Oscar (CD32)

Title		Oscar (CD32)
Game Type	Platform
Company		Flair Software (1993)
Players		1
Compatibility	AGA and CD?
Submission	graeme.r.porter

Review
Flair Software's brilliantly-colourful platform game Oscar was released on
AGA-only Amigas and for CD32.  In fact, it accompanied "Diggers" on the one
CD that came with the CD32.

Making full use of the AGA chipset's ability to display 256 colours on
multiple parallel-scrolling layers, Oscar is fast, smooth, bright,
colourful, and fun to watch.  But, like most platform games, that's where
the fun lies - watching.

The actual gameplay is dull and unimaginative. In fact, making no bones
about it, this game is almost identical to Flair's big-name license game,
"Trolls", where you play one of those irritating plastic dolls that people
collect, the ones with the long purple/green hair. The only difference
between the two games are the graphics.

You play the part of Oscar, a furry creature of some shape or form, who must
find all of the "Oscars" (which don't look like the Academy Awards) in each
section of several different genres, which are :-

Sci-fi
Horror
War
Game Show
Western
Cartoon

It also features a number of bonus levels, so in terms of size, the game is
quite large.

However, the CD32 version (not sure about the other version) makes the fatal
flaw of NOT ALLOWING YOU TO SAVE THE GAME ! This means that if you spend
hours playing and get to the last level and you die, you have to do it all
over again no matter what!  Needless to say, this is frustrating, and is
not excusable.

Not helping this is the fact that Oscar is the only game that I have for my
CD32 that actually caused it to crash (apparently randomly).

As I have mentioned, Oscar is graphically nice, and as I haven't mentioned
yet, it's sound is variable in quality.  The CD32 version did not have any
CD music, and there was no in-game music, leaving the ears to rejoice in a
variety of bland sound effects that were probably copied directly from
"Trolls".

Overall Score - 47%

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