Reviews

Taito's cutesy platformer was ported to the Speccy by Ocean Software, and a fine good job they did too.

The graphics while monochrome yellow are really nice and the characters pretty much resemble their arcade counterparts, I mean Tiki is Tiki! And it plays just like the arcade game as well which is obviously a good thing. The main let down believe it or not is the music, while it's nice and it plays well during the game and it was composed by Jonathan Dunn which usually means win, it's actually not the complete tune from the arcade game and it's just a continuous loop of the first part with the bridge completely non-existant and that's a great shame.

Still The New Zealand Story is one of the better arcade conversions, not the greatest but certainly one that's worthy of being called a proper port.

Decent conversion of the tricky arcade game.

It's quite a nice conversion but it's letdown by its annoying scrolling and the fact that after dying you respawn exactly where you died, even if it's in mid-air falling towards spikes.

1989 Ocean Software (UK)
by Gerald Weatherup and Jonathan Dunn

A fun port by Ocean Software of the popular Taito's platformer with the same name.
The obvious monochromatic yellow scenery in-your-face kind of thing, didn't do it for me. It made me wonder, why on earth in 1989 wouldn't someone exploit the new Spectrum techniques, thus including in the game some color, which I thing would be a plus for a game like this, specially with squared looking characters which makes it easier to apply color. Still the sprites are all accurate and faithful to the original. As so is the gameplay, simple and easy enough to get into. Overall a good port for a fun game.

It may not look faithful because of the monochrome graphics but it sure plays like it should. Far from perfect but still a decent conversion.

Tried to play this. Redefined keys, chose "M" as "fire". Cannot start the game at all. Awful.