Zool

Once again my old friend Rou La Femme has gotten himself into a sticky situation. That mishap with the Maltese natives means he must lie low for a few weeks. In his defence I would have made the same comparison with a certain light spherical chocolate treat, so without further gnu...

Children are foolish that’s why so many of them end up meeting old men off the internet. It’s also why games like “Kronk’s New Groove Party Racing” ride high in the charts while all the remaining copies of “Evil Zone” were sent to fight in Afghanistan. I was a child once and that’s why, when asked what game I wanted for my birthday, I picked Zool.

Memories of the time suggest the selection was made along the lines of

1. I want a jumping game like Sonic II on the megadrive.
2. You can’t get Sonic II on a Gameboy because it can’t display blue.
3. Mario looks a bit rubbish, he doesn’t appear to have any sort of early 90’s radical ‘attitude’.
4. If 3=True and 2<1 get Zool because the only other game in Woolworths is a boardgame called “The Great Floatini”
I should have gone for The Great Floatini. To this day I wonder what amazing anti-grav technology was employed to produce the floating effect. (No doubt imagination and strings)

Zool was some sort of amazing ant ninja from “The nth dimension”. People used to do things to “the nth degree” a lot in the early 90’s and when I say people I mean businessmen in sitcoms and extreme sportspeople on Saturday morning kids TV. (This was before the spelling of extreme was official changed to X-Treme! In order to make it 10% more radical.)
With his knock off sonic trainers (possibly bought on a market by his mother) and his lightsaber/baton type weaponry (which was never employed in the game). Zool seemed set to rock the shit out of that tiny green screen.

The first few minutes of Zool seemed promising, after all it did bear the much sought after Nintendo Seal of Quality. An award of comprisable quality to the Roy Castle clean air award. More importantly we were proudly informed that Zool was sponsored by Chupa Chups. Who knew that Chupa Chups had such financial strength? No one and I get the feeling that Zool set the cause of Chupa Chups back several decades. Only now have they started to recuperate by marketing themselves in bag and stationary form at teenage girls - just like playboy!

Well Zool never featured faux pop-art images of women sucking provocatively on lollypops. (Or indeed suggestively fondling a Slammer Whammers case full of fake Chupa Chup pogs and their ludicrously effective metal slammers.) What it did feature was an ant Ninja struggling to advance beyond the second level. No easy task when your enemies included spiked pits of instant death, an unhelpful control system where sometimes you stuck to walls and sometimes you merely jumped at them ineffectually like a youtube parkour video and worst of all the same music from the title screen playing through the entire game. Against all this Zool could do nothing but jump on the heads of his enemies or fire ineffectual ninja pellets at them. (To all the young people out there head jumping used to be the primary method of attack in all games, mostly because it didn’t require any extra animations leaving precious memory space for password save systems. Unfortunately head jumping faded into obscurity when 3D graphics made any kind of precision impossible – just ask the Jersey Devil or Croc: Legend of the Gobbos.)

Each level of Zool had a theme and the people at Gremlin did some amazing things here because instead of “Easy Forest level with nice music, Slidey Ice Level, Burny Fire Level, horrible unresponsive controls underwater level, final metal level and level where you kill civilians in an airport they made the first level a level based on sweets- which weirdly featured little in the way of cupa chups. I can only presume liquorice allsorts were easier to animate. The second level was based on musical instruments. Beyond that I have no idea because the instrument level was so frustratingly difficult that I put my copy of Zool inside a guitar and could never get it back out. The instruction book did promise two other exciting levels but having not experienced them first hand I couldn’t say if they existed or what the theming of those levels were. Hopefully the final level was a journey into the nth dimension with such twisted logic and imagery that you realised the entire game up to that point had been a clever post modern satire of rubbish ports of rubbish Amiga games. (All Amiga games were rubbish.)

Poor Zool. The only good things about the game were the eerily lifelike movement of the bumblebee boss on the sweets level and the delight of another attempted Mario type Macot being slowly killed by apathy and poor choice of corporate sponsorship. We can all take comfort in the fact that Zool now rests with comrades such as Aero the Acrobat, Titus the Fox, James Pond and the recently deceased Crash Bandicoot. Never again will we see their like, mostly because games companies have moved on from trying to create Disney style mascots, now it’s all about ill defined anti-heroes with badly selling spin off graphic novels.

Overall I would rate Zool: An ill conceived sequel featuring a female zool and a dog zool and two choose your own ad

Numan Athletics

Scientists provide us with all the answers these days, were it not for scientists we would be without everything we take for granted. Computers, mobile phones and Tron, all gone in an instant. One thing they can never provide an answer to however is the future. A future were the Olympic Games are so desperate to grab audiences, that ‘Train pushing’ is now an official sport, the Niagara falls is deemed safe enough for the high jump; and India is represented by an incredibly insensitive racial stereotype….it’s also called Numan Athletics.

Numan Athletics is effectively track and field to the extreme, if normal athletes run 10 miles and hour, then this game makes them run 1,000. It’s like seeing through the eyes of Daley Thompson for just one day; only Daley Thompson is blind due to the fact he is constantly outrunning light. Points are rewarded for each respective event; the winner is given the opportunity to write down a whole range of three letter insults as long as they hit the leader board. The events in question are:

Turbo Dash- As explained before, fast running….only faster. You have to do the old alternating button trick as quickly as possible; those who win gain the prestige of victory. Those who don’t survive through their 30’s without contracting arthritis…everyone’s a winner!

Interceptor- Stop missiles from a large naval battleship hitting you, the quicker the reaction the higher the points. One would think the world was put off by the prospect of large cannons ever since Cher heaved her whored self on top of one in an attempt to turn back time. If Doctor who has taught us anything it’s that time doesn’t work like that, and the traumatic memories shall forever remain in our heart, in the case of the doctor…hearts.

Tower Topper- In an attempt to make France look like something other than arrogant, they have opened their sweaty arms to the idea of freaks leaping between buildings parkour style in an attempt to reach the top. Kudos to France and its symbolic olive branch, perhaps now we can all forget the sordid events of world war 4 and look forward to the dystopian Shatner vision that is the TekWars.

VS.Express- In the future trains are unable to use breaks in an incentive to reduce carbon emissions and get rid of the new breed of vagrants known as “Arriva urchins”. Therefore it is up to professional athletes to stop them with bare hands, I would say don’t try this at home but I can’t imagine many people have a fully serviceable locomotive in their drawing room…or a drawing room for that matter.

Scud Toss- Perhaps the most unethical event of them all. Scud Toss involves players throwing a dangerous looking missile across the African Savannah. I can understand that an event like this might not go down to well in a built up area, but when you see a zebra coloured crater 500 meters away you know that Michael Jackson wrote earth song for a reason.

Nonstop Rock Chop- Fairly self explanatory bar the nonstop aspect to proceedings. Athletes smash their pudgy fists into jagged rocks, so that one day they can lift that trophy with the bloodied nubs at the end of their wrists they once called hands.
Numan Sniper- The most nerve wracking of games, this involves extreme dedication and reflexes as player’s fire upon the disturbingly frequent occurrences of Kraken and Kuthulu rising from the Arctic Ocean. My sympathies are with the Loch Ness Monster who has no doubt been demoted to kitchen duties what with the freakish mutations of future marine life.

Niagara Jumps- My mother had a saying “If you’re going to do something well, do it over the 10th largest waterfall in the world”. Alas, the ill fated advice came with a price as she tumbled down into the crashing foam; both she and the world were not ready for a gritty musical based on hydroelectric power. The Niagara Jump involves athletes leaping three times in quick succession against the unrelenting downward pull of a naturally formed death trap. While it’s not my place to comment on the dangers of waterfall leaping, I find that there should be at least some financial compensation left for the grieving family.

Numan Athletics is best played in 4 player mode, because each player number has a corresponding character, this will undoubtedly lead to disputes regarding who’s who. So here’s a who’s who of who’s who:

Sharon- Representing France is the only woman in the entire Numan Olympics, a woman who despite her stature can stop trains with sheer brute force. She’s the sort of person who could easily get away with domestic abuse upon an impressionable male, for your information she was a gentle woman and the train shaped marks on my arm are from getting carried away with my monthly train role playing get together

Masaemon- Representing Japan is the blackcurrant haired warrior known as Masaemon. While he may not be the best, he certainly gives it a try. What other athlete holds up two paper fans after a gruelling event? Some critics would have you believe that a man who speaks English and is clearly Caucasian couldn’t possibly descend from Japan. Well lucky for us the future doesn’t judge people on looks and nationality when representing a country. I would say this is a better future, a brighter future…a Numan future

Harry- Cocksure harry is what the ladies call him, oddly he doesn’t seem interested in all the female attention, but in no way does that make him gay I assure you! Representing America is the ladies man about town; clad in a Lycra ensemble he provides hope to the young Americans of today. Yes he does live with his overbearing mother and yes he has a tendency to frequent public bathrooms for long periods of time in the middle of the night. But they are merely the quirks of a man who definitely has an interest in women.

Bongo- In the days before political correctness, people were legally obliged to portray Indians as hulking brutes that shared the same name as a percussion instrument. Much like Daley Thompson, Bongo tries not to get bogged down by the racist nature of Olympic sport, and for that I admire him…his favourite food is probably curry as well

This is definitely one of the better track and field copycats, I would go as far to say its better than the source material. If there is ever an option to play as a green haired foreigner named after a musical instrument it’s usually a good sign. If you are the beneficiary to an aging Dukes fortune, then I strongly recommend you buy this in its arcade-only form. If you are however one of the common masses, then you have more to worry about than the purchase of hard to come by arcade cabinets. Should you luck upon this machine amongst the grimy coastal areas of the UK, ignore the faecal encrusted buttons, ignore the paedophile in the corner and absorb yourself in the sport of freaks. But seriously, do watch out for the paedo…