The Incredible Shrinking Fireman, ZX Spectrum - IS 0100
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Score - 5/105/10
Summary
You can quite easily pick up and start the game leaping around over the place. It’s quite fun jumping over furniture, fire buckets, ladders and fire trucks! Once you have done that though, you will get more into the adventure side of the it and want to complete the puzzles.
The Incredible Shrinking Fireman at first appears to look like a platform game (especially when you at “The Screen Displays” part of the inlay cover). Although in someways, it looks like a platformer game, it does give you the freedom to move from screen to screen and solve the puzzles along the way.
Its not likely to be the best game you’ll ever play but it’s not a dud either so why not give it a go.
User Review
( votes)Collect, Click and Select
The Incredible Shrinking Fireman involves picking up items with the aim of obtaining the five parts of the stretching rack and taking them to The Stretching Room.
As you move travel around the game, you will come across some white diamond shaped objects on the floor. You can either totally ignore them or press the fire button to either pick up, examine, or drop an item (by pressing numbers 1-5 on the keyboard) next to the corresponding item. Sid can carry a maximum of five items at any one time so the examine item is quite handy.
Just like an adventure game, along the way certain items need to be obtained to access certain areas of the game. Some items that can be found appears is “A Fat Mouse” but the others are things like various coloured keys or “Skeleton Keys”.
Playability
The controls are rather very responsive, and Shuffling Sid moves around at reasonable pace. This especially noticeable when jumping and landing on object etc.
Although there isn’t an energy status bar visible, you do have a certain amount of it, roughly around three seconds. If you collide with an enemy, your energy starts depleting and you’ll lose one of your four lives. One false move therefore isn’t fatal and when you do lose a life, you aren’t returned to a starting point on a prior screen, which is good.
Graphics and Animation
Upon loading the game, there is a neat drawing at the top of the screen with the game’s title shrunk within a stretching rack. Pardon the pun, but this fits in nicely to the presentation.
Going through the game, you will notice that most of the screens have made very good use of colour, so no monochrome here. When you move Sid around, you will see him change colour as he blends into the backgrounds.
There are some rather neatly drawn backgrounds screens too and you can tell that some time and effort went into these. My favourite being where there are a couple of fire trucks (which makes sense being that the game is based around a fireman, after all). Other screens on the other hand can be rather sparse though.
The animation as Sid walks along is amusing and you can see why he is called Shuffling Sid!
Sound Effects
There is no music in The Incredible Shrinking Fireman. Everything is purely sound effects based only. These are generally heard when choosing to pick up an object and opening the menu and selecting what you want to do. A tapping noise is also audible when you collide with an enemy on the screen (unless you are jumping or walking on it).
Proportionality
You certainly notice that Sid is quite tiny! For example, walking along the side of the pool table, you’ll see he is only around half its height and he’s size of the biscuit boxes (of which there are a few of them around!)!
A Sense of Direction
The top third of the screen displays a couple of rectangles and sometimes some arrows pointing left and right indicating that you can move from your screen into another in that direction. What you won’t see however in that part of the screen is that you can jump up some screens and move down too.
You will soon realise that you can do this because you can jump on top of the background objects and easily realise that you can jump through the top of the screen, only to appear on another screen. On some screens, there is a yellow Fireman’s Pole which does allow you to jump up and fall down screens one at a time.
The Incredible Shrinking Fireman doesn’t have though are screen names. I feel that would have been a nice feature to have had and given the game a bit more of a sense of adventure.
Fun Elements
A fun part of The Incredible Shrinking Fireman is that you can pretty much jump on-top of anything in sight. There are other Sid lookalikes, for example and can jump up and down on them as much as you like and literally walk all over them!
I feel the artist who drew the main cassette cover (John Smyth – Ed.) has done a very good job portraying that shrinking feeling too. His colleague putting out a fire looking rather perplexed as he looks behind him.
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You know what we think but why not share your thoughts on this game! Let us know what you think of it in the comments below, or add your own score using the slider in the summary box at the top of the review!
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