Children are foolish that’s why so many of them end up meeting old men off the internet. It’s also why games like “Kronk’s New Groove Party Racing” ride high in the charts while all the remaining copies of “Evil Zone” were sent to fight in Afghanistan. I was a child once and that’s why, when asked what game I wanted for my birthday, I picked Zool.
Memories of the time suggest the selection was made along the lines of
1. I want a jumping game like Sonic II on the megadrive.
2. You can’t get Sonic II on a Gameboy because it can’t display blue.
3. Mario looks a bit rubbish, he doesn’t appear to have any sort of early 90’s radical ‘attitude’.
4. If 3=True and 2<1 get Zool because the only other game in Woolworths is a boardgame called “The Great Floatini”
I should have gone for The Great Floatini. To this day I wonder what amazing anti-grav technology was employed to produce the floating effect. (No doubt imagination and strings)
Zool was some sort of amazing ant ninja from “The nth dimension”. People used to do things to “the nth degree” a lot in the early 90’s and when I say people I mean businessmen in sitcoms and extreme sportspeople on Saturday morning kids TV. (This was before the spelling of extreme was official changed to X-Treme! In order to make it 10% more radical.)
With his knock off sonic trainers (possibly bought on a market by his mother) and his lightsaber/baton type weaponry (which was never employed in the game). Zool seemed set to rock the shit out of that tiny green screen.
The first few minutes of Zool seemed promising, after all it did bear the much sought after Nintendo Seal of Quality. An award of comprisable quality to the Roy Castle clean air award. More importantly we were proudly informed that Zool was sponsored by Chupa Chups. Who knew that Chupa Chups had such financial strength? No one and I get the feeling that Zool set the cause of Chupa Chups back several decades. Only now have they started to recuperate by marketing themselves in bag and stationary form at teenage girls - just like playboy!
Well Zool never featured faux pop-art images of women sucking provocatively on lollypops. (Or indeed suggestively fondling a Slammer Whammers case full of fake Chupa Chup pogs and their ludicrously effective metal slammers.) What it did feature was an ant Ninja struggling to advance beyond the second level. No easy task when your enemies included spiked pits of instant death, an unhelpful control system where sometimes you stuck to walls and sometimes you merely jumped at them ineffectually like a youtube parkour video and worst of all the same music from the title screen playing through the entire game. Against all this Zool could do nothing but jump on the heads of his enemies or fire ineffectual ninja pellets at them. (To all the young people out there head jumping used to be the primary method of attack in all games, mostly because it didn’t require any extra animations leaving precious memory space for password save systems. Unfortunately head jumping faded into obscurity when 3D graphics made any kind of precision impossible – just ask the Jersey Devil or Croc: Legend of the Gobbos.)
Each level of Zool had a theme and the people at Gremlin did some amazing things here because instead of “Easy Forest level with nice music, Slidey Ice Level, Burny Fire Level, horrible unresponsive controls underwater level, final metal level and level where you kill civilians in an airport they made the first level a level based on sweets- which weirdly featured little in the way of cupa chups. I can only presume liquorice allsorts were easier to animate. The second level was based on musical instruments. Beyond that I have no idea because the instrument level was so frustratingly difficult that I put my copy of Zool inside a guitar and could never get it back out. The instruction book did promise two other exciting levels but having not experienced them first hand I couldn’t say if they existed or what the theming of those levels were. Hopefully the final level was a journey into the nth dimension with such twisted logic and imagery that you realised the entire game up to that point had been a clever post modern satire of rubbish ports of rubbish Amiga games. (All Amiga games were rubbish.)
Poor Zool. The only good things about the game were the eerily lifelike movement of the bumblebee boss on the sweets level and the delight of another attempted Mario type Macot being slowly killed by apathy and poor choice of corporate sponsorship. We can all take comfort in the fact that Zool now rests with comrades such as Aero the Acrobat, Titus the Fox, James Pond and the recently deceased Crash Bandicoot. Never again will we see their like, mostly because games companies have moved on from trying to create Disney style mascots, now it’s all about ill defined anti-heroes with badly selling spin off graphic novels.
Overall I would rate Zool: An ill conceived sequel featuring a female zool and a dog zool and two choose your own ad
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