Version - Amiga A500 version
Released by - Millenium
Written by - Millenium
Available from - Not legal to download freely
Main Coding -
Other versions - AGA Amiga version, Megadrive/Genesis, Gameboy (I think), possibly the ST and others I expect.

One of the things Amiga owners envied about console owners is that they had loads of fast, colourful, playable platform games. When this came out there was a bit of a drought of these on the Amiga. It is a love/hate sort of game. I love it and still play it now years later.

A sequel to another great game, underwater float-a-thon, James Pond. This game is another fishy film spoof with our hero, Pond, donning a powerful exoskelton just like Robocop! This suit gives him the ability to walk on land and jump high as well as extend his torso to phenomenal heights and to compress himself while falling for that all important splat of enemies heads! The last thing, the jumping on heads was a new thing to the Amiga at the time although Sega and Nintendo players were used to this technique.

The graphics were, and still are, very colourful and bright. Sometimes even headache inducingly garish but it does suit the game. Clever tricks were done with the custom chips to create subtle parallax backdrops but with very colourful colour gradients running through them. The game very rarely dropped below 50 fps (PAL is 50Hz unlike NTSC which is 60hz but I bet you knew that anyway!). The idea was to rescue penguins which had been kidnapped. This game was licensed from a UK chocolate biscuit called Penguin so it was one of the first product licensed games to be release (apart from a few awful 8-bit games!).

The game is incredibly playable while also, due to the skill needed, incredibly infuriating which did put a lot of people off. I liked the fact that you really did need skill and timing to. Unfortunately, the game was spoiled for many people by that cheat mode. At the beginning you collected the objects in the order Cake, Hamme, Earth, Apple, Tap spelling CHEAT and you were not only invincible but had access to every part of the game. It didn't stop me playing it but many did. Ignore that sentence and play the game properly. See if you can complete it, I haven't. There are loads of levels and they get progressively harder.

A sequel (Aquatic Games which I disliked) was release along with a prequel (James Pond which I also liked). I still find this game extremely fun and playable, nonsense.

Coagulus / Rob