Weird Dreams


Title           Weird Dreams
Game Type       Platform
Publisher	RainBird
Players         1
Compatibility   All (AGA needs degrading)
Submission      Mike West

Review
This game title is pretty well descriptive of the theme for this excursion
into a rather surreal world. You're on the operating theatre table,
surgeons looking down on you and you drift into sleep. The first game
scene sees you in a giant candy-floss machine. As the giant stick comes
around, you have to hop on and hopefully get lifted out. You then run, in
pyjamas, through a fairground with a giant bee chasing you across to the
hall of mirrors. The particular mirror that you choose determines which
level of the game you play next. Do you go to the desert where you can
grasp flying fish from the air to hit the living stone statues over the
head with or do you go to the rose-garden to try and get past the
man-eating roses? And if you aren't quick, the lawnmower will get you!

This game is a novelty on the Amiga. It's surrealness you will either love
or hate. Personally I love it. It has so many nice little features. The
music on each level is atmospheric and relevant to that particular
scene........the fairground music, the rose-garden music, the strange airy
rush of the desert. You really do feel a part of where you are.

My criticism of this game centres around the level of difficulty that the
game has been set at. The jump to the candy-stick has to be precise. Hit
the living statues a fraction too late or too early and back to the
theatre you go. This level of difficulty extends to all parts of the game
that I have yet seen. Play this and be prepared to stress-out bigtime! The
graphics are a little rough but the unusual and involving concept of the
game overcomes this. In its day though, it was as good as they came.

Going back to the operating theatre concept at the beginning of the game,
each time you start on your dream adventure a little heart monitor blip is
heard. When your last life is lost, the noise changes to a flat-line
sound. Just another nice touch that makes this game as atmospheric as it
is.

Meant for the likes of the A500, this is degradeable on the A1200 but you
will find certain scenes, in the desert for example, that are trashed
although this seems confined to screens that are not really in the game
ie. turn left in the desert and you will walk through screens indefinitely
without meeting anything. As you walk back through the same amount of
screens, every other one is trashed until you come across the flying fish.
I've yet to find a way of stopping this but at least it doesn't affect the
playability of the game. Being one of my first Amiga games, this is a
proud part of my collection, a game that showed how innovative Amiga
programmers could be. If you get the chance, play it but be prepared for a
very hard and frustrating time!





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