Remember Tiny Skweeks? Yes, of course you do, it featured those multi-coloured fuzzballs and was French. French software houses are not exactly renowned for their "normal" games and Tiny Skweeks was a fairly bizarre piece of software.

The Skweeks have now returned although they're now known as Tinies. The reasons is because the people who converted the Skweek games onto the Amiga loved the style of the characters and wanted to do their own game, but as the name was already taken they had to come up with a new one.

So it's not actually a sequel to Skweeks, but the characters look almost identical and you could be forgiven for thinking that it is actually a sequel, but it's not. Err yes I think I got that right.

Next problem. Despite the fact that I called it a puzzle game a minute or so ago, it isn't actually just a puzzle game. It is in fact a hybrid of a platformer, puzzler, adventure and an action game.

The aim of the game is to make your way through the eight regions of Sklumph (the world of the Tinies). Why must you do this? Well, a Tiny known as the Wicked One has taken control of the castle and captured the King and has in-turn thrown complete chaos and torment over the land.

It's up to you to guide a Tiny to save the Kind and overthrow the Wicked One. On each screen you must find a way out which is indicated by a bloody big sign with "exit" scrawled upon it.

Via the use of some magic rings your Tiny can change into different coloured Tinies who each have their own special power. The yellow tiny utilises the power of fire and can throw fireballs and go through flames. The blue tiny has the ability to dive underwater and spit air bubbles to attack the various enemies found on the planet.

The green Tiny can throw out a line and hook himself onto almost any object (including flying enemies) and swing about avoiding hazards just like Spiderman. When the Tiny is red he gets so hungry that he can eat certain bits of the surroundings which is very handy for finding bonus rooms.

This ability to change into different forms is what brings the puzzle element into Fury of the Furries. Just to make things even more difficult there are colour fields dotted around certain levels that takes one of the Tiny's powers away.

Fury of the Furries is a quirky little game and one which I think the games buying public's opinion will be divided upon. Some people will absolutely love it while others will detest it. I actually quite like it and it does grow on you the more you play it. There are 100 levels in the game, so it will take you a long time to complete it. The variation in the levels is also enough to keep you entertained.

Graphically the game's characters are rather small, but just like Lemmings they still manage to command your attention. Leaving the Tinies alone for a few moments will have them performing all manner of amusing antics - just one of the nice touches in Fury of the Furries.

The sound is very cheesy and layered with an organ effect that will irritate innocent bystanders, although it won't affect the games player. The control system is exceptionally good and moving the characters around the screen becomes second nature to you almost immediately.

Fury of the Furries is a strange one which will appeal to certain gamers, so try before you buy, but if you want something different this month then you need look no further.

Welcome back to platform land, genre fans. I would like to leap straight into this review by giving you a quote from off the back of the box. It paints a particularly vivid picture and quite brilliantly manages to convey what this game is about. OK, here we go. Hold tight.

"During the unsuccessful voyage of the rebel Tinies to the Earth, an evil Tiny had captured the king and got hold of the marvellous machine turning Slumph into a planet of terror!" Awesome isn't it? I could hardly wait to tear the cellophane off the box after reading that.

Fury of the Furries (please, who thinks up these titles) is a Lemmings-style puzzle game. You get kitted out with a Furry which can transform itself into four different varieties, each possessing a different talent. Using these little troopers you have got to battle your way through various levels to reach the castle where the king is held.

In order to complete a level you have to make the fullest use of your four Furries. They can all walk and run on solid surfaces and push objects, but the yellow one can throw fireballs, the blue one can swim underwater, the green one can throw out a line and swing from it and the red one can eat its way through rock

Death by motion
You get the gist yeah? Good. So how does it play? Well for starters, it has got one of those almightily annoying inertia systems. Set your Furry in motion and it will rebound, bounce, brush and skid off every single obstacle in its path. Attempt to bring it to a quick halt and you will fail. They have got about the same stopping distance as an oil tanker.

This kind of inertia means that when you die, you tend to blame it completely on the game. As frantically as you wrestle with the joystick the little blighter inevitably skids off the platform and on to a spike.

The game is not without its high points though. The best of the Furries is the rope-throwing green one. Learn how to control this chappie properly and you will soon be swinging Tarzan-like along the levels quicker than Ron Ely with the trots. The levels get jolly hard, jolly quickly. Even the tame introductory screens can give you a lot of grief.

As soon as you get into the game proper, however, you realise that this is the most unforgiving game since Beelzebub's Big Day Out. Once again, it is that inertia which screws it all up. No matter how well you think you have got a section sussed, it will still manage to screw up your gameplan completely.

The other big problem with the game is the transformation process. In order to change the abilities of your Furry you have to pull down on the joystick, click left or right to choose the new one and then press up on the joystick. I have got two problems with this. Firstly it takes too long to transform, giving nasties plenty of time to creep up on you. Secondly you often end up transforming by mistake, one minute you are happily eating your way through some rock and the next you inadvertently transform and end up losing a life. It is really not very nice.

Sumptuous and cute
As with all these games, the graphics are sumptuous and the sounds sickeningly cute. If I have any complaints about the graphics, it is that the sprites are too small, it is too easy to lose them on the screen, especially when you are using one that is the same colour as the vegetation. Still, some people positively enjoy hard games like this. And who am I to criticise them for it?

However I do not want to meet the challenge, I do not want to rise up against the odds and I most certainly do not want to climb that mountain because it is there. Nope, downright stubborn games like this you can keep. They are not good for your blood pressure, your joystick and you cat.

What a terrible name for a game. What a miserable, uninspired, insipid and quite frankly misleading name. I thought at first that it might be a particularly poor translation of the original French name, which would be some like La Fureur Des Poilus (I think) but even so, a GCSE student armed with a Collins pocket French/Englisch dictionary could come up with something with a bit more 'oomph'.

It doesn't even tell you what the game's about either. I mean - Fury? Do little coloured balls of fluff drum up any images of screaming in anguish and torment? Of course they don't. Okay, so the furries in the game look annoyed occasionally, and maybe possibly a tad strained as they push huge stone blocks from place to place, but they never look furious. Annoyance of the Furries, perhaps? Nahhhh.

Right, so I've already arbitrarily knocked off over 50 percent of the daft title, and haven't even got around to opening the box yet, so how's this game to win my affections? Well, for a start there's an ever so pretty animated introduction sequence showing the pointless and dumb story behind the game.

The intro's fun, but what really impresses me is that it's on a disk separate from the game disks, so you can watch the intro once, say "Hmm, that's nice" and then never to bother with it again. Hoorah for common sense.

STOP RIGHT THERE
Another good, common sense idea is the automatic game save function. The game start screen presents you with four game slots as well as a couple of other options. The game automatically saves your last position on each slot, so there's no need to copy down pages of level codes. This I also like, so it seems that things are looking up for the Furries, and I'm (still) not even in the game yet.

And then, disaster. There's an option to turn off the sound effects in the game but NOT THE MUSIC! What the...!? What kind of options is this? How many times have you played a game and thought "Oh, I love the music to this, but I feel that the intrinsic quality of the composition is spoiled by the tiresome spot effects?" Not very often, I'd wager. Having the option of music or music and sound effects means only one thing - reach for the volume control, turn it down and put some groovy tracks on your stereo system.

I NEED TO KNOW
Okay, the game itself, which is four disks packed full of 90 levels and 150 sub-levels and hidden bits. All you've got to do is get from the start to the finish without winding up dead. That's it, start to finish in the allotted time, easy.

Well, at the start, it's not all that difficult. You basically just bounce along, avoid a few spikes and then get to the end. Easy-peasy. The next level, you get the option of switching between a couple of the furries, then all four, then you get a few baddies, and so on. Simple, in fact a little too simple I thought, for although it's good to have a few tutorial levels, it's stretching the point a bit to have this many. Later on though, you'll be looking back to this part of the game as the untroubled happinessfilled youth of your Furry playing existence.

Time for a word about the furries. In the game you either have a single furry who can change colour, or a mass of different coloured furries with the ability of teleportation. Each of the four colours can perform a different skill; the red one can eat through rocks, the green one has a rope, the yellow one can shoot things and the blue one can dive under water.

They're all quite entertaining to look at (if a bit small) but the green one's by far the best, and with his rope abilities you can send him swinging across the screen like some sort of latterday gonk/Tarzan crossover.

To toggle between them, you press down and then select which ever colour you want, but things are complicated because you have to do this standing on firm ground. This doesn't seem that important at first, but when you get into later levels and the room you're in floods with water, you'll end up wishing you planned ahead.

If you haven't already gathered, this is a puzzle game, and although it got touted in the press release as being similar to Lemmings, it's much more like Lost Vikings (AP27 87%). Both games are based around negotiating platform levels, and both require you to use a variety of special skills, but here the two games diverge. Lost Vikings has three characters each with a skill, and the thing that annoyed me about it was that you had to get all of the across all the obstacles, so in effect you were doing each level three times. Furries bypasses this problem by having the one character who can switch powers, so thumbs up there.

However, where as Lost Vikings was gorgeously animated throughout by massive and expressive cartoon characters, the graphics in Furries are a tad, um, functional.

You'd imagine that after telling you to turn the volume down and stare at small, certainly not state-of-the-art graphics, that Furries is heading for a dribbling little score, but not so, for there's that oft-forgotten part of a game I've yet to cover - gameplay. Here's where Furries wins through, because the puzzles are complex and require gigabytes of lateral thinking, but you also need arcade skills to complete them.

Also, you're given plenty of range for experimenting, and rarely end up getting completely stuck, although if this happens, you can kill off your furry and start again. The problems are tough, but each time I messed up on a level, it gave me some ideas to try a different way, and I slowly progressed. The thing is, with puzzles this tough, it strikes me as being a bit silly that you've only got a finite number of lives because at the end of the day, it should be your inability to solve a puzzle that stops you, not running out of lives.

LOVE ME?
The game's a mass of good and bad points, with terrible music and tiny graphics countered out by the fact that it plays so well. After two days of solid playing, I'm still only a fraction of the way through it, so you're going to get your money's worth, and even when you've finished it, there are so many secret rooms that you can go back and play it again. Shame about the stupid title, though.

o Yes. Mindscape are taking the Tinies out of the cupboard once more, in a five-disk epic that sees a small band of the little furry things returning to their home planet to find that it's not as it should be.

Someone has used a transformation ray to turn the funloving Tinies into blank zombies, or even worse, psychopathic killers.

The King has been kidnapped but he is the only one who can return the public back to their usual mischievous selves. Guess who you have to rescue!

The game plays like a cross between Lemmings and Morph. Your little Tiny has four incarnations. One allows him to shoot fireballs, one gives him Spiderman-like swinging abilities, one lets him breathe under water and the last allows him to eat through the scenery.

Each level is packed full of traps and enemy sprites, and you have to use a variety of skills to get through.

I really am enjoying this one. It's beautifully animated, wonderfully presented and quite addictive.

The movement of characters is smooth and effective, with bags of personality. There are even a couple of flashy effects like the screen swirling around and fading into nothing when you complete a level.

The only downside is that some people might find it a little slow. It takes at least a second to get moving, and another second if you want to stop.

There's a bit of a lag on the joystick control, which means you have to be thinking of yourself.

After a couple of goes, though, the controls become so instinctive that it stops being a handicap and the game becomes really enjoyable.

Oh no! It's back. And I still can't pronounce the name without seeming to say something stupid. The Tinies have gone optical as Mindscape brings their latest and greatest offering to the CD32, and it's a more or less direct port from the original floppy version.

To refresh your memories, the Tinies are a small brand of woolly balls with legs who like nothing more than to wreak havoc whenever possible. They've been away from their home planet for quite a while now, and have returned to find that all is not well.

The King has been kidnapped, and someone has used a transforming machine to turn all the other pesky little blighters into normal, respectable hairy creatures. How horrid.

The game works as a cross between a platform game and a puzzler. Your Tiny has four different 'modes' he can operate in, and has to use a combination of them to get around each screen. A yellow Tiny can shoot fireballs, a red one bite through rocks, a blue one can swim underwater and a green one is particularly adept at doing Spiderman impersonations. Between them they have to take on everything you can think of, from spikes to crabs to fish to... well anything really.

The first time I played this game, I must admit I found it far too slow to be playable. A couple of goes later, and I was hooked by the charismatic little chaps, who may not be the fastest things on two legs, but sure are the cutest.

Fury is chock full of those 'little touches' we reviewers so love to see, which just add more to what is already a great game. This one won't leave your machine for quite a while.