Although we’re light on games this month, it’s good to have a cheapie title like Blockhead 2 to play with. It’s simple, doesn’t take up much room on your hard drive, you can run it from the floppy it comes on and it’s great for a quick play.
The idea is basically Boulderdash meets, hmm, the bit in Tomb Raider where you have to drag blocks around, with the overhead perspective of Valhalla or Final Odyssey.
What you have to do is put some green berries (they look like apples to me) into your cauldron and, once you’ve put enough in, move the cauldron to the exit. However, there’s a catch. There are no monsters at all, but there is a strict time limit which makes it somewhat harder, and there are walls to navigate. Also, you can’t stud the screen when paused because, curses, the authors have blanked the screen when pausing.
The learning curve for the game is nicely paced, with new levels introducing new perils and harder puzzles, some of which seem really impossible to begin with but become obvious with repeated attempts. You’ll tear your hair out as you try to work out how you can possibly complete a level with too little dynamite, or with too many "red eye" tiles to cross to stay alive.
There isn’t very much to say about this game really. Although you could spend an age waiting for it to give you a password, don’t do that – just keep a careful note of the names of the levels (hint, hint).
You'll tear your hair out as you try to work out how you can possibly complete a level with too little dynamite...
Also, on the cover of the box the game has "100 frustrating levels!" as its subtitle, but the instructions for the game state that there are 40. It doesn’t matter much since in the time I’ve played it I haven’t got to the end yet, or indeed anywhere near it.
One last thing about its system friendliness. Although the game can be played from its self-booting disk and you can also play it from your hard drive, it doesn’t have an icon for the game itself, which is a bit poor.
While you can’t multitask while playing the game, it does quit back to Workbench nicely at any time, so you can always leap out and back in again since, as you’d expect from a game that only takes one disk it doesn’t take long to load.
Right. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to try to complete that tricky level again...