jkh@bambam.pcs.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) (11/12/90)
Having just read some very good reviews on F19 Stealth Fighter and Killing Game Show (I'm gonna buy F19 now), I decided to continue this positive trend with a short review of my own. I bought the MPFC game as a dedicated fan of the show who was curious to see what a "game" based on the show would attempt to do. Well, for a start, it's quite silly. The manual is very silly, the game is silly, and the "cheeseblock" protection system is silly and more than a little annoying until you manage to memorize enough cheeses to make searching through the little booklet for cheese nomenclature less necessary. The game is also copy protected, which is also annoying since I hate playing from an original disk and I'd think the cheese system would have been more than enough protection. As to the game: The graphics are decent enough and have a good number of Gilliam favorites used in various and amusing ways. To be fair, there aren't many ways to adapt the actual comedy scetches to the game, though having an "argument" for bonus points showed that they tried, albeit weakly. Once you discount the shape of the sprites, this becomes little more than a shoot-em-up maze game, though there are some nice touches involving strategy where you have to know just when to shoot a particular object and in what sequence. Wanting to see what sort of weird python pastiches are ahead also provides some motivation for die-hard python fans, though the number of things the "gumby" character can do (aside from simply shooting things) is woefully lacking and boredom soon sets in. The game is also rather *hard*, with lots of stuff being thrown at you, and it would have been nice if they'd included some way for you to bypass levels already seen. Having to go through the same stuff all over again just to get to the one part you've been having trouble with is a bit wearying. I won't give away the various and sundry things the game does to you at odd moments, except to say that some of them are quite amusing. All in all, this game is probably not a bad buy for the serious python fan, if only just to have it to round out one's collection of memorabilia. Serious gamers will no doubt find it boring, however. Out of a scale of 1 - 10, this one gets a 4.5. Jordan