Requires: 256 color Mac w/5 meg free RAM, 13” color monitor, CD-ROM drive, and System 7.x., 25 MHz 68030 processor or better, and a joystick is recommended.
Protection: None
Power Mac Native: Yes
 
Remember when you were little and the cute bunnies and dolls and clowns in toy stores were wondrous and the stories from those big books read to you at night fired your imagination, and the pretty, tasty candies in your aunt’s bowl were the one thing to look forward to during long visits? And remember those same bunnies and dolls and clowns at night, at home, animated by those same stories and too much candy, becoming the most frightful of creatures? Well, the folks at MacPlay and Pangea Software do, and this time they have given you the firepower to put things right.
Power Pete is a one or two player arcade game where you, as the GI Joe-like doll Power Pete, have to save the cute little stuffed bunnies from all manner of toys, characters, and candy run amok. You have at your disposal a wide variety of weaponry of unique abilities and varying usefulness. In the act of rescuing bunnies from the baddies, you will have to contend with chocolate rivers, rolling batteries, race cars, and air grates blowing you in one direction when you need to go another. Fight by fight, through five departments of the toy store, you gradually free the other dolls from the grip of toy terrorism.
How Does it Work, Mom? You start off in Prehistoric Plaza, with your suction cup gun and a few hundred rounds of ammo, three lives (with four health points for each life, up to eight at higher levels), and five or six bunnies to catch. After the Plaza, there is Candy Cane Lane, Fairy Tale Trail, the Magic Funhouse, and, worst of all, the Bargain Basement.
At each of these “departments,” you must go though three levels, each time liberating a number of defenseless bunnies. While saving the bouncing rodents, you will find new weapons, like the Summer Fun Backyard Flamethrower, Triple Bubblegum Blaster and the Rubberband Shooters. There are even guns which fire around corners, and ricochet for a time around a room.
Opposing you will be some of the most vicious toys and candies of which a mind can imagine. Deranged Cinnamon Bears, ambushing Caramel Monsters, Barney wannabees called Hopping Henrys, and deadly, hard-to-kill Tops. At least, when you destroy them, you get things. You get ammo, bonus point gumballs, and short term power-ups like speed, fireballs and invulnerability. To make matters worse, there are, with more frequency at higher levels, areas which control or hamper movement. Rivers or air grates which only let you move a certain way unless you can catch a cross current, race car tracks to cross where pedestrians are of no concern, and black, uncrossable Tar Pits.
 
Does it Need Batteries? Power Pete plays well on a variety of models. I played it on a Mac IIsi with math co-processor, a Quadra 650, and a PowerMac 6100. Aside from speed, everything worked perfectly. No crashes, no conflicts, no weird memory errors, and no problem installing. In fact, you can set the display to a lower grade, thereby speeding up play, especially on slower machines. There was little wait when the CD-ROM was accessing as well, which I had originally thought would be quite a time sink on the IIsi. In all, I was quite favorably impressed with its robustness.
That’s Quite an Imagination You’ve Got There, Young Man. Imagination is rampant in Power Pete. Sure, the traditional arcade elements are there, with the little hero shooting stuff on the screen as he goes from level to level, but there is more of an evil genius at work here. The evil creatures are each very different in both power and ability. They surprise you, squirt you, bombard you, and break into smaller versions of themselves when shot. I especially liked the Cinnamon Bears which separate as above when shot, the Jumping Giant which gets you with his shock wave, and Little Miss Muffet, who screams bloody murder and drops a load of nasty little spiders on you when you least expect it.
The weaponry is also very different than I have seen in other games, and loads of fun to try out. The Exploding Cake was by far the most useful, as it acts as a grenade, destroying things behind walls and in groups when targets are close. The Triple Bubblegum Blaster and the Musket are close seconds — one for rate of fire and the other for the power of its single shot. One weapon I didn’t use much, but thought was interesting was the disc shooter, which sent ricocheting shots around a room. I didn’t have a lot of ammo for it, but it cleared out some busy areas for me fast. There seemed to be almost too many weapons, and there were a couple (like Pies and Rubberband Guns) I just never used nor needed to use. I even had more than enough ammo for the things I did regularly use as well, though I could see a blast-happy player running out of ammo for good stuff quick.
I was most impressed with the obstacles to movement like the air grates and more mentioned above. These are devilishly ingenious and at the same time a pain in the arse. You need to time movement to get by speeding cars or to switch air or chocolate streams, or else the current took you away from your destination and into the hands of a room full of bloodthirsty toys. It takes some mental mapping and quick hands to get through it all and to where you want to be. And it’s great fun to toss cakes at groups of clowns and evil Fluffy Bunnies as you passed by them too fast for them to respond.
 
It Looked Different in the Store... There is little bad to say about Power Pete. Its claims are modest, and it more than follows through with them. However, there are two areas which would have made the game better, one which is undoubtedly easier to do than the other. My wish is that you could save a game in progress at a number of points, and not just between levels. If you are having difficulty finding something or moving around on the air grates, you may take a long time, even if you have done it before. This means, that if your real life intervenes, you can lose a lot of time having to restart the whole level.
My second wish concerns replay value. There is some, but the level layouts are static, as are the numbers of obstacles and the location of the bunnies. Even if you can’t change the layout, I would have liked to have seen more variety in some of the other areas. Unless you are trying to beat scores or times, or just like shooting things up, the second or third time you play a level there’s nothing new. I liked the premise enough to want more, but if I buy a game I would like it to stay on my machine and in my imagination longer than a week or so.
What’s The Warranty Like? Overall, I sure like the game and its premise. The imagination, the fun sounds, neat theme music, and the ability to blast the hell out of cute things are great interest getters. The game is technically very solid, and smooth in its animations, explosions, and graphics. It does challenge the player to think, and one cannot just go charging ahead all the time, tossing Exploding Cakes like pennies. It will end your bunny commando raid in a hurry.
I do hope that Pangea and MacPlay can address the replay value in some way in later versions. $30 is a lot for a limited amount of play for a majority audience of young but experienced and demanding arcade game players. Convenient saving of location would be helpful too, say after a bunny is saved. Just suggestions. Don’t send the Evil Clown Cars after me, all right?
