Second of the two "Fido" games that appeared on Firebird's amusingly bad "Don't buy this!" compilation tape of 1985.
The game is very wrong in most respects and probably deserves a score of 1, but I'm being very generous in that (a) the game at least has colourful graphics, (b) contains multiple differently-themed levels and (c) the Fido games have a somewhat "original" gameplay. So, at least some effort was put in making things a little bit better than the very worst titles out there.
Overall though it's frustratingly poor and the gameplay is pretty terrible, with wildly inaccurate collision detection, bad key layout, and really just a feeling of awkwardness on playing.
You play the part of the pup named Fido, who indeed looks like a puppy, that is until he sits down at which point his sprite expands to a larger size and his tail grows to about three times it's normal length and he just looks like some sort of giant mutated adult dog.
Use keys WSNM to move around the play area and Q to fire a sort of laser beam from the pup's mouth. Shoot the enemy sprite to gain "food", whilst avoiding direct contact with it. (Where "direct contact is roughly defined as being within 16 pixels of the sprite) I don't even know what the magenta enemy sprite is on the first screen, but it sure has a disproportionately large wobbly nose! The main purpose of the game is to sit over garden moles which keep appearing at the bottom of the screen, such that your wagging tail hits them on the head, killing them. I don't know what's more surreal, a mole-killing pup which tail-wags its prey to death, the purple-nosed antagonist or the laser-beam coming out of a dog's mouth. Anyway, kill enough moles and you will at least progress onto the next exciting screen.
There are also large doors at the top of the play area, but despite your inevitable efforts to try to walk through them, they are in fact completely non-functional.
So, overall quite a bizzare concept of a game that's bound to make you ponder just how could such an idea come about. It's certainly no fun to play either, (especially as you repeatedly die after two seconds of play on your first attempt), but somehow it's a little intriguing due to the bizarreness of the whole concept. Anyone who has played through the Cassette 50 compilation will also know, this is not the absolute worst, but bad enough.
