Reviews

Crimbo is a festive effort from 2010 by the Little Shop of Pixels, who released it as a semi-sequel of sorts to their Gloop Troops game of the same year.

The quality of the overall package is exceedingly high. The graphics are crisp and have a classic ‘Spectrum’ feel to them, while managing to avoid any excessive colour clash. There’s a nice little introduction, which I’ll come back to later, and then we’re right into the game, a neat little platformer where the objective is to collect all the presents on any given level, while avoiding the usual array of enemies and spikes that can finish you off, which means no presents for the kiddies this Christmas.

The first thing that hits you about Crimbo, other than the crisp, colourful Bubble Bobble-esque visuals, is that it’s fiendishly difficult. I mean it’s really hard. Every level has a strict 30 second time limit and often require pixel perfect jumps over spikes and enemies to even stand a chance of getting all the presents in time.

Whether this puts you off or not depends on how much you like a challenge in your games. Over on the World of Spectrum forums some people rationalised it by saying that the relatively small number of levels, around a dozen or so, justifies the difficulty. Personally I feel the right balance of difficulty should leave you wanting to try it again even when you fail multiple times. With Chrimbo I have to admit it quickly got to the point where I just wanted to throw the damn thing out of the windows. Well, it would have done if I wasn’t playing it on an emulator.

What is for certain is that Chrimbo is a high quality package that bodes well for future releases from the Little Shop of Pixels, provided they get the difficulty balance right.

As an aside, the storyline to this game amused me. Santa’s elves go on strike, so it’s your job to help Santa around his house to collect all the presents for the children.

Now, it might just be me, but my first thought was ‘What if Santa’s to blame for the strikes?’. I mean, why have the elves gone on strike? What sort of working conditions did they have? What were their demands? Why didn’t Santa get round the negotiating table instead of deciding to do it all himself?

It’s hard to believe Jolly Ol’ Saint Nick would have such sub-standard working conditions as to merit a strike but then they do say a strike is a sign of failure on all sides. Certainly Santa wouldn’t be the first global giant to present a good image to the world while subjecting his workers to appalling working conditions. And think about it – if Santa engendered such good will from those around him then why does everyone in the game want to kill him? Even the cute little Robins are after his blood.

Anyway, where were we?

Taken from: http://zombiesatemyxbox.com/2011/12/27/the-retro-review-10-zx-christmas-classics-and-curios/

Annoyingly you can't choose keyboard in the game and must play with a joystick, but luckily we can map the joystick to the keyboard on Spectaculator so we're good to go. It's a tricky game, there is little room for error and not a lot of room to jump at times. It looks colourful and sounds great too, but I didn't get far in this to fully enjoy it.