Biff

Copyright : Beyond Belief | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Biff is a mischevious little Monkey that continously manages to get himself into all sorts of bother. This time he finds himself trapped and under attack from just about every creature in the jungle, it?s up to you to help him through this nightmare by collecting objects and solving puzzles in Beyond Beliefs cartoon platform adventure.
Or at least that?s what we read somewere in a magazine, find out more in our review or download by clicking the button below.

Graphics

After the massive success of Dizzy by Codemasters it appeared that many software houses were catching on to this sudden craze of graphical adventures, while most attempted to release some kind of clone hardly any of them even came close to the adventures our loveable eggy friend got himself and his family into. Beyond Beliefs attempt at this formula comes in the form of Biff and as you can see from the screen grabs below it?s not exactly as well polished as some might have hoped. While most of the characters (ranging from birds to strange land creatures) look nice and have had at least some degree of time and effort spent on them it?s pretty obvious that those in charge of colour couldn?t be bothered, well either that or they all worked behind green screen monitors and couldn?t test it. For those of you that had the colour monitor version of the CPC or the TV modulator then we feel sorry for you, those that had the old GT65 green screen monitor certainly didn?t miss any details as the whole of the game is presented in green and black from start to finish.
Not only does the game not feature any colour other than green but there is an obvious problem with certain sprites (characters, objects etc) in the game, if you look closely at screen grab 1 you will clearly see a black solid block around the wire currer (sitting next to the tree). This of course could be shrugged of as these objects aren?t that important and don?t cause much of a problem, when you move further into the game you see that the same problem effects some of the moving characters, making the game very confusing and difficult to see what is happening. Sorry guys but I think more playtesting should have been done on this one before you released it, not impressive at all. One final thing, when Biff jumps in the air he seems to take giant moon leaps from the floor to almost the top of the screen so please don?t jump unless you have to or you could find a bird stuck to your head.

Sound

Sound is again nowere near as good as the Codemasters adventure series as Biff lacks the intro music, in-game music and most of the in-game sound effects. Not only do you not miss anything on a green screen but you also wouldn?t miss anything if you had your speaker turned all the way down during play, again not looking good for Beyond Belief.

Gameplay

Gameplay of course suffers something terrible due to the buggy graphics engine, the speed of gameplay (very slow indeed) and the fact that Biff can jump 6 miles in the air in a single leap when the screen is only a few centimeters tall. After playing this game for 20 minutes or more we soon became frustrated and reached for the power button on our real CPC 464, don?t be confused into thinking that all the problems mentioned are due to poor emulation as they are also present on a real CPC 464 coupled with the long loading time.
Sadly this is one adventure game that might give the impression of a good game when you look at the box art but it certainly is a long way from home, also you?ll notice that most of the other conversions (ZX Spectrum and C64 etc) have got more than one colour on screen at once, someone at Beyond Belief was taking the piss out of our CPC machines and obviously didn?t realise the potential of the hardware.
Skip this game if you know what?s good for you!