SAM CENTRE

It's review special day here in SAM Centre! (Yup, another no news month.) Let's join Jon Pillar at the joystick...

Noesis Software
£9.99
256K/512K Disk
Reviewer: Jon Pillar

Great! The first game from Bruce Gordon's SAM Technology software arm Noesis! (Sounds of disk being unwrapped and loaded.) Oh no it's a cute SAM character. Aarghh! And he's in a Dizzy-ish sort of game! Aaieee! (Sound of someone running into distance. Long pause.)

Hello there I'm Jon's sense of reviewer's impartiality (no, I'm down here) and I'll be conducting this review. Boing! is the story of Boing (natch), a lumpy green blob who's crashed his time machine on a horribly dangerous planet. To escape he needs to find twenty bottles of Old Courage Enhancer and three bits of his machine - the time crystal, the main battery and (ahem) the starting lever. To get to them there's the usual Dizzy business of finding associated objects and using them in the obvious (ahem again) place. The billion or so screens boast the required oh-so-witty puns (the programmers actually have the gall to call one screen at the top of the map 'You Can See For Miles Alan') and there are all the little tricks and secret rooms associated with the well-established and (strainnnn) well-loved Dizzy genre. (Phew, that was close.)

IT'S A HARD LIFE WHEN YOU'RE A SENTIENT SLIME MOULD WITH A VERY BIG NOSE

Boing! is a funny old mix of the rather spanky and the downright horrid. On the downright horrid side there's the fact that instead of lives you've got an energy bar which takes the edge off bumping into the nasties and encourages mad acts of recklessness. Sneakily, it's still possible to die outright by falling too far or tumbling onto some spikes, which seems a bit harsh on the clog-footed amongst us. Also, the graphics are a bit of a mixed bag - the backgrounds and some of the sprites are really fun and characterful, while others (like the gnashing teeth) are just plain badly-drawn. (And Boing himself is about as interesting as you can reasonably expect any sentient slime mould with a very big nose to be.)

Leafing over to the rather spanky paragraph (ah, we're here already) we've got the exact collision detection, the not-terribly-hard-but-warmly-rewarding-when-you-crack-'em puzzles, and the timing-sometimes-approaching-Manic Miner-levels-of-deviousness jumps you have to do in order to beat the nasties. I mean, on the Voltaire Hyphenated Sentence Scale alone, it's got to be worth beaucoup points.

TEAPOT TIME

But before I go into the kitchen, I'll give the traditional final analysis. Boing! is a very enjoyable, frightfully professional and excitingly commercial platform game. The most annoying thing about it is the one-life energy system, but it's endurable. I don't think Boing is going to become the Coupe mascot, but he's got a game he can hang above his mantelpiece and talk about over dinner with swell-chested pride.