doug@terak.UUCP (Doug Pardee) (02/09/85)
Game review:
BC's Quest for Tires (Sierra On-line) C-64 disk list:$35? discount:$22
One player -- one joystick required
Overall grade: B-
The "BC" cartoon strip brought to life on your monitor. "Thor" is off
on his wheel to rescue "Cute Chick" from the dinosaur.
An absolutely beautiful job of graphics work, marred by a less-than-
exciting game concept. The graphics are superb. The cartoon
characters are all very recognizable, the animation is well done,
and even the backgrounds are above average (the nearer objects in
the background scroll by faster than farther away objects do).
The game has Thor travelling from left to right, jumping over and
ducking under obstacles. And that's about it. First you jump
over rocks and potholes. Then you jump over logs and duck under
branches. Then you come to a river where you have to cross by
jumping on the backs of turtles which bob up and down; you have
to guess when all four turtles will be "up" at the same time.
Then you go uphill, jumping over rocks and potholes and also
rocks which are rolling downhill. At the top of the hill, you
jump over rocks and potholes. Well, I guess you get the picture.
The jumping-and-ducking bit is just too boring for adults, and the
crossing-the-river-on-the-turtles is (I suspect) too difficult for
youngsters.
Given the simple game play, the simple documentation is quite adequate.
The sound effects are also simple, but are all that's needed.
The diskette was recorded slightly out of alignment. Not so much
that a properly aligned drive would have trouble, but by the time
I bought it, my 1541 had become misaligned and refused to deal with
this diskette (although it still accepted all of my others). This
game diskette was the one that finally goaded me into aligning my 1541.
I suppose it's a matter of taste, but I don't like the game's insistence
on keeping the "high scores" scoreboard on the master diskette. For
one thing, I prefer to write-protect master diskettes. For another,
you have to keep the 1541 turned on, with the disk in the drive, all
of the time that you're playing, since it'll open the file the instant
that you lose your last wheel. That overheats the drive and imperils
the diskette in the event of a power failure. But if the disk isn't
present and ready to go, the program hangs and you'll have to reload it.
Also, if you make a typing error when entering your initials on the
scoreboard, too bad. There is no back-spacing capability. Frustrating.
--
Doug Pardee -- Terak Corp. -- !{hao,ihnp4,decvax}!noao!terak!doug