Everygamegoing


Pi-Dentity

Categories: Review: Software
Author: Dave E
Publisher: Fusion Retro Books
Machine: Spectrum 48K/128K/+2/+3

Pi-Dentity

The most interesting thing I know about Pi is that it has its own day, the date of which is 14th March every year. This day is also Steak And Blowjob Day, the unofficial male version of Valentine's Day. I found out they fell on the same day in a morning scrum at a tech company when the Scrum-master asked if anyone knew what special day it was and I enthusiastically yelled "Steak And Blowjob Day". Never lived it down.

Anyway, from not-really-worth-knowing things about Pi to not-really-worth-playing games about Pi, and Fusion Retro Books has released (admittedly, for free) Pi-Dentity, a vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-up game for the 48K Spectrum in which you hurl the Pi number (3.142) around as a bullet, eat pies en route and shoot wireframe boxes out of existence. I have to say, I really don't get it.

This is one of those games which is so pathetically mediocre that it's barely worth even reviewing. Still, in line with my COVID 19 lockdown "if I play it, I'll review it" policy, I will say that it's unusual in that it scrolls downwards rather than up, and the playing area is long and thin for no particular reason. Oh yeah, and as if those two facts didn't make the action cramped enough already, the space through which you navigate your Pi symbol is littered with abacuses and random weirdness that you can crash into.

As for the rest of the game, well it's just a standard "blast the waves of things if you can, avoid them if you can't". Except avoiding them is pretty much impossible with all the debris littering the place.

Fusion's first game release was Jonathan Cauldwell's Egghead Goes To Town which was a far superior product (and now sadly seems to have been the last game we would ever see from him). This dross, well, it's a very poor relation indeed. The music is good though. Would it be far too painful to close a review of this by suggesting the best a player can do is load it up and just let it sit on the title screen with the volume turned up? Obviously not, because that would be my recommendation.

Dave E

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