FAST FOOD

Main review

Skoro Design (known in the real world as Gabor Varga) has been one of the most active developers the Plus/4 has seen in it’s lifetime, his work stretches back over ten years and covers a variety of genres. This game is a loose conversion of the original Fast Food released by Codemasters and featuring that loveable little git… erm, egg Dizzy. The player must help the eggy one to wander around the maze whilst consuming “finger lickin’ chicken” and “big juicy burgers” and avoiding the locals, the worryingly named “Bonzo”, “Fido”, “Wizza” and “Pippa” (names courtesy of the Spectrum version’s cassette inlay).

Dizzy starts each level in a secluded area of the maze that’s walled off so that only he can get in and out and, from that safe harbour he must head out and collect the assorted food dotted around the maze before returning home with all of his booty and moving on to the next level.

FRIED, SCRAMBLED OR POACHED?

The sprites are very detailed, having apparently been converted from the Spectrum original; the level of detail on some of the objects (which are all in hi-res) jars a little with the newly drawn multicolour maze graphics but all in all it fits together well. The movement of our little ovoid friend and the nasties is smooth and fluid and generally the whole thing looks and moves very nicely indeed.

Despite having a high turn of speed, the nasties seem to have no intelligence (or possibly no will to catch Dizzy and give him a kicking, something I really can’t imagine!) whatsoever and simply roam around; when a junction or corner comes up in the maze, they pick a new direction every time and their decision seems to be totally random. In other words they can end up ping-ponging back and forth between two points before suddenly deviating off like a rocket in just the direction you didn’t expect or more often than not didn’t want! This erratic movement makes it very difficult to predict where the nasties are going to head next and more often than not leaves the player sat in the safe zone and waiting for a break before dashing out.

One thing that works in your favour is the food itself; apart from being tasty for a hungry egg on the run it also acts as a barrier, preventing the nasties from taking certain routes and giving the player some breathing space if they’re cautious about how they collect the various items.

On the sound front, the music is a series of converted tunes from the C64 (with an option to play them through a SID card or with Skoro’s own TED converter) which are nice in themselves and sound reasonably good rendered through TED too but don’t really bear much relation to the cute nature of the game. This is one thing I’ve commented on in the past, Skoro’s games would benefit greatly from some specially composed soundtracks and this one is certainly no exception to that.

My personal hatred of Dizzy apart, Fast Food is a solid and playable action game, albeit an incredibly frustrating one at times because the erratic movement of the nasties makes planning any kind of route or strategy close to impossible so instead the action is reduced to running out, grabbing a couple of objects and getting back to the safe zone as soon as possible. If you’ve got a high tolerance and some quick reactions, this is more than enough challenge for a couple of nights in front of the telly and one I’ll be returning to from time to time.

Second opinion

Lets be honest here. Anything associated with Dizzy doesn’t send me into rapturous delight, the first Codies Dizzy game was good and I drew a line there. This game however proves to be quite good fun and the pacey action is quite addictive. The baddies are fast and furious, if not intelligent, and collecting the food in a strategic order is an advantageous game to play. It helps contain the baddies somewhat to certain areas, when you are far away from the “safe zone”. This really helps due to the completely unpredictable nature of the enemies and adds a slightly deeper element to what is essentially a pretty shallow game.

The graphics are decent on the whole, although I would have liked to have seen Dizzy animating when moving as the baddies do. Instead of Dizzy walking or something, he just slides around the screen like a dodgy transport cafe fried egg. It’s a small thing, but I noticed. Audio wise, the music is acceptable also, although I only ever use TED sound, and didn’t hear the stuff for a SID card.

Generally, the game plays, looks, and sounds fairly good. It certainly stands up to a fair bit of play – I’ve only managed to get to level 9 so far! It definitely comes with my seal of approval.