Let’s start off by saying Bugaboo is very good, but it could easily have been perfect. We’ll get back to that later. But who would have thought that controlling a lowly bug jumping around a chasm would be so fun? We didn’t until we played Bugaboo. Is there a story? Not really, the intro shows you falling down a massive hole in the floor and you have to get back up to the top. You move your bug around the alien landscape by holding keys or the joystick to set the direction and power of your jump, and try to gauge it to land where you want to, easier said than done, most of the time you’ll tumble back down and down and down and curse as you fall. Graphics are fun and colourful. And we don’t think we have ever seen cutscenes in a Spectrum or C64 game until now.

If trying to time your jumps without falling back down isn’t hard enough, there is also a yellow flying dragon determined to make you his mid-afternoon snack, so stay away from him. And he is our biggest gripe in the game; it’s challenging enough planning a route out and timing your jumps. Having an unkillable killing machine suddenly appear and eat you has tested our patience on many occasions. 

It’s safe to say the dragon will haunt your dreams, It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead. 

We encountered this dragon within 20 seconds of starting a game. Game over. We’ve had a rush of joy when we are about to hit a tiny ledge to be destroyed by the dragon coming from nowhere to snatch us up and eat us. Game over. It’s just hovering there on the other side of some rocks, and we know there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. Game over.

The Dragon…   The Dragon…    The Dragon…

There is a perfect game in here, remove the dragon and Bugaboo at the times without it is a pretty perfect game, it’s challenging, simple to pick up but hard to master, never unfair and infinitely replayable. With the dragon, though, it’s a chore. You feel it’s only a matter of time before your game is ruined with something entirely out of your control.

This is a prime example of where a POKE could make the game so much better, if someone does, and we hope it doesn’t take too long, find a POKE to remove the dragon we would be eternally grateful.

Scoring this is hard, but we can only go with the game in front of us, and just for the rage the dragon causes us we are giving Bugaboo a 6, however someone POKEs out that Dragon we are revising our score to a 9.

Available for £6.95 on the ZX Spectrum and £7.95 on the C64.

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