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ORM
AND CHEEP
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
Macmillan Software, £6.95 cass
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Macmillan
Software do rather better on the graphics score with
their Orm and Cheep games programmed by Widgit.
There's two, Narrow Squeaks and The Birthday
Party. These are described as suitable for 'Kids
of all ages', which is a somewhat loose description
of their suitability. Both start with a reaction test
to set the level of difficulty -- a neat touch, if you
don't know, Orm and Cheep, a worm and a yellow bird,
are popular TV characters for the younger bracket.
Narrow
Squeaks offers four games featuring these two, plus
a rat and a crow. The graphics are attractive, although
the games are very simple. In play-testing the identical
Spectrum versions of these and The Birthday Party
for CRASH magazine, Rosetta McCleod and her team
of 5 to 14 years-old found them to be 'totally boring
and pointless'. The latter game is a graphic adventure,
although in most respects it is as much an adventure
as Donald Duck's Playground, which is to say
that it's really composed of several arcadeish sequences
where you help Orm bake his birthday cake, collect all
his friends for the party and then get them satisfactorily
seated. Rosetta's team summed the two games up as 'Absolutely
awful!'. Perhaps a little harsh, especially as the graphics
on the 64 versions are very jolly at times, although
not a patch on the Disney games, and add a lot of visual
interest. However, it has to be said that the educational
value in these two is extremely low, I would have thought,
and if they are supposed to simply be attractive games
for kids of all ages, then perhaps the gameplay elements
should have been substantially improved.
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