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Super Snail is by ARM’d & Dangerous, and was coded by David Johnston, with Mike Goatly doing the graphics and Adam Hay the music. It is published by the Fourth Dimension, supplied on an HD floppy and is accompanied by an instruction sheet on two sides of A5. It should run on any machine with RISC OS 3 onwards but does require 2Mb of RAM.
Considering the complexity and advanced features of many current offerings, I would suggest that this game is probably targeted at lower specification machines. It can be loaded onto a hard disc simply by dragging the !SuperSn icon. Super Snail can be played by one player, or on a split screen by two players either as a team or head-to-head. When playing head-to-head, you can take on the computer as your opponent.
“Snail − a gastropod mollusc with a spirally coiled shell.” Our hero is molluscoid in appearance all right, with the appropriate shell, but there all similarities seem to end. For a snail, our man (come to think of it, snails are hermaphroditic) is decidedly fleet of stomach-foot. He (I hope my use of the pronoun will not offend any liberated snails who may be reading this) zooms around the screen at such a pace that his silvery trail appears to be non-existent (OK so it is non-existent!), but then he is Super Snail. He has even mastered flight by utilising strategically placed updraughts of air, which have the appearance of gravity-defying rain.
The game is essentially a platformer, and Super Snail needs to collect five blue spheres which are distributed around the playing area in order to advance you to the next level. As you might expect, there are numerous hazards around to deter you, as well as coins to collect and extra lives to find. Collecting one hundred coins will fill an on-screen crystal, and obtaining all the crystals at the end of a level will enable you to play a bonus game with “Bonsai Hedgehog”. This is what the instructions tell me, although my limited skills mean that I have yet to meet this particular spiky friend. Some parallels will inevitably be drawn with Bonsai’s cousin Sonic although being a dedicated Acorn (R.I.P.) fanatic these are totally lost on me.
There are switches to operate which open some doors (whilst closing others). Never afraid to abandon the traditionally damp and dingy habitat of molluscs, Super Snail will even risk the potentially fatal environment of lava pools, against which even his temperature-controlled shell only offers limited protection. Vertical movement is enabled by the afore-mentioned streams of something or other, which looks like rain to me apart from the small matter of direction. Still, computer gamers have never been great respecters of the fundamental laws of physics.
The playing area for each level is pretty impressive and there are, allegedly, twenty of them. You can, at least, access each level from the beginning once you have mastered it once. I think the graphics are quite well drawn although a bit samey throughout each level. Scrolling both horizontally and vertically is smooth, with Super Snail being allowed to move to the edge of the screen before the background moves, rather than his remaining in the middle which always seems a bit naff to me. One criticism I have is the curious feeling of nausea that two-dimensional travel seemed occasionally to produce (though that might have something to do with my penchant for red wine, or anything else mildly alcoholic).
Our hero traverses the landscape in spectacular fashion, but his outward appearance is limited to a left-facing snail or, er... a right-facing snail. Still, I’m sure there are compensations; his control of body language probably means he is a superb poker player. Even bearing in mind the fact that snails are notoriously poor conversationalists, sound effects are, I think, a bit weak. The two that would have added some interest for me are the sharp crunch obtained between sole of shoe and garden path, and the whimpering sizzle whilst being fried in garlic butter (I’m assuming that very few young children read Archive; if I’m wrong, I was only kidding). Background music is OK and in keeping with the theme of a fast snail, I guess.
I’m not a game player really (OK, so you guessed!), but I have fond memories of some old platformers, mostly from 8-bit days gone by. I have to say that the gameplay never quite got me hooked (hence the considerable delay in this review − sorry again, Paul). I don’t think it will become a big seller, even taking into consideration the very reasonable price tag (you’ll probably find it for less than £25). But what do I know?
Steve Blyth, steveblyth@argonet.co.uk
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