Everygamegoing


Bumble Bee
By Micro Power
Acorn Electron

 
Published in EGG #013: Acorn Electron

Bumble Bee

Everyone's familiar with Pac-Man, but less people know of its variant Ladybird, which replaces the walls of the Pac-Man maze with turnstiles that flip from horizontal to vertical as the hero passes through them. Bumble Bee is based on Ladybird. It's the only version available for the Electron and, despite the odd bug, it's quite a good game. For a couple of minutes anyway.

To complete a screen you are set the rather unadventurous goal of eating all the dots (pollen), and Bumble Bee's sprites are so large that you would be able to achieve this fairly speedily. That is, were it not for the spiders who also stream into the maze, one every twenty seconds. The spiders are fatal to the touch, so you have two options for dealing with them.

Firstly, you can flip the turnstiles of the maze so that they cannot get to you. They will intuitively know where you are in the maze and glide over in that direction, but if there's a physical barrier between them and the bee then you can go about the business of collecting in safety. For a while, anyway.

Bumble Bee

The other strategy you can take is to try to "lure" the spiders into the "fire barrels" placed throughout the maze. I'm not quite sure what these are, or why they kill spiders, but each time a spider glides into one, the pair of them disappear. There are also toadstools in the maze which you must avoid.

When all the dots are eaten you must make your way to the 'OUT' box at the bottom left of the screen, avoiding any spiders that remain. You can also make use of the screen left/right gates on each side of the screen which, Pac-Man style, let you leave from one side of the screen and enter on the other.

That's Bumble Bee in a nutshell, a fairly simplistic early game for the Electron which was clearly converted a little bit too quickly from the BBC version. I say that because there's a countdown timer present on-screen which is used on the BBC but just 'sits there' on the Electron, and occasionally you clear an entire maze and the 'OUT' box doesn't allow you to exit!

At time of release, opinion was mixed but most reviewers concurred that it looked good with its big, smoothly-scrolling sprites, but it lacked that something that would keep a player coming back for more. I agree. You play it now and a few games are enough. However, it did sell well and, if you collect Micro Power games, it's not hard to track down a physical copy of it. It was one of those games that almost every Electron owner had back in the day, so you'll probably only pay about £2 for it.

It also made it to a compilation called Micro Power Magic II which featured ten Micro Power games and which has become increasingly difficult to find. Expect to pay around £10 for that.

Dave E

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