Everygamegoing


Weetabix Versus The Titchies
By Romik
BBC/Electron

 
Published in EGG #013: Acorn Electron

Weetabix Versus The Titchies

It's over four decades since this game was released and Weetabix, the breakfast cereal, is still going strong. These days it's probably got all sorts of apps, social media feeds and web pages to keep kids eating it, but back in the Eighties, it chose to interact with its kiddiewinkle customers by offering an 8-bit computer game by mail order. You got it by collecting tokens from the cereal packet, and pestering your Dad for a cheque for the return postage. Then you sent the tokens and the cheque to Weetabix and, a few weeks later, a padded envelope plopped onto your map containing Weetabix Versus The Titchies.

Sadly, I suspect even the kids who ordered this didn't fool themselves into believing it would actually be any good.

You take the role of Dunk, and you must destroy the force of "Titchies", in a Space Invaders-style game featuring huge sprites. Dunk is the equivalent of the laser base, and the rockets he fires appear one at a time, meaning you must guide him over to each one, pick it up and then fling it straight up into a hovering green alien. If it makes contact it will blow him up in a reasonably spectacular explosion. Throughout the game, the Titchies rain down bullets, again one at a time.

Weetabix Versus The Titchies

Being hit on the head by a bullet doesn't kill Dunk, it merely activates his shield, and takes some of his "Neet Weet" energy, depicted on the far side of the screen. The shield puts a little halo over Dunk's head for a few seconds whilst the bullet explodes. You can operate the shield independently with the space bar to save the hit to the energy bar.

And that is all there is to it. It speeds up as you wipe out the titchies. Not, I suspect (though I can't prove), because it's programmed that way but because less titchies requires less memory to move them around. When you've destroyed them all (Not hard!), it just starts over again.

As entertainment, it doesn't really have a lot going going for it. It's far, far too easy, almost a tech demo rather than a serious game, and probably you'll get bored of it and turn it off long before you've lost your only life. In fact, it's pretty hard to see how you could ever actually lose in this game, it just seems to go on and on...

Still, the graphics are reasonable and the spot effects are functional, albeit lousy. If you just play it for five minutes on the hardest difficulty level, you may find its quirkyness endearing enough for it not to feel like a complete waste of time.

Overall, though I'd say the following: Superior breakfast cereal? Perhaps. Superior Space Invaders clone? No. If looking for a physical copy, expect to pay around £3-£5.

Dave E

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