THROUGH THE TRAP DOOR (ZX SPECTRUM)

So what happened is, I mentioned The Trap Door in the last article, which made me remember “oh yeah, there’s another Trap Door game I haven’t written about! Forget about what I was going to cover this time, I’m going to write about that other Trap Door game.” This, as it happens, was example of me shooting myself in the foot. Actually, “punching myself in the balls” might be a more apt metaphor. It’s the ZX Spectrum version of Piranha Game’s 1987 you’re-a-fool-if-you-dare-em-up Through the Trap Door!

I wrote about the first home computer Trap Door game a while back, and any questions I may have had about whether this was a direct sequel are answered by the title screen. It’s exactly the same as the title screen from the first game, except the artist has just about managed to squeeze the word “Through” in there. That doesn’t exactly bode well for innovation and imagination, does it?
Through the Trap Door is, of course, based on the classic British kid’s claymation show The Trap Door. It’s a show I loved then and still love now, and it’s certainly held up a lot better than other childhood favourites like He-Man or Transformers, possibly because it’s not an obvious toy commercial but also because it’s just so darned loveable. A quick recap: Trap Door is the story of Berk, an amiable blue lump of a monster who lives in a spooky castle and performs two main duties: acting as servant, chef and general dogsbody to The Thing Upstairs (the castle’s unseen but very demanding master) and guarding the titular trap door. The trap door covers a pit that leads to a vast underground space filled with all manner of horrible, disgusting monsters. Berk is… not great at guarding the trap door, and most episodes revolve around something escaping from the pit – often because Berk left the trap door open after throwing rubbish down the hole – and Berk and his friends having to beat it back to the stygian plasticine underworld that spawned it.

Here’s Berk and his friends now. The small lump next to him is the scuttling, beeping spider-mouse-thing Drutt, who is grey in the show but is coloured yellow in this game, thanks either to the Spectrum’s colour limitations or in the interests of keeping him visible against the background. In the middle of the screen is Boni, the miserable, melancholy talking skull who just wants to live peacefully in his little cave and not get involved with the various hijinks, and who is therefore a character I can really identify with.

Sadly, Boni’s hopes for peace and quiet are soon shattered – as they so often are when you live in a monster-filled castle – when a headless skeletal bird flies out of the trap door and affixes itself to Boni. That’s a real stroke of luck for the headless skeletal bird, but it’s not so good for Boni as his new avian body flies itself back into the trap door, leaving Berk and Drutt with a mission to rescue their calcium-rich chum.

Ever the practical sort, Berk wastes no time in jumping straight down the trap door with Drutt in hand. Berk smashes into the floor in a pleasingly cartoonish manner, while Drutt looks on, completely unscathed. Unfortunately the Spectrum’s sound hardware can’t replicate Drutt’s high-pitched giggle, but I guarantee he’s laughing at Berk right now.
So, now we’re in the trap door, what are we actually supposed to be doing?

Well, there’s a locked door over here, so finding a key seems like a reasonable first step. Once found, I can pick the key up and bring it over to the locked door, because that’s the kind of game Through the Trap Door is: a sort of graphic adventure without the parser, plus some platforming. It’s exactly the same system as the first game in the series, with Berk able to waddle around, pick up one item at a time, carry it around, drop it, use it or eat it. The big difference is that rather than fulfilling tasks for The Thing Upstairs, you’re trying to rescue Boni, which means there’s even less guidance here than in the prequel. In fact, almost none of the items give you any clue as to their purpose or function. For instance, there’s a red sweet floating in the sky up there. What will happen if Berk eats it? Who the hell knows? I turned to the game’s instructions for guidance, but they just say they have “strange effects, either helpful or disastrous” so I guess we’re looking at Trial and Error: The Computer Game with this one.

A little more exploration revealed a corridor full of deadly dangling spiders. I was a having trouble getting Berk past this obstacle, because he’s not the most svelte clay monster out there. You might think Berk would be unconcerned by mere spiders after all the horrors he’s seen, but don’t forget these spiders are falling from the ceiling and Berk’s exposed eyeballs are perched right on top of his body. A spider falling directly onto the surface of your eye is enough to freak anyone out, but not to worry – there’s a way to get past. I can switch to controlling Drutt!

This is Through the Trap Door’s big gameplay change over its predecessor: you can swap between controlling either Berk or Drutt whenever you like, and they’ve got their own unique skills and quirks. Berk can pick up and use items, while Drutt is small enough to avoid many hazards and he can jump.

It’s a good job he can jump, too, because the key’s all the way up there and although Drutt can’t carry the key he can knock it to the ground where some poor blue dope can grab it. However, there’s also a ruddy great bat in this room, and this is where Through the Trap Door reveals itself to be a complete pain in the arse. You need Drutt to jump up and touch the key. That’s simple enough. Videogaming 101. Jump into the thing. But then there’s the bat, who flies down from above and pushes you back down when you try to jump. Okay, so you lure the bat to the right of the screen and then quickly move over and get the key, right? Well, yes, in theory. There are complicating factors, the main one being that Drutt can’t jump that high on his first jump. Or his second, or third. Each time Drutt bounces on the spot he leaps a little higher, so it takes time to reach the correct altitude – so long, in fact, that you can’t just bounce underneath the key because the bat will always swoop down and block you. So, you have to start bouncing on the right of the screen, get some momentum up, wait for the bat to appear, jump to the left and hope you land in the exact right spot underneath the key so you can continue bouncing upwards. Slightly too far to either side of the key? Tough luck, it won’t register as a hit so go back to the start and begin slow, cumbersome process again.
Sounds pretty terrible, doesn’t it? Well buckle your goddamn seatbelt, kid, because it gets worse: Drutt also moves around of his own free will. The moment you let go of the joystick, Drutt will wander off, seemingly at random. I say “seemingly” because often he’s chasing the small worms that appear around the stages, but even when there are no worms about he’ll fidget around and roam the rooms without a care in the world. Any time you’re (nominally) in control of Drutt, you’re wrestling with the controls of a creature that wants to do its own thing and it is infuriating, one of the worst, most wrong-headed game design decisions I’ve ever had the misfortune of experiencing. Imagine playing a Super Mario game but Mario is also controlled, simultaneously, by electrodes wired to the brain of an overstimulated guinea pig, and you’ll get an idea of what trying to perform the extremely precise sequence of events required by this section is like.

Somehow, after countless attempts and a huge amount of unnecessary stress that is bound to cause me health problems later in life, I knocked the key down and nudged it onto the spider screen, where Berk has managed to negotiate the spiders and pick up the key. Now I’ve just got the get to the locked door, but (surprise) there’s a problem.

Berk’s stuck at the bottom of this pit, and the door’s up at the top. Berk can’t jump, or rather I’m sure he can jump but he’s not the type. He’s too stoic and straightforward to be bouncing around like that, so he’s stuck down here unless Drutt can figure something out.

After some more jumping with Drutt, which was still awkward and unpleasant but not nearly as god-awful as reaching the key, I got up near the door. This is where the trial and error really starts to kick in, because all I could think to do was to jump in the various sweets dotted around the level and once they were on the floor to slowly, oh so slowly, nudge them down the pit towards Berk.

Well, that worked. Red sweets give you wings, as the advertising slogan almost goes. Well, you get wings from red sweets in this stage, anyway, and the power of flight comes from other sources later on. There’s absolutely no consistency to what effects each item has, just another way that Through the Trap Door takes what should be a simple puzzle-solving adventure and turns it into a punishing nightmare slog. But Berk’s got the key and he can fly up to the door, so I’ve at least managed to make it through level one. It took longer than you might expect even once I’d solved the puzzles, because I didn’t realise you had to be carrying Drutt before you could move on to the next area. After trying to jump past that bat, I’m sure no-one would blame me for wanting to leave the little bastard behind.

The second stage is a lot more linear but no less aggravating, and Through the Trap Door’s dizzying  lack of consistency is never more apparent than in this first screen. You see that hole in the ceiling? There’s a key floating up there, but if Drutt jumps up there he doesn’t knock it down. Instead, a mushroom appears. Berk can eat the mushroom, which allows him to jump. This is a double-edged sword, because while Berk doesn’t jerk around the screen without your input like Drutt does, he’s also a lot, erm, huskier and therefore has even less margin for error when you’re trying to make the very precise jumps over the green monsters that roam the caverns.

Still, after the last stage an activity as simple as “jump over the bad guys” was more than welcome. Berk may be slow, cumbersome, twitchy, imprecise and stuttering in his movements – and he is, as is everything else in the game – but at least I knew what I was supposed to be doing. The stumbling block in this stage was when I found reached a dead end and found this yellow thing and not much else. I think this is supposed to be Bubo, a recurring antagonist – although “irritant” might be a better word – in the show who pops out of the trap door from time to time and generally acts like a little prick. However, in the show Bubo looks like a little prick, with a mean face and general mischievous air, whereas this yellow lump is far more friendly-looking. Maybe this is a member of Bubo’s species who was raised in a loving, nurturing household. Whatever it is, it periodically fires projectiles from the orifice on top of its head. Projectiles that would be perfect for knocking down the key at the beginning of the stage, in fact. But how to get Bubo over there?

It turns out you can pick him up. I know, I didn’t expect to be able to pick up a monster, either. I could only pick up Bubo once Berk had eaten another mushroom, a mushroom that was identical to the first mushroom despite having a wildly different effect. Yeah. So now Berk’s got Bubo in hand, but eating the second mushroom has removed his ability to jump so getting past the deadly monsters in the cavern is going to be tricky. The way you’re supposed to do it is to use Bubo as a mobile gun emplacement of sorts. You place him down, he fires his projectiles into the air, they come down on the monsters and kill them so you can get past. This is where the dread concept of precision once more rears its ugly head. The hitbox for Bubo’s projectiles is tiny, and he fires oh-so-slowly, and the monsters you’re trying to destroy move back and forth, and sometime it just doesn’t bloody work properly even when everything seems to be perfectly aligned. Making it across these three screens becomes the kind of harrowing journey Odysseus would have taken one look at and said “you know what, I think I’ll just live here now” as you laboriously waddle over to Bubo, adjust his position slightly and wait and wait and wait for monster and projectile to align. That’s how you’re supposed to do it, anyway. I used a POKE to turn off the hit detection. I’m kinda dumb, but not a total idiot.

Stage three begins, and that’s a large lead weight. Finally, something recognisable and specific enough that I will surely be able to discern its purpose. Thank you, weight, for being my anchor in this maddening universe. Also this stage appears to be made from snot.

On the next screen, Berk stumbles across an ‘orrible pile of yellow scunge - “scunge” being the deeply evocative word that is used in the show to describe the omnipresent multicoloured slime that is splattered around the castle and often serves as the primary ingredient in Berk’s cooking. What a great word scunge is. I sincerely believe that we should start a campaign to make it an actual word, possibly to describe the stuff you scrape off your oven when you’re cleaning it.

Except, surprise, it’s not scunge but rather a huge and genuinely creepy monster that will eat Berk if he ventures near it. It’s a fun-looking monster, especially those eyes with the trailing optical nerves, although it doesn’t much like it belongs in The Trap Door. That said, one thing I’ll give Through the Trap Door this – the graphics are mostly rather good, especially Berk’s sprite which looks just about as accurate to the show as it’s possible to get on the Spectrum. It’s unfortunate that the backgrounds are mostly pure black, but because the background in the show are a swirling mix of multicoloured patterns it’d be impossible to recreate them on the Spectrum. Impossible without them causing extreme nausea and possible blindness, anyway.

Then, just as things were starting to muddle along in a marginally less painful fashion, Through the Trap Door sets up an astonishingly obnoxious bit of gameplay. Berk needs to get up to the screen above this one, you see, and the only way to do that is to eat a pair of eyes he found on the floor. What, you don’t eat eyeballs you found rolling around on the ground? You think you’re better than Berk, you stuck-up… no, never mind, forget it. The eyeballs themselves aren’t important, what’s important is that eating them makes Berk float upwards like a helium balloon.

And just like a helium balloon, Berk cannot control his own direction, and the lack of air currents in the depths of the trap door mean he’ll only go straight up. This is where Drutt comes in. You have to place Drutt on the small platform at the left of the screen and jump into Berk as he drifts past, pushing him to the right. Oh yes, it all sounds so simple, just like NASA must have thought it sounded simple to point a rocket towards the moon. To accomplish this series of events requires a Herculean effort of will, not just to pull it off but to prevent yourself from ripping the game tape out of your Spectrum, chewing it into fragments with your teeth and spitting the crumbled remains onto a tyre fire.
You start as Drutt, and have him start bouncing so that he’s got enough momentum to reach Berk when the time comes. Make sure he’s as far left as possible, though – if not, he’ll crash into the ceiling and stop bouncing. You can see there’s a tiny hole in the far left of the ceiling to allow Drutt some clearance. I’m not sure whether the programmer only cut out such a small hole due to laziness, ineptitude or sheer contempt for the human concept of “fun,” but there we go. Remember how I said Drutt will move around on his own as soon as you let go of the controls? Well, he’ll also bounce back in the opposite direction if you jump into a wall, so have fun getting the little sod into the exact position required on that minuscule ledge. If you somehow manage that, you have to switch to Berk, make sure he’s in the exact right position, eat the eyes and then quickly switch back to Drutt, praying that you can maintain his bouncing. Berk drifts onto the screen, Drutt jumps towards him and almost invariably misses. Drutt and Berk fall back down, and you have to go through the entire soul-sapping palaver again, fighting the hateful controls every step of the way.

Pictured above: one of roughly twelve thousand failed attempts.
This part of the game honestly made me question what the hell I’m doing with my life. If I put the same amount of effort into something productive or self-improving as I did into try to get two 30-year-old game sprites to bounce into each other, I’d be writing this article from the fifth bedroom of my multi-million pound mansion while the London Philharmonic gently played the Trap Door theme in the background.

I did it, though. I’m not sure how. I think I blacked out for a moment, and then Berk was on the right-hand platform. I’ve never made an emulator save state with such satisfaction in my life.
You reward for making it this far is a short section where you have to pick up worms with glowing coloured lights on their heads and place them into the matching picture frame. It is the sweet ambrosia of the heavens after the last section, even with the annoying bird’s claw that swoops down  to grab Berk the instant he stops moving. Frankly, the claw could come down carrying a boombox blasting Nigel Farage’s political speeches and copies of your parent’s boudoir photos and it still wouldn’t spoil the mood. I am the king, the champion, the undefeated, at least until I stop playing the game and realise how much of my precious time on this Earth I have wasted.

I made it to the final stage. I’m not sure how, but I did. See that skull over there, the one that looks identical to Boni because it’s the same sprite that was used for Boni in the intro? Yeah, that’s not Boni. It’s just a skull. A yellow herring, if you will.

No, Boni is actually the skull of this massive skeleton that’s trying to kill Berk with a comically undersized pitchfork. You’re supposed to shoot the skeleton with a cannon until Boni is knocked loose, a scenario which raises all sorts of questions. Like, is this fair on Boni? Maybe he wants to be part of a full skeleton. It must be a nice change of pace from being an immobile skull that Berk has to drag around in a little cart. On the other hand, although Boni is a grumpy sort who likes to complain, I don’t think he’d ever resort to trying to murder Berk, so I have to assume he’s not in control of the skeleton.

When I reached this point – Berk trapped in a pit, harassed by ghosts and snakes, surrounded by sausages – I knew it was time to admit defeat. Even with guides to hand and various cheats at my disposal, I simply could not bear to continue with Through the Trap Door. The hideous controls, the glacial pace, the fiddliness, all of it became too much. Imagine trying to build an Airfix kit while wearing oven gloves and you’ve got some idea of what it’s like trying to play this game. I looked up the game’s ending, and all that happens is the three friends return to the opening screen while a text box reading “Home Sweet Home” appears, so at least I’m not missing out on much.

Apart from the addition of Drutt as a second playable character, an idea which I admit could have had legs (six of them, even), Through the Trap Door is a real disappointment of a sequel. The first Trap Door game wasn’t good but at least it was interesting and had some potential, but for the sequel to take the exact same gameplay mechanics, concepts and sprites and turn them into such an awkward mess is very disappointing. I can see how this could be a good game, even: trial and error is not necessarily a bad way to figure out puzzles, as long as you’ve got some guidance and, more importantly, you can try again quickly. Through the Trap Door’s biggest failing is that whenever you screw up, the grinding tedium of getting back to where you were is enough to put anyone off.
So, like I say, it’s a real shame. If there was a proper Lucasarts-style graphics adventure based on The Trap Door, with the kind of cartoony graphics you’d find in, say, Day of the Tentacle, then that would be one of my dream games – but instead I’m stuck with this nightmare. Oh well, I can always go and watch the show. You should do the same.

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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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THE TRAP DOOR (C64)

A thought that occasionally pops into the flaccid grey slop of my mind as I write VGJunk articles is that there's a whole section of gaming history that much of the world - and by that I mostly mean America - didn't experience. That would be the European home computer market of the mid-eighties and early nineties which, as the name suggests, was mostly European. Japan and America got titles we never received like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, but that was okay because we'd already had the joy of playing games on the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. Earthbound? No thanks, we still have all these movie tie-in games from Ocean Software to play through. Yes, it was a time of great bounty and endless pleasure. No, I'm not still bitter, why do you ask?

One of the knock-on effects of this was that because the British computer game market was so constrained by its geography, there was a stream of games being released proudly featuring licensed shows and characters that would only be recognisable to British people. The Grange Hill game springs to mind, as does Viz: The Game, and today I'll be looking at one such title - Piranha's 1986 Commodore 64 release The Trap Door.

Full disclosure: I'm writing about the Trap Door game solely as an excuse to watch episodes of Trap Door. If you've never seen Trap Door, and chances are you won't have unless you're British and you were born in the early eighties, it was a claymation children's show about the adventures of Berk.

That's Berk there. He's an amiable blue monster with a West Country accent (and if you've never heard one, think of the "friendly rural folk" accent from your own country) who lives in spooky castle with his friends Boni, an ennui-filled talking skull, and Drutt, a bizarre spider-mouse-rock hybrid... thing that scuttles around the place making noises like someone in the middle of psychotic episode trying to swallow a gerbil. Berk works in the castle's lower regions as a cook / butler / general skivvy for The Thing Upstairs, a never-seen monster who is forever growling orders at Berk, which Berk then fulfills in his usual cheerful, no-nonsense manner. This often involves hitting monster with a rolling pin.

You see, Berk is also in charge of the titular trap door, which serves as the only barrier between the castle and the hordes of freakish, malformed creatures who live in the stygian caverns below. Most episodes of Trap Door revolve around Berk leaving the trap door open, a monster escaping and causing havoc, and then the monster being dealt with in some way. That's where Berk's rolling pin comes in, although that's far from the only solution. Sometimes he just sends the monsters up to The Thing Upstairs as lunch. Like I said, Berk's a no-nonsense kinda guy.
For a kid like me, obsessed with the grotesque and malformed, Trap Door was an absolute joy to watch and I love it to this day. It's still very watchable now - the humour that comes from seeing Berk's deadpan reaction to whatever vile creature has dragged itself out of the trap door never gets old, the plasticine animation is utterly charming and Willie Rushton's voice acting is fantastic. It is, in short, a Good Programme.
Then it was turned into a computer game. I'll be honest, I'm feeling some trepidation here. Is a beloved childhood memory about to be dashed against the rocks of underpowered computer hardware and lazy licensed cash-in antics? Okay, enough stalling, let's find out.

I'm certain that my friends will tell you that I am, indeed, a super berk. I'll take that option, please.

Here it is, the world of The Trap Door recreated on the Commodore 64. Admittedly, it isn't especially impressive-looking for a C64 game. In fact, it looks almost identical to the ZX Spectrum version of the game, but all the major characters are here and Berk and Boni look pretty much spot-on. Drutt, who you can just about see lurking behind Berk, is less accurately portrayed, looking as he does like a cross between a frog and a lemon. Still, two out of three isn't bad. The Thing Upstairs is also here, his words appearing on-screen to tell me what I'm supposed to be doing. He wants a can of worms - presumably to eat, although he may well have other plans for them that I would rather be kept ignorant of - and it's your job to satisfy his wishes. The game has already won points from me by attempting to recreate Berk's life of menial drudgery instead of just making another platformer or maze game. Time to find some worms!

Once I'd restarted the game and redefined the control to a more comfortable layout, I embarked on my quest. There aren't many controls to master, just movement and two buttons for "drop" and "tip." Tip things up, that is, not leave a small gratuity. Trap Door plays like a graphic adventure without the menu or parser, with a series of puzzles that need to be solved by walking around the rooms of the castle, finding objects and combining them in ways that will produce the desired result, that result usually being "The Thing Upstairs gets his dinner."
In the screenshot above you can see the storeroom, where I found a can. That's fifty percent of my job done already! I searched around the few rooms available to me looking for worms and there were none to be seen, so that left me with just one place left to look: the trap door.

There's a valuable lesson here, and that lesson is "never obey orders contained within the theme song of a children's television programme." The Trap Door song famously warns "don't you open that trap door," but by walking Berk over to that switch on the wall, the trap door flies open and worms issue forth. The trap door may house untold horrors, but it's also more efficient than the Tesco home delivery service.
Once the worms are exposed, it's a simple matter of picking them up and dropping them into the can before Drutt eats them all. This is easier said than done, because Berk moves so incredibly slowly that you'll wonder whether he accidentally swallowed a fistful of temazepam before you started playing, doddering from one spot to the next at the kind of pace normally only witnessed in particularly sluggish glaciers. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I have already found the worst aspect of this game, and it's Berk's walking speed.

I eventually managed to get three worms in the can. I wasn't sure if that was the required amount, but chasing worms around only to see Drutt slurp them up like living spaghetti was starting to get frustrating so I placed the can in the dumbwaiter and sent it up to The Thing Upstairs.

The praise from a hideous unseen creature lurking in the attic of haunted castle turns out to be much more rewarding than the endings of any number of modern videogames. Well, to me it does, probably because given the leaden pace of Berk's movement collecting those worms felt like a Herculean task truly deserving of recognition. Or possibly it's because my father never thanked me whenever I brought him a can of worms, I couldn't say.
Filling a can with worms was just a warm up, a chance to get used to the controls and survey the various locations, but now The Thing Upstairs is ready to expand his culinary horizons and Trap Door is about to get difficult, starting with the raw, nerve-shredding insanity of... fried eggs.

That sounds even easier to rustle up than a can of worms, and it would be if there were any eggs around, but there aren't and once again Berk is forced to open the trap door in the hopes that some eggs will crawl out.

A bird flew out instead. Well, that's fine too, I just have to figure out how to extract eggs from the bird and I'm sure there'll be something around the castle to help with that.
A ghost escaped from the trap door at the same time, a morose-looking cyan spectre with eyes at shoulder level and hang on, that's the ghost of Horace! All those times I got him killed in Horace Goes Skiing by walking him into heavy traffic, only for his immortal spirit to end up under the trap door. It's a small world after all!
The ghosts follow Berk around, and if they touch him they teleport him to a random part of the castle. You can get rid of the ghosts by offering them something to eat: I tried to feed it Boni, but it wasn't having it so I had to open the trap door again and harvest more worms. They seemed to satisfy Horace's terrible hunger for a while, and the ghost disappeared leaving me with the task of finding a way to get this bird to lay an egg.

While I was looking for helpful items, I found a small white bishop's mitre in a wicker basket. Upon seeing it, a plan began to form in my mind: if I could get the mitre onto the bird's head, the shock of being made a senior member of the Catholic clergy would cause it to lay an egg out of sheer surprise. Somehow, this insane plan actually worked, although there were some stumbling blocks. Firstly, how do you get the mitre up there? I figured this out by accident when I accidentally catapulted Drutt into the air: anything on the trap door when you flip the switch is flung upwards by the force of the opening door. It was as I saw the mitre travelling upwards that I realised it was actually a bullet, and I was using the trap door to launch said bullet into the bird's cloaca. I felt no remorse.
The other issue was figuring out what to do with the egg once it was out. Luckily, I found a frying pan. At least some things make sense in Trap Door's bizarre universe.

Here's the bird part-way through laying the egg. The very large egg. No wonder its eyes are so wide.
Once you've got the egg on the pan, you just have to leave it on the stove to cook for a while before sending it up to The Thing Upstairs.

Screw you, pal. Given the amount of effort it took to get one cooked egg to you, you're lucky to get anything at all. I doubt I could have managed to prepare more eggs anyway, because I simply didn't have enough time. Did I mention that you're timed? If you don't meet The Thing Upstairs' demands quickly enough, it results in a game over and some stinging criticism.

Berk takes it well, though. He's a laid-back guy.
Overcoming time constraints is the meat of Trap Door's gameplay. Everything is timed, from the main timer that counts down to failing your overall task to each element within that task - for example, if you take too long getting the fried eggs into the dumbwaiter they go cold and The Thing Upstairs sends them back down. It's a test of precision and planning, trying to get as many of your ducks / giant trap door birds in a row as possible in order to counteract Berk's lack of speed and occasional problems picking items up. Unfortunately, I'm not great with precision and after just about managing to cook some eggs I reached something of a brick wall.

A bottle of eyeball crush, huh? Simple, I just need eyeball and something to crush them with.

By a process of elimination, the eyeballs must come from this box of seeds I found, because there's nowhere else to get eyeballs short of ripping them out of one of the game's creatures. I tried that, and it didn't work, so it must be the seeds. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the three seeds go in these three convenient plant pots.

Sure enough, after a little waiting around three mighty eyeball-bearing plants have sprung up. You could say they're... eyedrangeas. Look, I'm sorry but that was the best eyeball-plant pun I could come up with. You're welcome to submit your own.
Once I'd gathered the eyeballs, placed them in a vat with a spigot and positioned a bottle under the tap, all I needed to do was find something to crush them with.

This giant moveable weight seemed like a good candidate, but apparently that's far too logical for the weird world of Trap Door and it didn't work. Once again, I was forced to disobey the theme song and open that trap door.

This thing jumped out, and jumped, and jumped some more. It bounds around the game world, crushing all before it under the weigh of its massive boots. Here's the answer to my prayers, I thought, and a quick look at a walkthrough confimed that this monster was indeed the key to success. Get it to jump into the vat and it'll crush the eyeballs, providing Berk with a bottle of delicious vitrous humour smoothie that he can give to his boss. Except I could not get the bloody monster in the bloody vat. You can push the vat around by walking into it, but as you can imagine it's rather unwieldy and Berk moves it so gingerly that you'll wonder whether he's filled it with nitroglycerine and he worried about blowing up the castle. I managed to get it near to a spot where the jumping monster sometimes landed, but for the life of me I couldn't get it on the correct plane and every time the monster just landed close by, leaving the eyeballs uncrushed and Berk at risk of losing his job. In the end, I ran out of time. Mission failed, back to the start of the game.

This time it's "boiled slimies" on the menu, and I've got a pretty good idea where to find those - if you're looking for slimies, probably the first place you should check is your castle's very own swamp.

They're the same as the worms, essentially, although harder to catch because sometimes they disappear under the muck. Still, I managed to grab three of them and throw them into the large cooking pot found in the storeroom.

Getting them into the pot took far longer than you might think, because I didn't realise you had to climb up to this ledge and drop them in from up here. I'm still not sure why - Berk's clearly tall enough to put the slimies in the pot from ground level, even if he has to use a bit of a slam-dunk motion to do it. Whatever the case, they're in the pot now and it's time to boil them. For which I need heat. Which I don't have. I tried pushing the pot near the stove, but that didn't work, and in the end I had to consult a walkthrough. Open the trap door, it said. A monster with a flamethrower will appear, it said. I did, and it didn't.

For whatever reason, the flamethrower monster refused to emerge from the trap door and so I was stuck with no way to boil these adorable living creatures alive. I left the trap door open for a while, I tried flicking it open and closed repeatedly, I even tried putting Boni on it as bait in an attempt to lure the monster out, all to no avail. The last thing only resulted in Boni falling into the trap door. He screamed on the way down (in text form). Once again, I felt no remorse. This job has ground away my sense of empathy.
With no way to boil the slimies, my time once again ran out and the game was over. Of the four tasks put to me, I only managed to complete two of them, which doesn't sound like a great return but I'm not going to take all of the blame for that. It's hard to progress when the game straight up doesn't work for whatever reason, and getting the jumping monster into the vat seemed achievable but far too frustrating to persevere with. I'm sure you won't blame me for not trying to get all the way through this one.
There is one final task to complete once you've beaten the rest, and that's to claim Berk's reward by using the weight to smash open a safe and reveal the ending.

(screenshot from c64endings)

That's it. That's your reward. Well, at least it fits in with the tone of the show - The Thing Upstairs is hardly a kind and nurturing employer. As nice as it would have been to see Berk get a happy ending, it would have also been a bit odd.

So, I didn't quite manage to complete it, but I've certainly played enough of it to form a conclusion and that conclusion is that Trap Door is an interesting game. Not a bad game, not really a good game, but an interesting one. Presentation-wise, it overcomes the disappointing first impression of the graphics by capturing the feel of the Trap Door world fairly well. If you've ever seen the show, the jittery, block-caps text used for The Thing Upstairs' commands will cause his voice to pop into your head, and Berk in particular looks great - the artists did an excellent job of capturing his fat-handed, waddling walk and his pleasantly dopey facial expressions. There's even a rendition of the theme song that might not be particularly accurate but is still very good.

The best thing about the game, though, is the kind of game it is. This could easily have been a simple cash-in job, with the Trap Door characters plugged into a side-scrolling action game or something equally pointless, but by making a title that sticks to what actually goes on in the show, the whole enterprise feels so much more... Trap Door­-y. Berk performs his thankless work with a smile on his face, even when Drutt gets in his way and Boni starts complaining, and that's how it should be. There are problems with the mechanics - Berk's movement speed is still my most hated aspect of the game, getting items into the right positions can be a nightmare and it's hard to be positive about the game not spawning monsters necessary to progress, but because it's such a short game these things don't ruin the fun entirely.
If you grew up with Trap Door, then give the game a try - just don't let it frustrate you. If you haven't seen the show... well, I think every episode is on YouTube and watching Berk smack monsters with a rolling pin is probably a better use of your time.

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