Review: Mr Do!
The last couple of years of Speccy homebrew releases have felt like some kind of personal wish-fulfilment dream for the 15-year-old me. All the games I most loved playing in seaside arcades on summer holidays, but which never got decent home conversions for my beloved rubber-keyed buddy, have shown up one after the other in the form of some truly superb ports: Mister Kung Fu, Maze Death Rally-X, Terrapins, Horace And The Robots and most recently the tremendous out-of-the-blue appearance of Astro Blaster. Not only are they all wonderfully playable games in the here and now, they also make the past somehow retrospectively better. Because suddenly there's an alternate universe of the mind where we all got to enjoy them at the time instead of the relatively tatty efforts that actually came out.
But Universal's colourful and action-packed manic-mining monster-masher from 1982, Mr Do!, was such a big ask for the Spectrum that despite it being a huge hit widely ported to every other format under the sun, nobody had even bothered to take a semi-serious Speccy stab at it until 2006, when Bob Smith produced the gorgeous-looking Farmer Jack In Harvest Havoc. But while it was deftly done, it didn't do Do!
To experience the iconic bouncing ball, classic Can-Can music and the clever, extra-life-hunting ruleset we had to wait another 13 years for Adrian Singh and Mark R Jones to somehow cram the perky polka-dotted Pierrot into our beloved black rubber buddy.
And what an absolutely phenomenal feat of cramming it is - capturing not only the look and sound of the coin-op but the feel, to the point where you almost forget that you're not playing the real thing, so similar and familiar are the rhythms and patterns. But then, to all intents and purposes, you are.
Review by Rev. Stuart Campbell.
Share your thoughts about the article