1984 Artic Computing (UK)
by Karl Jeffery
Another game featuring the name Monty, and i'm mixing them all up.
This is actually quite interesting but the non stop multi-speed movement of the character is quite annoying and irritating. Despite that everything else is fairly good. I like the music in the background, at least for the first five minutes.
Yes it's a collect-em-up game - but with some differences which make it stand out.
For a start, your character is always on the move until he meets an obstacle. Then, you can move in four directions on the whole screen, you are not limited to the usual platform action of left-right-jump.
The screens are deviously designed and will need a careful and pixel-perfect action to be negotiated within the given time.
Not for the easily discouraged player, but ingenious and highly rewarding in the long run.
As I already wrote somewhere, controls and movements are a nightmare.
Monty moves slowly and steadily vertically, while extremely fast horizontally, and he's affected by a plague called perpetual motion, once you start him, he keeps going. It's very easy to lose control of the subject, if you ever had it. When you pass from vertical to horizontal, he can very easily slips away at full speed against some nasties. You have to dose carefully your key touches: in fact, horizontally the movement can vary. And you can even manage to make him walk backward. One of the most terrible experiences of the game is trying to enter vertical narrow passages, it's a really arduous venture. It's like trying to make a total drunk to urinate straight. At the same time, once you manage to control him almost decorously, the game beings to get quite good. The aesthetic is clearly Manic Minerian in a very cute way, little in game tune included. The gameplay is different instead, it's not a platform, but a one screen you're-in-a-maze-so-collect-the-items-and-avoid-the-nasties game, although I'm not certain this is the technical name for it.
3/5
