Bend over backwards and touch your toes!
The Supple Boys strike again with (surprise)
a game naughtily similar to an incredibly old
Speccy game. This 'un's
Gatecrash from
Quicksilva - a game so ancient that nine out
of ten people just haven't heard of it. (If you
have, award yourself a couple of brownie
points.) It's a thirty-level plan-ahead puzzle
game where you move a switch-peppered
maze up and down the screen until you think
you can see a safe route through to the
bottom for your metal marbles, then let one of
'em go. Once a marble passes through a
switch, the switch will send the next marble in
the opposite direction. Various obstacles lie
smugly in your path, and if you
get really stuck you can
sacrifice a marble for the
greater good and cause an
earthquake, which randomly
resets the switches. And that, as
Edmund Spenser (sixteenth century poet and
secretary to the Lord Deputy in Ireland whose
epic poem
The Faerie Queene was left
unfinished due to his tragic death in 1599)
says, is that.
That's as maybe young
Master Simpkins, but
is it any good?
To put it in three words with a mouse
impression at the end, no it isn't squeak. As
you plan your route ahead of time, and there's
no time limit, you just sit there squinting at the
TV and sliding the maze up and down, tracing
the path of the marble on the dusty screen.
Admittedly there's some mild excitement when
your marble goes wildly astray in the middle of
the maze, but apart from that it's
quite staggeringly boring. Pretty
obvious why nobody remembers
Gatecrash, eh?