Head Over Heels

Copyright : Ocean Software | Reviewed by : betpet

\"Headus Mouthion (Head) and Footus Underium (Heels) are two spies from the planet Freedom. They are sent to Blacktooth to liberate the enslaved planets of Penitentiary, Safari, Book World and Egyptus, and then to defeat the Emperor to prevent further planets falling under his rule. Captured and separated, the spies are placed in the prison headquarters of Castle Blacktooth and must first escape, then break through the market to the orbiting Moonbase where they can teleport down to the planets to locate and reobtain the stolen crowns. Liberation of the planets and defeat of the Emperor will allow Head and Heels to return to Freedom as heroes.\"

That was the blurb from Wikipedia which sums up the basic story of the game. Is that all? Is it heck! \'Head over Heels\' is a beautiful work of art that should be admired again and again. The game is an isometric-room based puzzler. You have to negotiate the traps and nasties that are in your way and recover the five crowns to fully complete the game. You could also escape without finding any of the crowns (or less than all five) but you wouldn\'t see the wonderful graphics and cunningly designed puzzles in all those poor, imprisoned worlds would you?

The graphics are wonderful. They\'re clear and well defined. The use of colour is effective and there is very little that gives away that the original game was written for the speccy\'s Z80 chip.

The graphics are of the \'ported from the spectrum\' variety although I do think they were copied rather than ported. They\'re effective but in Paradise Valley, it can be very difficult to pick out the creatures. Then again, maybe that was the objective.

The sound consists of good quality sound effects and the occasionally funky tune. All fit in nicely with the whole theme of the game and a nice touch is the screen change tune which is appropriate to the world you are currently in.

The controls are fine and the collision detection is pixel perfect which matches up nicely with those pixel-perfect jumps you occasionally need to perform to get across a spiked pit or grab that crown before the guardian gets you. Heels can pick up a bag early in the game allowing him to carry an object should he need to. Head similarly can pick up a doughnut gun and ammunition in the form of 6-pack doughnuts. Apparently, all monsters love doughnuts and when hit by one, will stop what they\'re doing and lick the jam off their faces. The final crown guardian doesn\'t like doughnuts so you\'d better be quick!

To summarise, this game is the greatest 8-bit game ever written without a doubt. It has everything, beautiful graphics, wonderful gameplay, and that \'one more go\' grab factor that keeps you going back to the game - even 20 years later!