Game Review: Horace Goes Skiing (ZX Spectrum, Melbourne House)

Nintendo and SEGA have both been extremely successful in not only building brands around their consoles, but in managing to create iconic characters that people associate with them in the shape of Mario and Sonic respectively. That’s been an incredibly rare occurance in the home computer industry, but the ZX Spectrum scene managed to accomplish this not once but twice with Miner Willy and Horace. Whatever you may think of the games themselves, the two are instantly recognisable to anyone who grew up with home computers of the 80s. Of all the Horace titles released, Horace Goes Skiing was probably the most ambitious, but was it worth getting?

Horace Goes Skiing… Eventually

If the name doesn’t give it away, the core of Horace Goes Skiing is the same as the countless downhill slalom skiing games released throughout the 8bit era – from magazine type-ins, titles like Olympic Skier for the Commodore 64 on the Americana range… you name it, every publisher released one.

But there’s a lot more to this game than just a downhill slalom race. Horace doesn’t start off on the slopes. In fact, he doesn’t even have any skis in his posession and that’s where the first half of the game comes in.

Feeling Froggy!

Starting things off, Horace begins the game with £40 in cash. You need to hire some skis before you can get on the slopes but the ski hire shop is the other side of a very busy road. As you can probably guess, you have to cross the road, avoid all the traffic and enter the shop. Once you’ve got the skis (which cost £10 to hire – you can tell this was released at the start of the 80s!), you’ve got to make it back across the road to get to the slopes so you can start skiing.

However, if you get hit by any of the traffic, you need to pay £10 to be rescued by an ambulance (the developer obviously looked to the American health system for inspiration for this part of the game!). There’s no time limit, but the longer you take, the more traffic appears on the road so you need to be quick! It’s quite obvious that this has been “inspired” by the Konami smash hit Frogger, but one thing that sets this apart from the arcade classic is the way the vehicles move. As well as moving across the screen horizontally, the vehicles change lane at random, making navigating the road much more difficult and the traffic harder to predict.

It All Goes Downhill From Here…

So you’ve made it back across the road so it’s time to get those skis on and get on the snow! Still controlling Horace, you have to ski from the top to the bottom of the slope, avoiding trees and other obstacles along the way, making your way through the slalom gates until you reach the finish line, earning points for every set of gates you pass through.

Instead of having a set amount of lives as you would in other similar games, each time you collide with anything your skis take damage, and if they take too mauch damage they break and the ski run ends sending you back to the road to hire another pair before you can return to the slopes.

If you manage to successfully complete the run, you’ll be awarded a points bonus, and you have to go through it all over again. This time however, you start at the ski hire shop so you only have to cross the road one way. Obviously, as before if you get hit while crossing the road, you need to pay for an ambulance so you have to be careful again and once you finally run out of cash it’s game over.

A Sinclair Release?

While we focus on releases by Mastertronic and its subsidiaries on this site, Horace Goes Skiing has an usual release history or at least it does on the ZX Spectrum. It was developed by William Tang of Beam Software and the title screen makes it clear that it was presented by Psion Computers and Melbourne House.

However, during the early days of the Spectrum, many of the titles produced by Psion Computers were released by Sinclair themselves and Horace Goes Skiing (as well as the two other Horace games) were amongst them. All of the other formats, including the Dragon 32 conversion which I looked at previously, were released by Melbourne House directly but these were the only ones that had Sinclair branding while retaining a reference to Melbourne House on the cover.

Gameplay

Now, when it comes to the playability, I have to admit that it’s something of a mixed bag. While it’s a fun game and the mashup of game styles prevents the game from feeling stale while you’re playing it’s not without it’s problems. Controls do feel overly sensitive at times and for some strange reason – on the road sections at least – Horace seemed to have a mind of his own in parts and kept running continually in the same direction for no reason making the game more frustrating than it needed to be. I’ll be brutally honest here and say that if this were a standalone Frogger clone I’d be a lot more critical, but as part of a larger game it does the job quite well.

Moving on to the ski sections, and the randomised nature of the course really helps lift this immensely and gives it endless replayability. It’s challenging without being too frustrating and this could have easily been released as a solo title on its own without the first part of the game. There was just a small issue I had with this part as I’ll mention next…

Graphics And Sound

Graphics are fairly simplistic throughout but are quite well defined and everything is easy to make out with little to no colour clash with the exception of Horace when he goes to visit the Ski Shop. Everything moves smoothly and runs at quite a brisk pace, and there’s no sign of any slowdown during the Frogger inspired section, even when the road is packed full of traffic. The only instances where the Spectrum seemed to struggle was when Horace came into contact with the rocks in the downhill section. Whether this was intentional and these were meant to slow him down I don’t know, although this did make it easier in reaching some of the gates that were near to the edge of the screen so it wasn’t all bad!

Sound is quite basic as you’d expect from the beeper, although there was a screeching sound effect that plays when Horace crashes and I’d say that’s probably the most memorable. But apart from a few basic effects, there’s nothing to write home about.

Overall

Horace Goes Skiing is a fun and challenging game and is one of the more unusual early Spectrum releases, not only because it was probably the most well-loved game in the series that introduced us to the iconic Horace, but I’d say it’s arguably the best in the series. It manages to seamlessly blend two completely different game genres, but in a logical manner so it doesn’t seem forced in any way and while I’ve never really been a fan of Horace as a character, it didn’t stop me enjoying the game at all.

Unlike most people, I have to be honest and say that I actually played the Dragon 32 version of this first and I did find that one to be a slightly better version of the game, but the Spectrum original is still a fun game and well worth playing even more than 40 years after its original release.

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