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CodeMasters £24.99

Five games, five lovable characters, five guys named Moe and five samurai. Some of these are in the Codies' new compilation.

Spike in Transylvania is an arcade adventure where you walk from location to location, solving simple puzzles and 'interacting' with lovable rogues, cut-throats and footpads. Cute, pretty simple and fun.
CJ's Elephant Antics is more of an arcade game. You pilot a chap around some demanding platforms, collecting, zapping and occasionally parachuting on an umbrella. It, too, is an enjoyable light-hearted romp.
Treasure Island Dizzy is another arcade adventure. Send the egg scurrying, solving puzzles and using objects in the right order. It's cute, colourful and there's a large playing area. Sort of Spike, really.
Seymour Goes To Hollywood is yet another arcade adventure. It's cute, colourful, blah, blah, and also has a large playing area.
Slightly Magic is, yes, you guessed it, a cute, colourful use-the-objects-in-the-right-order game. It's actually the best in the compilation.

Overall, a big chunk of cartoony enjoyableness aimed at, I cant help thinking, the younger members of our great democratic civilisation.

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Die Budget-Spezialisten von Codemasters geben ihre Jump & Runs ja von Natur aus schon recht billig her, aber wer hier zuschlägt, bekommt sogar gleich fünf Spiele für nur 79 Mäuse.

Neben dem bereits klassischen Eierhüpfer Treasure Island Dizzy und der mittelprächtigen Elefanten-Hatz CJ's Elephant Antics finden sich auf den zwei Disks auch neue Titel wie etwa Seymour goes to Hollywood, das erst im letzten Joker getestet wurde (Gesamturteil: 53 Prozent).
Die hiezulande gänzlich unbekannten Plattform-Streiche Slightly Magic und Spike in Transylvania hauen inhaltlich in die gleiche Kerbe - alles hübsch bunt, aber sonst?

Trotz der mitgelieferten fünf Poster muß man also nicht unbedingt zuschlagen: daß es obendrein keine deutsche Anleitung gibt, ist nur das Tüpfelchen am I.


TITEL BEWERTUNG ANZAHL DER SPIELE PREIS HERSTELLER GENRE
CARTOON COLLECTION SCHWACH 5 79,- DM CODEMASTERS GESCHICKLICHKEIT
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Following the success of the Dizzy Collection, Code Masters gives us another compilation of their budget wares. Cartoon Collection brings together a piece of pure action, four arcade adventures, and five luvverly posters. It's quite the package then. Well...

The action comes in the form of CJ's Elephant Antics. CJ's elephant antics involve little more than leaping from platform to platform, avoiding spikes and spitting peanuts at the bad guys, all for the ssake of reaching the pachyderm's family in Deepest Africa. It's fair-to-middling stuff, reminiscent of The New Zealand Story, even though CJ's two-player simultaneous action has few similarities.

Spike in Transylvania conjures up all sorts of interesting images but it turns out to be a mediocre exercise in collecting and using objects, and keeping ' em peeled for bad characters and dreary puzzle-solving possibilities. And let's not forget the annoying inconsistencies... for example, Spike, who looks suspiciously like Hagar The Horrible, can push some things (such as a small cannon) but not others (such as a stool). Yawn.

In Treasure Island Dizzy, everyone's favourite egg on legs is stranded on a desert island with a desire to escape back to his Yolkfolk. If you feel hard (boiled) enough, you can always try to find 30 pieces of gold along the way. Negotiating platform arrangements, avoiding the wildlife, collecting objects and solving puzzles is the order of the day here, but it hardly qualities for the Chef's Special.

Seymour, the star of Seymour Goes To Hollywood, is very much like Dizzy, only his adventure is blantantly linear slow-paced tedium. I'd like to see less of Seymour and, to be honest, of this style of arcade adventuring as a whole. Seymour wobbles along, jumping occasionally, collecting items of interest and puzzle-solving potential, bumping into characters and communicating with them in a limited way, and so on. Gorsh.

Finally, there's the dinky Slightly Magic, complete with its 0898 helpline advertisement, il-fitting speech, Chzechoslovakian-cartoon music, colourful visuals, rubbish animation, and simple yet laborious Sesame Street logic problems to solve (a hungry rock monster - I bet he eats rocks, so let's feed him those). I would say it's fodder for kids but there are too many slightly irritating flaws. It's Slightly Tragic more like.

The Cartoon Collection is a pack for the very young at heart. It's all just so inoffensive and harmless that I think Im going to be sick.