Blargh! Still being kept incredibly busy this month, although strangely my auto-posted posts mean that I've probably already been more consistent and productive than most other Countdowns! Anyhoo, I've got a random free hour, so I thought I'd stick up another Gruesome Game whilst I had the chance....
The Movie Monster Game (Commodore 64) :
In this 1986 game from Epyx Software, you can choose to stomp around as one of six monsters, causing havoc in one of six cities around the world You select these options at the rather lovely cinema front-screen you'll see upon loading, where you can also choose what action you'll partake in with your monster! Will you just smash your way through buildings creating as much chaos as possible? Will you try to escape the city, or look for your offspring that have been captured? Or will you head to a nearby landmark's radio beacon and knock it down to stop the annoying noise?
The monsters themselves have clearly been influenced by classic creatures from Japanese & American sci-fi flicks! The Glog (The Blob), Mr. Meringue (Stay Puft Marshmallow Man), Sphectra (Mothra), Tarantus (Earth Vs The Spider) and Mechatron (Ultraman, Johnny Sokko's robot or any other giant Japanese robot thing) are who you'll be controlling....
Or Godzilla, who isn't a rip-off at all, but the actual bona fide fire-breathing, radioactive rogue that we all know and love, Epyx having gone out of their way to licence the giant lizard to give the game that little extra oomph!!!
Once you've made your choice, the game continues it's rather spiffy presentation by plonking you in a cinema as the curtain raise and the lights dim, and even advertises more Epyx games you can buy for your C64! And then after a bit, it gets on with the main feature....
You'll be in control of whatever monster you picked in your city of choice, and a meter at the bottom will either show your endurance (lose it all and you die) or your proximity to landmarks or your offspring depending on what action you decided to go for. Oh, and it'll also show your hunger if you decided to pick the 'Lunch' action I forgot to mention earlier!!
Unfortunately, it's here that the game gets a little disappointing. Sure, your monster looks great, but most clump around the screen rather slowly...and stomping on buildings and puny humans doesn't feel anywhere near as satisfying as it should. This is mainly due to some slightly puny sound effects and most of the graphics being way too small.
It gets really repetitive really quickly too, although the different game modes help things a bit by a least giving you two or three different objectives. It's also a tad tricky to get very far sometimes too though, but some monsters seem to have it a little bit easier than others.
Still, having aid all that, it's still pretty satisfying to crash around as one of these giants, and each creature does have their own scream and abilities to set them apart!
Overall then, it's not a game I'd necessarily recommend to non-giant-monster fans, as the repetition would probably grate too much. But if you like Kaiju enough to know what the word means, you should be pretty happy with this game for a half hour's play every now and again!
(With thanks to C64 Wiki, where I found the groovy gifs!)
No comments:
Post a Comment