Beetle Mania

Copyright : Skyline Software | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

The earth has been invaded by the people eating, nasty, horrid blobs! Now to make things worse the nasty blobs are on their way to your town and only you can stop them.
Using your trusty VW Beetle, you can drive around the town and get the pieces of a bomb your fellow townsfolk have left out for you hidden under flagpoles.

Graphics

Beetle Mania is a very strange game indeed, back in the early 1980s and even the mid 1990s these cars had a massive following and people went nuts over them, personally I think they look like upside down prams with engines. Nobody came up with the crazy idea of mixing a popular car with the invasion of a strange alien species until Skyline Software came along and made this rather messy little game.
The graphics at first glance look fine, great colours, nicely detailed level design, almost like a very early version of the popular Grand Theft Auto game. But then when we look under the bonet we find a whole array of problems, the scrolling is messy which causes the game to drag portions of the left and right areas of the screen along with you, the collision detection is far too highly set, leaving a whole centimeter of boundary between you and an object would still mean death and the so called alien creatures look like nothing more than passers by in normal cars. It looks far too pushed along and not enough time has been spent on playtesting the game before the release, this is still done today by some software houses but back then it was important due to the lack of graphical power that ever game was tested for playability.

Sound

Sound is a little disappointing also, we do hear the occasional bang and one or two sirens around the playing area but other than that the game is far from being breathtaking. I for one remember the VW Beetle being a very noisy piece of kit, this isn?t even attempted in this game as your car runs silienty around the rather sleepy village.

Gameplay

Gameplay suffers a lot due to the graphical errors mentioned above, though the game seems simple enough when you read through the instructions it turns out to be far from the truth when you sit behind the controls. Moving the VW Beetle around the village is like trying to push a block of concrete up your street, in fact if you tried to do just that I?m sure you would be able to get it to move a lot freely than the car in this game.
If your idea of fun is driving around a village looking for tiny little flags and picking up bomb parts then this might be for you, for the rest of us sane people this might well be one worth skipping as the playability is low and the replay value is almost non-existant. For those that bought the game originally and had hours of fun then I?m sure you?ll still have that with your emulator and a copy of this game.