Game Review: Micro Mouse (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic/Mastertronic Plus)

This Plot Seems Familiar

After reading through the instructions and viewing the cassette cover for Micro Mouse, it instantly made me think of Specventure.  Go around fixing a supercomputer circuit board and placing patches over the damaged areas.  Was this going to be another good game along a similar vein?  The loading screen gives a full title; Micro Mouse Goes De-Bugging.

The instructions have a fun element about how human engineers discuss tea and cricket scores whilst you’re disguising your solder robot as a mouse to make it more amusing!  Hmm…   That sounds a bit strange but at the same time, at least some thought has gone into making a fun storyline.

Playability

You control Micro Mouse by moving him around a vertically scrolling circuit board playing area.  Scrolling moves in both upwards and downwards directions to follow where you are on the screen, giving a large playing area to run move around in.

The control method has been very well thought out.  Going around corners is extremely easy when you get to them.  So, say that you are moving downwards on a circuit line with a right turn below, if you keep press down and right pressed at the same time, when you get to the turning or junction points, you’ll turn and move right when you reach it.  This keeps the game flowing smoothly and there is no frustration if you slightly over-step a turning point.

The game also works well in the sense that you have remaining strength and can survive quite a few seconds if you happen to run into them.  Unlike, say Pacman where when you are caught, here you don’t lose a life straight away.  Collision detection is extremely good too, especially when it comes to being nearly caught or twisting corners.

When you do run out of strength, the game waits until you are ready to continue by pressing the fire button.  Things still move around, but the countdown pauses until you resume again by pressing the fire button.

Graphics

Micro Mouse has reasonably drawn graphics and sets out to do exactly what it suggests.  It’s clear that you are a mouse and the circuit board is clear with transistors and RAM chips.  The parts that you need to repair are in red and what you need to pick up next to repair a faulty section is displayed in a square in the lower centre of the screen.

Your energy is displayed in an animated section as a lump of cheese and the more you collide with the baddies, the lower it gets, leading to a lose of one of your five lives.  Damage levels are also displayed on the left side of the screen as well.  This gradually draws a smiling cats face as if it was being gradually printed out as time goes on.

Despite the colours on the screen, there isn’t really any colour clash.  So even when moving over the first aid kits or other boxes, because your mouse always has a yellow background and is drawn in black, it just displays over the top without the other colours causing say red.

A red screen fade effect also looks very game once the game has loaded and before each game begins and ends.

Presentation

Micro Mouse has a great opening page which has plenty of colour moving around the text and an extremely smooth scrolling text message with shadow effect at the bottom of the screen.  The text is quite a long rambling message mentioning a few people and reminded me of the on demos of the 16-bit machine era.  Also on the screen are two mice faces and every so often these twitch their faces, giving it an amusing cartoonist vibe to it all and humour is very evident, making it fun.

Even re-defining the keys isn’t just the words up, down, left or right and fire and pause just appearing on the screen.  Instead, in the bottom right-hand corner you see arrows pointing in the directions and the key you press appear next to it followed by fire and pause symbols.  After each one is selected, they scroll neatly to the left.

The High Score table is also colourful and allows for a small sentence instead of just a name.  My only minor niggle here though is when entering your name, you choose each letter, number or symbol by moving left, right up and down over four rows.  It is extremely quick and you can miss the character that you want.  Moving to the left jumps to the right and moving to the top of the 4 rows, places your cursor at the bottom and vice versa.

Music and Sound Effects

On the 48K Spectrum, the opening screen is silent but on the 128K a reasonable AY tune plays away.  It has a bit of a baseline and is quite jolly and uplifting in places with a range of instruments and clapping rhythms.

What was disappointing on the 128K version was that there is no in game music, purely relying on the 48K sound effects only.  There is an option to switch the sounds effects on and off as well (if you press the pause key.)  I can’t think of any other games that allow you to do that.  Sound effects are short crashing noises when you move into an enemy or a few short beeps as you move over first aid kits or do a repair.

Points of Interest

The catalogue number on the spine of the inlay cassette is IA 0305 (not IS 0305).

It also states Virgin Mastertronic within the game and written is printed on the physical cassette tape.  The cover, however, having 2.99 Mastertronic Plus.

Final Thoughts

Although I don’t generally compare games to each other in my reviews, it is very similar in to the plot of Specventure.  I enjoyed that game, but Micro Mouse is far more playable, has a much faster pace and with the larger playing area and great controls, is a clear winner.

Micro Mouse is one game that I will come back to playing again and right up there as one of the better releases.  Just a shame that there isn’t a 128K soundtrack whilst playing the game….

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