Bad Cat

Copyright : Rainbow Arts | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Bad Cat was originally an Atari ST game that was later converted by Stefan Reisner to the Amstrad CPC (good man). The game itself is based on a rather clever cat that thinks he can do much more than your average house cat and so decided to compete in a home made olympic challenge in which he will jump pools of water, brick walls and many more.

Graphics

Bad Cat has some great graphical aspects and some pretty bad aspects to even out the score, lets start with the good stuff. Colours and sprites are well presented and very bright, animation is pretty much on top form and the cat like events are pretty well thought out, there?s also a fair amount of detail both in the background and in the foreground, the playing area is pretty large (probably as large as the Atari ST/C64 conversions but you?ll also notice a few bad points. Because the colours are so bright it?s often hard to pick out what is what on the screen without looking twice just to make sure, this also makes the graphics look a little blocky in places and doesn?t do much to keep the player interested for very long.

Sound

Sound is pretty basic, there isn?t an introduction music at the front of the game (note: we are reviewing the tape version which has been converted to DSK) and the in-game sounds are few and far between. The only sounds you?ll actually here are those when "bad cat" is actually hurt or fails to jump over an object in time, not exactly what you?ld call active in any sense.

Gameplay

Gameplay isn?t that good either. There are many "olympic" style games on the CPC, some of which are good (Daley Thompson) and some which are purely awful (Athlete) in this case Bad Cat rests somewere in the middle. It certainly doesn?t work well as a single player game because there is nothing but a timer to compete against, levels or stages aren?t very hard to overcome and there is little in terms of rewards at the end of it.
We personally think that this game is aimed at younger players because there is certainly a lot less of a challenge involved if anybody playing this title has recently completed much more challenging games such as Daley Thompsons Supertest. It?s not a complete waist of time though and it isn?t an overly bad conversion considering that it?s originally coded for the much more advanced 16-bit machines, if you like a challenge we say avoid, if you like your games VERY easy then it might be worth a download.
Judge for yourself but we would avoid it given the choice.