Zzap


Biff
By Beyond Belief
Commodore 64/128

 
Published in Zzap #84

Monkeys are peculiar creatures. They spend all day eating bananas scratching their bums and... annoying their mothers? Ian 'Hands Off My Monkey Nuts' Osborne goes for a rumble in the jungle...

Biff

Biff's a cheeky little monkey - he never tidies his room, is rude to his mother and wouldn't ever join his family in a tea commercial! Not surprisingly, mum's had enough. Biff is booted out of his tree-top home and left to fend for himself in the cold, cruel jungle (all together now - aaahhh!).

Your task is to get Biff back into his mother's good books by performing a series of tasks in a "Dizzy-style" arcade adventure.

Those who have played the afore-mentioned Codies classics will find Biff's gameplay instantly recognisable - guide the main sprite through umpteen rooms of platform action, solving various object-based problems en route. The two-dimensional playing area flicks from screen to screen, making it ideal for mappers. Naturally your primate pal can leap to higher platforms or fall (any distance) to lower ones.

Biff

Like any jungle, Biff's back yard is a dark and dangerous place - there's all manner of flora and fauna conspiring to stop him appeasing mumsie. In Biff's jungle, flowers uproot themselves and attack, birds do far more than crap on your head, and those baby dragons aren't as cute as they look!

Most baddies move without intelligence, just trundling back and forth, but the puzzles and scenery are varied enough to prevent the game getting monotonous. You only get one life though, and your apparently huge energy rating depletes at an alarming rate on contact with baddies - don't be tempted to ignore them for quickness sake!

Grapple Me Grapenuts!

Bill is technically superb! The animation of the cheeky chimp uses an amazing sixteen frames of graphics, and the other sprites moe pretty well too. The graphics are acceptable, but I wish they'd made more of an attempt to use the C64 for its own sake - I'm sick to death of tweaked Speccy programs.

Biff

Although the problems aren't quite as involved as those in the Dizzy games, they're far from boring - the game's off-beat sense of humour and huge dollops of character win through in the end (to get the chocolates, for example, you have to plant the chocolate seeds!). After each problem is solved, you're presented with an on-screen hint about what to do next, and the object needed flashes, so you won't be left scratching your head *too* often.

On the minus side the flick-screen effect could have been better executed - in some places it's impossible to go from one screen to another without walking straight into an energy-depleting baddie! I could have done without the comments culled from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure too - everywhere you go these days, some pillocks going "Bodacious!", or "Most Excellent" and it's getting on my nerves! Not that this stops Biff from being an excellent adventure! 77%

Phil

At first, Biff seems like just another dodgy arcade adventure - especially with the annoying way you bump into baddies immediately on entering a screen. And my first go ended frustratingly, falling down a big pit with escape impossible.

Biff

But it wasn't long before the simple puzzles grabbed me by the monkey-nuts. With the help of text clues, Biff's tasks aren't hard enough to drive you bananas - the main problem is the rapidly-decreasing energy level. Indeed, I completed the game fairly quickly once I got into the swing of things.

Nevertheless, just like Murray Mouse, this is an enjoyable introduction for arcade-adventuring novices. 75%

Verdict

Presentation 80%
"Hey hey! We're the Monkees, people say we monkey around!"

Graphics 70%
"Do, do, do, the funky gibbon - the funky gibbon!"

Sound 75%
"Yes! We have no bananas, we have no bananas today!"

Hookability 70%
"Well, I'm the king of the swingers... the jungle VIP"

Lastability 79%
"One banana, two banana, three banana, four..."

Overall 76%

Ian Osborne

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