress he can move closely to you and cause you to panic. Then when you reach the paint, indeed you have to paint the grid whilst following the same routine. Who thought of this design? This turns what's supposed to be a simple, fun and effective game into a huge laborious mess. Playing this and Skuldugery makes me wonder if all of K'Soft's games are this bad, but that's for another day.