Monday 12 September 2011

Kolobok Piramida (Mega Drive)


With some of the games I've recently posted about, I feel like I've sold out a tiny bit, and that they weren't quite obscure enough to meet the original purpose of this blog. So now, I am reviewing a Russian Mega Drive bootleg.
With a tiny bit of research, I learned that it is actually a hack of a homebrew game, also Russian, called Uwol: Quest for Money, which was itself a remake of an old spanish ZX Spectrum game.
Anyway, in the game, you play as a small bearlike thing, and you collect coins in small, one-screen stages. There's a Darius-esque pyramid of these stages, and when you get to the bottom of te pyramid, you get sent back to the top, able to choose a different route down. I wonder if anything special happens if you complete every stage on a single run?
The cool gimmick of the game is that all the stages loop horizontally (but not vertically: if you fall off the bottom of the screen, you die). This is used cleverly in the stage designs, with most stages requiring the player to jump across the "gap" to reach higher parts of the stage.
Obviously, there are enemies in the stages too. Get hit twice and you die, though the first time you get hit, a t-shirt will appear at a random place on the screen, which will let you get that hit back. If you spend too long in a level, the music changes and a ghost appears to chase you round.
The game's a lot of fun to play, and certainly a lot better than the other Russian MD bootlegs I've played so far. It looks okay, and the music is really catchy, too. It's definitely worth hunting down and playing, though maybe you'd rather play the original homebrew, rather than the pirate hack of it?

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