Furball

The game is called Furball and is free. You may remember (if you've been using an Amiga for any length of time) the small game Dithell in Space? Same author. Now the author has moved on to remixing music and writing music for soundtracks but has made his games available for download. People who do remember Dithell won't be surprised by Furball. It's another platformer and Amiga did do this format rather well.

So, onto the game and how to get it running. The game can be run on both Windoze and Amiga and the author has spent some time getting it to do this. The Amiga version is an adf file. That's Amiga Disk Format to you and you will need any of the packages that convert these to run it on your Amiga. The Windoze version is even easier, unzip the archive and double click on the exe file.

The author has been slightly naughty here. Double clicking the exe runs UAE from Dos and as such loads in a Rom file and then the game. Apart from this little point, and I believe it is a little point (we all have Amigas, don't we, so we should have valid Rom files), that is it. Very neat and easy. The game can be run in a window or full screen and hasn't any failings in this respect. Plays like a dream, even if you've no knowledge of UAE or how to set it up. The author has made the process entirely painless and has also included various other configs if you don't want to run it this way. The game itself plays smoothly under Windoze and has lots of colourful graphics. Sprite collision works well, and the game is a nice little time waster.

I'm afraid I wasn't that big a fan of platformers and although I played with this one for a little while, it never held my attention. This might just be down to me, however, and I wouldn't want to put anyone off playing it. As I say, the game is slick , graphics are good and the gameplay is there . There is a story to the game I'm sure, but as far as I know, you jump about platforms and jump on the enemies.....nice! Maybe the game is slightly easy for seasoned players of this type, since I got through the first level no problem but I expect things hot up later on. Quake its not, but as a little platform game, it's rather nice.

You can while away your time playing this and reminding yourself of all those P.D. games of yesteryear that you looked forward to. The download isn't that big either, so you won't need too long to wait to get your hands on it. I believe the author has been extremely nice by telling us about the game and deserves the game at least be tried. If you like platformers, give it a try!