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City Slicker (1987)
(Hewson Consultants)
Only released on the ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC, this 30-year old platformer is so obscure not even Mobygames has an entry on it. Fortunately World of Spectrum comes to the rescue with all the details.
You control Slick, a bloke tasked with stopping the infamous Arab terrorist Abru Cadabbra's nefarious plot to blow up the House of Parliament. To do this you need to find and combine the eight parts of the Bomb Disassembly Unit before midnight, which translates to about 45 minutes in real-time.
I played this game when I was about 10 years old (on the Amstrad) and I was both amazed by it and way in over my head. This is not your average platformer, there are some very strict (and unwritten) rules in play that must be followed, some pixel-perfect jumps are required and a general knowledge of London is needed to make sense of most things. Oh, and in true 8-bit platformer fashion you can't climb up or down ladders - you jump up them to ascend, and must find another (safe) way to get back down. You know the drill if you've played Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy.
Instead of using a lives system, City Slicker has an Energy Bar. This bar is reduced when Slick touches enemies, is hit by projectiles (i.e. bird crap) and falls too far. But another aspect of the game is that your jumping height is determined by the Energy Bar - if you have too little energy, you can't jump anywhere. (Losing all your energy is Game Over, obviously.) Fortunately Slick is carrying three Pep pills which he can use at any time to replenish his energy, and both more Pep pills and various foodstufs can be found in-game to keep that Energy Bar topped. Sadly none of this means diddly-squat when it comes to Abru himself. Abru is pursuing Slick and trying to stop him - and touching Abru is instant death as the game's "intro" explains. The problem is that Abru tries to reach you every 15 minutes (in-game time, or roughly every minute real-time) by emerging from the nearest exit. So you have to navigate the levels and their normal obstacles, while dodging Abru, while also trying to figure out where (and what) the BDU parts are and what the hell you're supposed to be doing. Easy, right?
But here comes the most interesting (and amusing) part of the game: Many of the baddies (including Abru) have inventories, just like you. That means that if they touch an in-game item they'll pick it up, then usually carry it around for a short while before dropping it again. Repeat endlessly until the item is out of their reach, or you drop a weight on their head to make them cough up the goods. Better yet, some of the items you can pick up (like Ed Boon the drunkard) also have inventories of their own, so you can pick up an item that's holding an item that's holding an item, thereby circumventing the 6-item limit on your inventory. This tactic is actually needed to get one of the BDU items, so it's good to know of it in advance.
Travel is provided courtesy of the London Underground, which cycles through the eight available "landmark" locations around London. The game doesn't really pick up until you reach the Tube, but that was a part of the game not many players even got to see back in the day, because for some strange reason the game starts you off in the dungeon of the Tower of London, one of the hardest areas of the game to navigate around. What's worse, opening up various passages involves doing illogical things. One of the Beefeater guards moves too quickly to be jumped over, for example, so he needs to be stopped somehow. This is done by toggling the two torches above him, on the outside of the Tower of London. Some platforms need to be weighed down for them to lower, and far too often an item merely needs to be picked up for another, more important item, to magically appear in a nearby hard-to-reach location. Pick up the crown in the Tower of London to see what I mean.
The video below (a complete walkthrough) claims that the only way people could figure out how to beat the game was to analyze the game's code to see what needed to be done. I would say that's a plausible claim, but after watching the video I realized just how close I was to beating the game back in the day, having found 5 of the 8 items myself. And as usual with an old 8-bit game, there are absolutely no systems in place to save your progress, so you have to do everything in one go. Thank emulators for having save-states.
And yes, the reason I bring up this game in particular is because of the "Politically Incorrect" plot of the game; an Arab terrorist (Latin: Arabus Terroristicus) threatening London with a bomb and a white bloke is called in to sort everything out. Try releasing this game today and watch social media go absolutely bananas.
(Hewson Consultants)
Only released on the ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC, this 30-year old platformer is so obscure not even Mobygames has an entry on it. Fortunately World of Spectrum comes to the rescue with all the details.
You control Slick, a bloke tasked with stopping the infamous Arab terrorist Abru Cadabbra's nefarious plot to blow up the House of Parliament. To do this you need to find and combine the eight parts of the Bomb Disassembly Unit before midnight, which translates to about 45 minutes in real-time.
I played this game when I was about 10 years old (on the Amstrad) and I was both amazed by it and way in over my head. This is not your average platformer, there are some very strict (and unwritten) rules in play that must be followed, some pixel-perfect jumps are required and a general knowledge of London is needed to make sense of most things. Oh, and in true 8-bit platformer fashion you can't climb up or down ladders - you jump up them to ascend, and must find another (safe) way to get back down. You know the drill if you've played Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy.
Instead of using a lives system, City Slicker has an Energy Bar. This bar is reduced when Slick touches enemies, is hit by projectiles (i.e. bird crap) and falls too far. But another aspect of the game is that your jumping height is determined by the Energy Bar - if you have too little energy, you can't jump anywhere. (Losing all your energy is Game Over, obviously.) Fortunately Slick is carrying three Pep pills which he can use at any time to replenish his energy, and both more Pep pills and various foodstufs can be found in-game to keep that Energy Bar topped. Sadly none of this means diddly-squat when it comes to Abru himself. Abru is pursuing Slick and trying to stop him - and touching Abru is instant death as the game's "intro" explains. The problem is that Abru tries to reach you every 15 minutes (in-game time, or roughly every minute real-time) by emerging from the nearest exit. So you have to navigate the levels and their normal obstacles, while dodging Abru, while also trying to figure out where (and what) the BDU parts are and what the hell you're supposed to be doing. Easy, right?
But here comes the most interesting (and amusing) part of the game: Many of the baddies (including Abru) have inventories, just like you. That means that if they touch an in-game item they'll pick it up, then usually carry it around for a short while before dropping it again. Repeat endlessly until the item is out of their reach, or you drop a weight on their head to make them cough up the goods. Better yet, some of the items you can pick up (like Ed Boon the drunkard) also have inventories of their own, so you can pick up an item that's holding an item that's holding an item, thereby circumventing the 6-item limit on your inventory. This tactic is actually needed to get one of the BDU items, so it's good to know of it in advance.
Travel is provided courtesy of the London Underground, which cycles through the eight available "landmark" locations around London. The game doesn't really pick up until you reach the Tube, but that was a part of the game not many players even got to see back in the day, because for some strange reason the game starts you off in the dungeon of the Tower of London, one of the hardest areas of the game to navigate around. What's worse, opening up various passages involves doing illogical things. One of the Beefeater guards moves too quickly to be jumped over, for example, so he needs to be stopped somehow. This is done by toggling the two torches above him, on the outside of the Tower of London. Some platforms need to be weighed down for them to lower, and far too often an item merely needs to be picked up for another, more important item, to magically appear in a nearby hard-to-reach location. Pick up the crown in the Tower of London to see what I mean.
The video below (a complete walkthrough) claims that the only way people could figure out how to beat the game was to analyze the game's code to see what needed to be done. I would say that's a plausible claim, but after watching the video I realized just how close I was to beating the game back in the day, having found 5 of the 8 items myself. And as usual with an old 8-bit game, there are absolutely no systems in place to save your progress, so you have to do everything in one go. Thank emulators for having save-states.
And yes, the reason I bring up this game in particular is because of the "Politically Incorrect" plot of the game; an Arab terrorist (Latin: Arabus Terroristicus) threatening London with a bomb and a white bloke is called in to sort everything out. Try releasing this game today and watch social media go absolutely bananas.
