Amiga Power


Viz
By Tronix
Amiga 500

 
Published in Amiga Power #15

Viz

As Virgin's refreshingly truthful advertising campaign vaguely hinted at the time of first release ("You'll never play a bigger load of crap in your life"), it may be assumed that those programming people at Probe weren't really in the business of creating an earth-shakingly historic Amiga product here. I mean, how do you convert everybody's favourite lav-mag onto the small screen? According to Probe, it's by doing away with such frivolities as gameplay and concentrating on the graphics, humour and (slightly muted) bad language instead.

A wise move one my think, but unfortunately there are a few flaws in the plan. Firstly, the graphics. All your favourite characters are bowel-shatteringly accurate to the comic, but once you've seen them all on your first go, the interest level flags a bit.

As for the game; this comes at you in three stages. Firstly, pick a character out of Johnny Fartpants, Buster Gonad and Biffa Bacon. Then enter an all-out joystick waggling nice-graphiced but phew-this-hurts-your-hand sub-game in order to build up your tokens. Then start the race against the other two characters, avoiding hazards (else you fall and lose time) and using tokens to clear your path or avoid tricky situations, each character boasting a special feature - if you know the comic you can probably guess who does what.

Viz: The Computer Game

Then you have to keep this up for five levels (or you die and start again). Unbelievably shallow, then, with frustrating and boring gameplay, not helped by long disk accesses. It is, however, endearingly crap and very true to its source.

So what's the mark? Well, at this point I'm going to tread in territory only dreamt of by other reviewers and (Gasp! Swoon!) out-Stuart Campbell Stuart Campbell, who originally gave this 58 percent (at full price) on the grounds that it was quite funny to play. Funny, maybe, but surely you'd be better off buying a whole load of the comics instead?

The Bottom Line

Hooray for the graphics! Hooray for the jokes! But boo hiss for the crappy gameplay. Only worth it for novelty value, even here on budget.

Rich Pelley

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