MICKEY'S JIGSAW PUZZLES (AMIGA)

Look, I’m getting to be an old man these days so after getting my arse kicked repeatedly in VR Troopers and playing Dark Souls 2 again in my free time, I’ve decided I need a bit of a break. It’s time for something simple, something gentle, something that doesn’t throw my declining reaction times and mental acuity into sharp, grim relief. So, a kid’s game, then. Considering the last time I played an edutainment game starring Mickey Mouse it turned out to be surprisingly not-terrible, I’ve decided to return once again to the House of Mouse with Novotrade’s 1991 Amiga (also available on PC) rainy-afternoon-em-up Mickey’s Jigsaw Puzzles!

With a cheery blast of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” issuing from the speakers, Mickey himself appears to greet us. Jigsaw puzzles! With Mickey Mouse! What more do you need to know? I hope the background is not representative of the actual puzzles contained within the game. I was hoping for an easy ride, after all.
With no other preamble, it’s straight into the puzzle-building action. I suppose I’d better show you the first puzzle then, huh? Yeah, I should, but I’m building anticipation. Get a good, clear picture in your mind of Mickey Mouse’s face. You may need to refer to it later.

So you start the game and you’re immediately presented with this. My decision to play Mickey’s Jigsaw Puzzles has paid off in spades, because Mickey’s facial expression gave me the kind of genuine, chest-rattling, wipe-away-a-tear belly laugh that no piece of intentional comedy has in months. It’s just too, too perfect, and represents the closest I’ve ever come to replacing long-time VGJunk mascot Satan Goat in the site’s header. There’s much fun to be had trying to figure out exactly what could cause such an expression, but my two main candidates are that Mickey gambled on a fart and lost, or Donald Duck’s wearing that faux-innocent look because he’s just whacked Mickey square in his mouse-hole with a pipe wrench. Oh yeah, Donald and Goofy are here too, and they haven’t fared much better, art wise. Goofy’s hat now looks makes him look like he should be dealing ecstasy at Glastonbury circa 1998, and given Donald’s bulging eyes I suspect he’s been buying whatever Goofy’s selling. As for the ghost on the right, well, that thing’s just neat. I don’t know if this is the intent, but I can only see it as being swaddled like a baby. A spooky, floating baby.

Okay, fine, the actual jigsawing. You select which picture you want to puzzle out, then you can choose how many pieces the resulting jigsaw will have, from sixty-four all the way down to a mere four. It’s nice to have the option to make things easier for very young children, but as a grown man who has just about managed to stop laughing at Mickey Mouse’s face I’m sure I can handle a sixty-four piece jigsaw.

Nope, I placed Mickey’s eyes down on the puzzle and now I’m laughing again. This might take longer than I had anticipated.
As you can see, it works much as you’d expect it to. Place the piece in the appropriate segment, and if you click in the wrong place the screen will flash so you know to try again. The cursor feels a bit jerky, but other than that I suppose I can’t fault the mechanics.

Because the jigsaw takes up the whole screen, you do have to go to a separate screen to select your piece. That slows things down a little, but I suppose it’s the best compromise available. Could you imagine how much we’d be missing out on if Mickey’s face had been made smaller to accommodate the jigsaw pieces? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

The most interesting feature of MJP is that once you’ve completed a puzzle, you can press the camera button on the right to play a short animation of the displayed scene. For instance, here Mickey opens the chest and bat flies out, the ghost wobbles ominously and the Disney friends talk about how spooky it all is. And I do mean talk, because there are voice samples for the dialogue and it sounds pretty decent for the most part, although Donald’s rasping quacks were always going to be a challenge for a low bitrate sample and as a result he sounds even more like he’s gargling with broken glass than usual.
It’s a shame that this was the very first puzzle that the game shows you, because nothing else in this game is going to live up to it and we’ve already seen most of the gameplay – but I’ve played through it all now, so for the rest of the article we might as well look at all the other puzzles.

Mickey chills out on Mars while a robot servant brings him drinks – drinks that he’s too lazy to even lift his arms to hold, the robot just pops the straw right in his mouth. If I were a political cartoonist I’m sure I could turn this into a panel highlighting the Disney Corporation’s eventual desire to spread their tendrils beyond the Earth itself, but alas I lack the laser-sharp wit and clear thinking of most political cartoonists.

I know his name’s in the title and everything, but a lot of the puzzles seem to go out of their way to remind you that Mickey Mouse is the coolest dude ever and you cannot hope to ever approach even one percent of his incandescent magnitude. Mickey is the alpha and the omega, the standard against which all others are judged and found wanting. That’s why he gets to be the guitarist in the “MM Band” - and you can guess what “MM” stands for. His coolness is rather undercut by the fact he fashioned his guitar from the anchor of Barbie’s Dream Yacht, but he pulls it back with a rather snazzy shirt.
As expected, viewing the animation for this puzzle plays a brief snippet of the band. Mickey and Goofy want to rock, but Donald uses his curiously massive hands to throttle his saxophone into playing a completely unrelated jazz riff. Ever the rebel, is Donald.

Mickey’s also a sports star, naturally – here we seem him on the gridiron, showing some rare fallibility as he fumbles a pass before eventually recovering the ball and presumably scoring both a touchdown and all the mousey cheerleaders. The thing is, these scenes aren’t fully animated, so Mickey’s body stays in place while his limbs awkwardly rotate. Disney is a company that specialises in imagination, which is handy because you’ll need a lot of imagination to believe that Mickey’s actually playing American football.

Mickey’s also good at football, although scoring goals is much easier when there are no other players on the pitch. Unfortunately, no football team in the world (that I know of) wears a kit of pink shirt with a blue band, pink socks and yellow-and-green shorts – I imagine there’s some kind of rule against it to protect the opposition’s eyes – so I can’t pin Mickey down to a particular club.

Oh, and here’s where I realised there’s a different style of puzzle available to you, one where you get items rather than traditional jigsaw pieces and have to place them in the correct blanked-out areas. Obviously this does little to enliven the gameplay, but if you ever wanted to create an image where Mickey Mouse is kicking his own severed head around in from of a crowd of horrified onlookers, now’s your chance.

Mickey Mouse: Radical Skate Dude now, with a deck that’s so intensely of its time that people who are into the whole retro-80s-synthwave aesthetic could only dream of recreating a fraction of its power. Mickey’s also sporting a palm-tree-patterned shirt that I’m sure set him back about two hundred bucks at a fancy boutique.

Yet more sports with a bit of baseball, although once again the focus is on Mickey’s rampant narcissism. Notice how he wrote “I love Minnie” on the fence back there but then wrote his own name at three times the size? And a scrawled self-portrait, too. A show-off and a vandal, that’s Mickey, although thinking back to the places I used to hang out playing football when I was a kid there are a lot worse things he could have graffitied up there. It might still have involved Minnie, but not the word “love.”
Speaking of Minnie Mouse, she’s been notable by her absence so far, but all that will change now that I’m ready to insert disc two and access the second lot of puzzles. I have no shame in admitting that by this point I had resorted to setting all the puzzles to four pieces each, allowing me to complete each jigsaw in an average of eleven seconds. Hey, it means less time waiting around to see fantastic images such as…

...Minnie doing some exercises in a way that cannot be good for her spine. Mind you, she is a rodent and therefore much more skeletally flexible than any human. “Oh, I just love Gymnastics!” says Minnie in a voice so high-pitched that all my neighbours dogs started barking. Given that all she did was flap her hands around a bit, Minnie’s routine is as much gymnastics as me walking over to the kettle and ducking down to get the teabags out of the cupboard is a biathlon.

Minnie plays tennis. Not much else to this one, folks, beside that stray observation that given his proven track record of narcissism, Mickey clearly only loves Minnie because she looks exactly like him.

Back to the exercising – or “mousercising,” as Minnie calls it. The real star in this image is the radio on the shelf. At first you’re like, “how cute, a Mickey-shaped radio” but then you look more closely at those eyes – pink-rimmed, fleshy and wet with tears – and you start to wonder if that radio is entirely mechanical. It also looks more like a koala than a mouse.

Now we’re in Minnie’s boudoir, in a scene that immediately brought back surprisingly strong memories of the Dream Phone board game. By now Mickey’s constant presence should come as no surprise, but if you’re like me you’ll spend a good few minutes trying to figure out the perspective here that allows Minnie to look at the picture of Mickey even though it’s hanging on the wall behind her.

Don’t you bloody well threaten me, Mickey. I don’t care if you are dressed as a skinhead, I won’t be intimidated by a mouse even if said mouse does look like the kid from This is England.
Oh, and I see Goofy’s got his usual hat back. The big hat is just for spooky castles, I guess.

Yep, those are horses. I think. Okay, so I’m not so sure about the one on the right because it’s only got three legs and glowing demonic eyes. Protoplasmic elder beasts that have temporarily assumed a vaguely equine shape, at the very least. As they ride through the desert on a horse with no soul, look at Mickey and remember that in cowboy movies “black hat” is a term for a bad guy because they, well, wear black hats. I rest my case.

I hadn’t really noticed before, but while I’d say the graphics in MJP are mostly okay (although the Amiga could do a lot better) everything does look very rubbery, as though all the characters are encased in PVC. I mean, look at Minnie’s skirt, that’s definitely not fabric.

And finally, just as we’re getting into “Krusty Visits Relatives in Annapolis, Maryland” territory, we reach the final scene. Mickey goes for a swim. For some unknown reason I was expecting something a bit more… climactic. A group shot of all the characters, Mickey ascending to his eternal throne as the Earth’s new ruler, something like that. Instead we get tiny sharks and a weird-looking starfish. The starfish flops around listlessly, and so I feel a certain kinship with it as Mickey’s Jigsaw Puzzles limps over the finishing line.

Well, those were definitely some jigsaw puzzles. No doubt about that, and as such it’s difficult to judge the game as a whole. I suppose it partly comes down to price: if this was sold as a full-price retail game back in the day, a parent would probably feel a bit ripped off even if it did come with a real 24-piece jigsaw (or at least the PC version did). I reckon kids would enjoy it, though. It’s simple enough to be perfectly suitable for very young children, the selectable piece counts and alternate “shadow” mode give it a bit of extra longevity and the sounds and animation are pretty fun. Put it this way: if this game had featured He-Man or The Real Ghostbusters rather than Mickey Mouse, the six-year-old VGJunk would have been all over it. So, I suppose that’s a tentative thumbs up on MJP, although frankly the game could have caused my monitor to squirt skunk spray into my eyes at regular intervals and that Mickey face in the first puzzle would have made it all worthwhile.

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TINY TOON ADVENTURES CARTOON WORKSHOP (NES)

Hey, kids! Have you always wanted to make your own cartoons but lacked the funding, artistic talent and scores of Korean animators necessary to make your dream come true? Well, offer up a blood sacrifice in praise of Novotrade and Konami, because they've brought the tedious and time-consuming world of animation to the NES with their 1992 mildly-diverting-sprite-manipulation-em-up Tiny Toon Adventures Cartoon Workshop!

Yes, you too can use moving images to bring forth the warped imaginings that lurk in the twisted labryinth of your mind, as long as those imaginings revolve around around the wacky hi-jinks and famous characters found in Warner Brothers' Tiny Toon Adventures cartoon.

If you don't remember Tiny Toons, it was Warner's early-Nineties attempt to make the Looney Tunes relevant once more by creating younger versions of the established Looney Tunes cast, giving them different names and sending them to "Acme Looniversity" where they learned about, I dunno, clowning and wise-cracks and the grim reality of student debt in a world where a first-class degree in Applied Slapstick no longer guarantees you a job.

Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the rest of the famous Warner characters appeared in Tiny Toons as the Looniversity's professors, but the bulk of show was dedicated to the next generation. The stars of this new wave were Buster and Babs Bunny, two rabbits inspired by Bugs, and Plucky Duck. Plucky is Daffy Duck, but green. All the popular Looney Tunes stars get younger but otherwise very similar analogues, except Elmer Fudd, who became a small girl who terrorises animals through excess affection. I suppose portraying him as a kid with a gun who repeatedly tried to kill the main characters in a school setting would be a little beyond the pale.
I always wondered what the hell the genesis of this new breed was supposed to be. Are they the children of the original characters? Are all the animals in the Warner universe fated to conform to a certain set of traits on a per-species basis, a universe where every rabbit is a smart-mouthed prick and all ducks are ranting semi-psychotics? Do they each represent an unchanging aspect of the cosmos, rabbits being an embodiment of the "trickster" archetype as portrayed by the likes of Br'er Rabbit and Bugs himself? I don't know, but I'm sure there are people on the internet who have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure it out.

Never mind that, though - we're here to create cartoons, and Tiny Toon Adventures Cartoon Workshop makes it easy! For once I'm not being sarcastic, either - Novotrade really did manage to cram an effective if extremely limited animation engine onto an NES cart.
Here's how it works: everything is controlled by the icons across the top of the screen. The left- and right-most icons let you select the "actors" - that is, the two characters you can have on screen at once. Each character has a few set animations, like running or swimming or, in Plucky Duck's case, whatever obscene act this is motion supposed to represent.

Oh god, I'm not sure what's going on here but there's no way it's suitable for consumption by minors. Just look at Plucky's eyes, it's all become too much for him and he's fallen into a catatonic state.
So anyway, you pick the animation you want to to use, be it Calamity Coyote flying around on an Acme-brand rocket, Babs Bunny firing a water pistol or Plucky doing... that, and you place them on the background. An extendable arrow allows you to make the characters move, so creating something like Buster walking across the screen is very easy to do.

The second icon from the left lets you select a background. There are two types of backdrop: solid colours and famous Tiny Toons locations like the Looniversity and, erm, some generic forest / desert / lake areas. The solid colours are useful if you're going for a more symbolic approach: for example, a flat black background can really highlight Furrball's descent into existential despair. Mostly you'll be using the scenery, though.

The typewriter icon allows you to place captions into your animation, although it's hamstrung by the fact you can't enter any message you like, meaning my grand vision of the cast of Tiny Toons performing an 8-bit version of Hamlet will have to go unrealised.

It would have looked something like that (Plucky Duck is playing the role of the ghost, you see. He's in the middle of exeunt-ing.)
A lot of the available captions are very specific or tied directly to one character or scenario and are thus of limited use, but there are some more general phrases like "The End" or "Happy Birthday" or even "I love you dad!" which does nothing but conjure images of a small child slaving over a deeply personal animation designed to show their pure and abiding affection for their father, only for said parent to not even look up from the betting pages to watch their child's digital labour of love, the offering dismissed with an irritated grunt. That's what you get here at VGJunk, folks - bad jokes and unresolved father issues. Don't forget to tip your waitress.

The other two options are the camera, which lets you move through the animation frame by frame and insert things precisely where you want them. Helpful, but unglamourous. The other one, the one second from right, is where you insert music and sound effects chosen from a very small library of samples. Frankly, I forgot the audio option was even available and thus all my animations played out in total silence. I'm going to pass it off as a pretentious stylistic choice, because now that I'm a movie director I get to do things like that.
All these options come together in an impressively intuitive if not very malleable way - it's easy to make an animation, but nigh-impossible to construct something that isn't forced upon you by the limited choice of sprites at your disposal. Still, I struggled past these limitations and now I can present to you VGJunk's directorial debut. I call it The Coyote's Howl, or Toons Inhumanity to Toon.

The dangerously psychotic Calamity Coyote detonates a bomb strapped to an unsuspecting member of the public, his attempt to gain revenge on an uncaring society that he blames for his inability to catch that blasted roadrunner. He proudly informs the viewer that he "meant to do it," further reinforcing the depths of his psychosis. Clearly, this is a searing and enlightening look into the heart of madness. It's Taxi Driver for the "emotionally stunted man-child" demographic, and I expect my Palme d'Or is in the post already.

I thought I'd try some family-friendly comedy fun for my next effort. A rabbit rollerskating on a lake! What could be funnier than that? Nothing, except maybe a duck attempting to copy the rabbit and drowning. Because, you see, as waterfowl the very idea of a duck being unable to swim is intrinsically humourous! That's what's happening in the second bit, by the way. I know, it gets a little hard to follow. Let's just chalk it up to Dadaist absurdity rather than the meagre library of animations that Tiny Toon Adventures Cartoon Workshop provides you with.

I thought I'd get on the remake bandwagon, and taking my inspiration from such pointless exercises as Gus Van Sant's version of Psycho I decide to recreate the opening scene from Castlevania with Plucky Duck cast in the Simon Belmont role. Of course, I bollocksed it up because Simon Belmont doesn't actually walk towards the castle in the Castlevania opening. My 8-bit dork cred is in tatters. I'm going to quit the film-making business and do something more socially beneficial, like rounding up lost shopping trolleys or donating all my organs to science.

Oh, okay then, one more. In The Thorns of Passion, Babs Bunny's mind is so addled by the fierce desert heat that she confesses her love to a saguaro cactus. Happily the cactus is totally into that kind of thing and they both live happily ever after, or at least until they tried to consummate their relationship.
I hope you enjoyed those animated GIFs based on animations made with an NES animation program spun off from an animated series, but I've just about reached the extremes of what I can do (or what I'm willing to spend time doing) with Tiny Toon Adventures Cartoon Workshop.

TTACW is ultimately both impressive and disappointing. The fact that someone managed to cram a simple-to-use, intuitive animation utility into a NES cartridge is no small achievement, but the lack of options mean there's not really much you can do with it. The small pool of available sprites is unfortunate but understandable, but the inability to enter your own text is a real kicker. There's also no way to save your animations, short of hooking up a VCR and recording them to tape. I hope this means that somewhere out there there's a four-hour longplay video cassette filled with nothing but some kid's TTACW creations. I'm not sure why, but that's a pleasant thought.

Tiny Toon Adventures Cartoon Workshop, then. A fun tool to mess about with for a while, not great at recreating classic moments from famous Konami franchises. If you want to make your own Tiny Toons animations and send them in, I'd be happy to see them.
Oh, and in case you were still wondering, that Plucky Duck animation? The yellow bits at the bottom are not, as I originally saw them, Plucky's spread-eagled feet with some fleshy, spinning mound between them. They're the edge of a boat. He's rowing really fast. I'm sure you're as glad as I am that's resolved.

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HORROR CITY (C64)

This is a computer game about using a gun to shoot things. Alien things. In a futuristic city. I'm not really narrowing this down much, am I? It's Novotrade's 1989 Commodore 64 crosshair shooter Horror City!

I don't know what it says about me, but the first thing I thought upon seeing this mutated beast was "its head looks like the upside-down crotch-joints of an old action figure." Already Horror City has suffered a punishing blow to its credibility. There's only so horrific you can be if your grim visage reminds me of He-Man's pelvis.
I'm just going to dive right into this one. It's a crosshair shooter, I think I should be able to handle the intricacies of the gameplay.

Right then, here we are in Horror City, ready to put an end to whatever evil lurks on its streets and subway concourses. Judging by the portrait on the right, I'm playing as a woman, so good on Novotrade for addressing the gender imbalance often found in alien-slaying games such as these. I mean, Samus is a great role model for any young girl wanting to become an intergalactic bounty hunter, but she can't do it all herself.
Your character is called Sinclair, and you'll be controlling her for the duration. Well, controlling her hand, at least. Move the joystick to move the crosshair, the fire button lives up to its name, all is as it should be.

Ignoring the people flying around on hoverboards under the assumption that they're civilians and not actively evil, I instead tried to shoot the bloke at the bottom, the one with the blue colouration and giant googly eyes of the Cookie Monster. I didn't try to kill him just because he looked like the Cookie Monster, you understand. I've got nothing against the Cookie Monster. I just had to make a quick threat assessment and that guy seemed more dangerous than the hoverboarder, that's all.
In the end it didn't matter, because despite getting my shots (as far as I could tell) dead on target, the villain completely ignored me and sauntered off the side of the screen. On the plus side, this did help me realise that you can scroll the screen horizontally by placing your crosshair right at the edge of the screen.

I spotted some more suspicious individuals. You can see one on either side of Sinclair's gun. On the right is a man who has suffered a serious injury at a barbecue, an accident which befell him when he poked the ketchup with his barbecue fork until it exploded all over him. On the left, and forgive my crudeness, is a dustbin with a large blue erection. Here, take a closer look.

I tried shooting both of these unsavoury characters. They seemed like they had to be guilty of something, especially that dustbin. Public indecency, at the very least. Even with the crosshairs right over them and the fire button pummelled to within an inch of its life, nothing happened. The bad guys just walked away.

I shot this shark-man right in the heart. Right in the heart. Did shark-man give a good god damn? No, he did not. I chased him for a while, convinced that a man with the head of a shark could not possibly be something I'm not supposed to be shooting at. After a while, my eager pursuit finally annoyed the shark enough for him to turn around, look at me and make a funny noise.

The noise made the screen flicker, which I suppose represents Sinclair taking damage. Taking damage because a bulletproof shark shouted at her. What is going on? Is the true horror of Horror City a kind of psychological impotence, a traumatic state of not-knowing designed confuse and humiliate the player? I certainly feel a bit humiliated, what with not being able to figure out how this crosshair shooter works. I'm going to turn in my videogame-playing badge and (apparently ineffective) gun.

A few shouts later and Sinclair was dead, having made no impact whatsoever on the wellbeing of Horror City. Well, that's not strictly true. She did kill a civilian. Good work, Sinclair.
I admit defeat. I'm not a proud man and so in order to show you, the readers, a bit more of Horror City, I'm willing to take the "Review" option on the title screen in an attempt to figure out what's going on.

Before I do that, though, take another moment to examine the world of Horror City. If you're a reader of comic books, especially British comic books about granite-faced lawmen who act as judge, jury and executioner, it might seem somewhat familiar. "Ronald Reagan Block"? "Sump Sucks" graffiti? The fact that Sinclair looks as though she's dressed as Judge Anderson? This is all because Horror City is, in fact, a Judge Dredd game with the serial numbers hastily filed off.

Here's a panel from an issue of Computer and Video Games magazine, showing that Piranha (who made the Trap Door games) were working on a game set in the Judge Dredd universe. It was going to be called Judge Death, and it would have starred Psi-Judge Anderson as she battled against Judge Death and his fellow Dark Judges. That's why Sinclair's dressed as Judge Anderson - it's because she is Judge Anderson.
Judge Death was never released, but you can see from the screenshots that it's very obviously the same game as Horror City. At some point Novotrade took the work that had been done on Judge Death, scraped away the top layer of 2000AD while still leaving the background details that clearly mark Horror City out as Mega-City One and released it under a new name. They probably shouldn't have bothered.

These are the Dark Judges, who were set to be your opponents in Judge Death before it was reworked - Judge Fire, Judge Fear, Judge Mortis and Judge Death. Cheerful fellows all, but without the official license they had to be replaced when the game became Horror City. But who to replace them with? Don't worry, I'm sure the creative minds at Novotrade came up with four equally striking and not at all daft-looking alternatives.

Sinclair will be doing battle with Judge Toygroin, Judge Dustbin, Judge, um, Fire and Judge Depressed Shark (he's not jawesome at all). At least I know what they're supposed to be now, and I suppose I can see that the Judge on the left is part-man, part-fly.

Review Mode also give me a hint on what I've been doing wrong. Apparently I have to "aim precisely at the teleport globes on their belts" in order to succeed. I didn't have a goddamn clue what this meant, so I went back to investigate and after much squinting I think I've figured it out. Here, I made the "teleporter globe" flash in this GIF so you can see it.

I think that's it. As far as I can figure out, only shots that hit precisely in this tiny area only a few pixels across will count. What I was doing wrong was, yeah, get this, trying to kill the enemies, when instead I should have been attempting to undo their bloody belts with my bloody pistol.
In order to try to get my head around this baffling, obtuse and frankly awful system, I figured I should head to the practise range.

The practise range is useless. The targets are only destroyed when you hit the transporter globes, but all except the most distant targets have much larger hitboxes than during actual gameplay and the because the orbs are in different places on the characters and they don't move in the same ways the training bears almost no resemblance to the gameplay proper. You learn nothing, although I think it might still be more fun than the game itself.

Armed with this new-found knowlege I returned to the streets, only to be immediately confronted with yet another problem. This is Judge Dustbin, and it looks like he's squatting with his mechanical legs splayed open in a most uncouth manner. Never mind that, though. Take a good long look at Judge Dustbin, and tell me where, on that sprite, is the teleporter globe. I sure as hell couldn't find it. I managed to hit the three other Judges in their globes (if you'll pardon the expression) three times - after being hit three times they're defeated and disappear - before I managed to to hit Judge Dustbin even once. There's just no feedback, no way of knowing if you're close to scoring a hit, no way to tell what you're even supposed to be aiming at, and the whole thing collapses into a face-slappingly, strangling-yourself-with-your-own-nasal-hair-to-escape mess of frustration and pointlessness.
After around thirty minutes of chasing Judge Dustbin around the screen, I somehow managed to score the three lucky hits that let me move on to stage two.

For my efforts, I was rewarded with the chance to do it all again, this time in an underground car park. The background aside - a lovely green-and-black piece of urban congestion that puts me in mind of the original XBox - the game is exactly the same, except the Judges sometimes walk up stairs now. They're still impossible to hit, especially Judge Dustbin, who once again survived long after I'd dealt with his compatriots, my anger rising as I imagined what the robotic clanging of his mocking laughter would sound like as shot after shot did nothing to harm him. I came to the conclusion it'd sound like a metal dustbin being rapidly hit with an egg whisk.

As I vainly unloaded round after round in an attempt to get something to happen, I managed to run out of bullets. On the right, you can see a variety of different ammunition icons. When the red bar underneath an icon fills, you can't use that gun any more. That's not a problem, because you can just press the space bar to switch to another type of ammo. Do the different types of ammo have different powers and properties? No, of course they don't. They have different sound effects. Exciting, I know.

I know I've been complaining about Judge Dustbin be impossible to hit, but the other Judges are almost as bad - those transporter globes are only a few pixels across, after all. Scoring hits is made all the more difficult by the Judges' tendency to act like coquettish schoolgirls, and as you slowly drag yourself across the screen to find them they will quite often simply teleport to a different part of the stage the moment you lay eyes on them, lest you sully their virginal innocence or something. The display at the bottom left of the screen is a radar of sorts, the dots representing the Judges, and when you're not firing wildly without scoring any hits you'll be laboriously hauling Sinclair around the stage trying to catch the dots, like Pac-Man strung out on ketamine.

I stuck with Horror City for just long enough to reach stage three, where enormous lampposts dominate the scenery and everything is just as bad as it was before. I'm not sure who to blame - either Piranha, Novotrade or most likely both - but they've managed to take the crosshair-shooter genre, a genre simple enough that you'd think it impossible to cock up so thoroughly, and turn it into a molasses-slow and needlessly frustrating exercise in unattainable precision.

For starters you're using a joystick - hardly the most precise of tools and not really up to the job of consistently lining up your crosshair with an area smaller than that of the original tissue left on Joan Rivers' face. The enemies simply potter about and don't really do anything, which is really for the best because if they got their act together they could take Sinclair out in two seconds flat. The whole thing is slow and inaccurate, and to cap it all off the only semi-successful purging of any Judge Dredd-related elements means it feels like you're playing the gaming equivalent of one of those bootleg Transformers toys you see in Poundland with names like "Trans-Change RoboCars."

I didn't make it past stage three. I know, I'm sorry, you know I like to show you the whole game but after forty minutes spent chasing Judge Dustbin around I couldn't take it any more. Looking around the internet seems to confirm that no-one else could take it either, and while there apparently at least four stages including a trip to the Cursed Earth you'll be hard-pressed to find any photographic or video evidence of this. If you're desperate to see the rest, you'll have to make it on your own. Good luck and god speed.
Are there any positives I can take from Horror City? Well, Sinclair's hand is quite nicely animated. The static effect when you get hit is kinda neat. Judge Depressed Shark's portrait is at once amusing and faintly melancholic, like a clown in an iron lung. Can you tell I'm stretching?

With a full Judge Dredd license behind it, smoother controls and the removal of the utterly idiotic "teleporter globes" nonsense, Horror City could have been an interesting prospect. Instead you're left with a game that's only interesting because of what it isn't. If you're looking for a C64 game about shooting things that won't make you want to saw off your own fingers in frustration, I recommend Forbidden Forest - at least that'll just give you nightmares.

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