Yahoo! Yippeeyihay! And other Western-type
noises. It's the Supple Boys (yet
again) with
Daylight Robbery, a
NON-PUZZLE! game that fair
lives up to its name in two striking
ways. Firsfly, it's about bank
robbers working in daylight, and
secondly it's been
shamelessly stolen from the old Dinamic
game
West Bank. Caramba!
If you manage to avoid tripping clumsily
over the discarded morals that tumble from
the envelope along with the disk, you'll find
that it's actually a rather fun little game. The
idea's dead simple. You're Mad Al, the bank
teller, and you're presented with three doors.
The doors randomly fly open, equally
randomly revealing robbers or honest citizens
making a hefty deposit. Taking in the situation
at a glance, you have to stab one of three
keys to blast the villains, or else leave well
alone until the honest citizen wanders off.
Once three deposits have been made, you
can scroll to a different part of the bank.
Once all twelve accounts have been filled,
you jump to the next level by way of a quick
reflex-testing shootout with a real tough
hombre. And that's it. Graphics are colourful
and almost animated, while the sound
manages the not-inconsiderable feat of being
worse than
Brainache's. There's a nice
Western-y bass line, but the harmony
appears to have been composed by
carelessly distributing the same three notes
about a scale. There's an annoying control
problem - to scroll around the bank, you wait
until all three doors are closed, then hold
down fire and press one of the three controls.
Alas, more often than not, one of the doors
flies open unexpectedly, and as the program's
already registered your keypress, another
happy depositor gets a lungful o' lead. Apart
from this fault, the game is terribly playable,
provoking the kind of mindless fascination
previously monopolised by those old
seaside shooting galleries. But
there's no more to it than a test
of reflex, and while this is
rattling good fun for a while, it
doesn't make for lasting appeal.