Flimbo's Quest

Title           Flimbo's Quest
Category        Platform
Players         1
Compatibility   68000/OCS only
Submission      Joona Palaste (palaste@cc.helsinki.fi)

Review
The Amiga, like the 8-bit computers before it, has had lots of platform
games. Some of them were film licenses, some invented their own stories.
Flimbo's Quest is one of the latter category.

  The plot is a typical romance story. Your girlfriend has been kidnapped
and you have to rescue her. The only difference is that this time the
villain has a real reason for the kidnapping, because he wants to put the
girl in a lifeforce transferring machine to prolong his own life. You,
however, don't agree on this.

  Flimbo's Quest is a quite typical platform game. You take the role of
Flimbo, who looks like a 6-year-old boy with a big blue cap and a sword.
You must traverse 7 different levels to rescue your girlfriend Pearly from
the clutches of the evil Fransz Dandruff. To do this, you must collect
scrolls to reveal letters of magic words. These can be found by killing
baddies, which take the form of numerous different animals.

  Flimbo performs all the stuff you'd expect your average platform hero to
do: He walks and he jumps. A novel idea is that not only can you hop
upwards onto a platform, you can also hop downwards from a platform. This
can be put to good use, and other games (most notably Bubble Bobble) would
also greatly benefit from it. For offensive qualities, Flimbo is armed
with a sword, that fires bullets. Why would a sword fire bullets? I have
no idea. It doesn't matter, however, the main point being you can shoot
baddies with it.

  Shooting baddies often grants you a reward. This is usually money, but
one of the baddies is marked with an arrow, and grants you a magic scroll
when shot. This must then be taken to the shop, where it will be stored
and a different baddie will be marked with an arrow. You can also buy
bonus items in the shop.

  Graphics and sound play a major role in platform games. Flimbo's Quest
performs well here. All the 7 levels have pretty, colourful backgrounds
whose style can be expressed as a mix of realism and cartoons. The baddies
come in many forms, from insects via cats to fantasy animals. All the
baddies are very colourful and cute. The sound in Flimbo's Quest is also
very good. The sound effects aren't that good, but the music is excellent.
There's a total of 4 tunes, all of which sound very pleasing.

  Although Flimbo's Quest is simple to understand and quite fun once you
start to play it, it doesn't offer anything special. Also, most people
will label it as a game for small children. Not because it's so easy (it's
actually quite difficult), but because the choice of graphics and music is
more suited to children than adults. Also, adults often expect to find
larger levels, more "secret" bits and a generally broader scope in their
platform games. Flimbo's Quest fails to meet these expectations.

  I'm not saying Flimbo's Quest is rubbish, but it's clearly not one of
those games that keeps you interested for months or even years. It might
be fun to play at first, but once you complete it, you may get so bored of
it you never play it again. The game's lack of appeal is further added by
the fact that the game comes on a non-AmigaDOS disk, and doesn't work on
new Amigas. I tried to play it on my A1200, but the graphics were so badly
corrupted I couldn't be bothered to finish the first level.

  If you are looking for a simple game for children (who have an Amiga 500
or a similar computer) Flimbo's Quest might do for that purpose.
Otherwise, it's just a bog-standard platform game, average at best.

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