This isn't really Kid Gloves 2, y'know. Not originally anyway. This little platformer started life last year as a game called Little Beau. But it was such a crap name for a game that the company responsible spontaneously combusted and left poor old Beau wandering about in software limbo.
Then Millennium came along, and rescued the little bugger. They tarted him up, buffed up his helmet and redubbed him Kid Gloves 2. Despite the fact that he hasn't got any gloves.
Just one look at the graphics and you know exactly what you're in for. Millions of other games spring to mind - Mario, Rainbow Islands, Mega Man, Alex Kidd, Mega Twins, New Zealand Story, the list goes on and on and on. Cutesy platform romps, with all the usual trimmings, kidnapped princesses, end-of-
Where Kid Gloves 2 falls flat is that as well as being derivative, it lacks the glossiness that makes, for instance, Mega Twins a good laugh. It looks and plays like an 8-bit Nintendo reject.
You just can imagine some spotty, gum chewing MTV generation Yankee nerd playing this while listening to the new Paula Abdul album. Not the sort of ultra hi-tech home computer entertainment us smug, superior, stiff upper lip Amiga owners are used to.
There are some attempts to beef it up with the inclusion of little arcade subgames and one-armed bandits lurking in the scenery, and while this is a nice idea it doesn't really offer anything of use - especially since I've got a nasty feeling that the fruit machines are a bit rigged. And the arcade machines are pretty crap as well.
The graphics are, as you can guess, cute. But cute in an old-fashioned way. The sprites lack the crisp, colourful definition of their rivals and as such leave the game feeling a bit dated.
Another rather odd graphical feature is the lack of any backgrounds. At least, any backgrounds worth noticing. Lots of white dots for snow is about all you'll get on the first level, and it only gets a bit better as you go on. It all looks a bit sparse.
Sound is actually quite nice. There's yer standard cute platform game boings and beeps, but there's also some pretty nifty speech when you pick items up. For instance, when you collect some wine, Kid emits an ecstatic 'yum yum!'. It's a nice little touch, and it does give the game a teeny bit of much needed Pzazz!
But Kid Gloves 2's problem is that it brings nothing new to an already overstocked genre. Mega Twins manages to justify its existence by being slickly programmed and by having a great two-player mode, but the Kid (nee Beau) would probably have been happier if he'd been left to wander about in software limbo last year.
Who knows, maybe he could've met up with Monty Mole and Miner Willy and formed an obsolete platform characters club. But they probably wouldn't have him. They're very strict about things like that.