Game Review: Mind Control (Commodore 64, Mastertronic)

Mind Control was one of a series of games made with The Games Creator, but had up to three releases.  The original release was on the ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment) label, and then reissued on Hitech Games Plus and then it was handed over to Mastertronic for a second reissue.  The plot is relatively simple in that you need to get into Zyco’s brain.  To do that, you need to navigate the hospital first and find the machine which will shrink you down to a small enough size to explore the brain, before then manoeuvring inside the brain to get to the centre itself.

It is perhaps noticeable that for the Mastertronic re-release, the opening level was added which is where you navigate the hospital.  This is not mentioned on the cassette inlay, which takes the plot from the original release of the game.  That does appear to be somewhat unprofessional – surely an extra level would be worth mentioning here for more variety and to entice the buyer that there is more to this game than a maze with some lasers?

Losing My Mind

After the initial load with the instructions, the game immediately starts and before you know it, all three of your lives have been lost.  On the hospital section, you start at the bottom right of the screen and need to make it to the top left.  To do this, you need to negotiate through two various rooms with two flights of stairs.  You can jump over the other patients in the hospital, which include some wheelchair users and some with walking sticks.  The jumping must be precise or you will end up losing one of your three lives, with the death being a mess of sprites where your main character once was.

Making Your Mind Up

As you move through the hospital, jumping close to wall will mean the jump will not be as far, and other patients can spawn as you climb the stairs, meaning that they are impossible to miss and another life has been lost.  The key seems to be to wait for a clear stairwell, whilst ensuring you have room to jump over the other patients.  If you make it to the top there is a conveyor belt, marked as a shrinking machine, meaning that you then become small enough to head to the top left of the level and therefore enter Zyco’s brain.  It is at this point where the original version would kick in.

States of Mind

On the second level, you need to carefully negotiate the maze that is the inner of Zyco’s brain and head to the centre.  If you touch any of the walls of the brain’s maze, you lose a life, and that will be the same if you hit any of the other blood corpuscles within.  You are armed with a laser, but this is useless and does not remove any of the enemies whatsoever, and you are best working out the path of the corpuscles and avoiding them whilst negotiating the maze.  This section also appears to be slower paced than the ACE original version too.  The loss of life is by showing your character set back to normal size with the same poor lose a life animation that other Games Creator games have.

Always On My Mind

All of this may have been passable to some degree, but the game also does have a couple of bugs on top.  One seems to be that if you reach the conveyor belt and use the shift key (more so if on keyboard) then you seem to grow back to full size when leaving the conveyor belt and lose a life, so it is preferable to play on joystick to avoid that.  The other one is more noticeable – if you press the Shift and Commodore key on the second level, sometimes the character set changes too, and that really is a bit annoying as you can then see some of the characters that makes the maze.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in Mind Control are not very good.  The first level background of the platforms and doors are acceptable, with a moving conveyor belt, but the characters themselves do not animate very well, and the legs spreading when jumping inevitably leads to a collision and death, with the collision detection not being so generous.  The brain on the second level has miniscule enemies and characters that just seem rushed.  There are different tunes on each of the two level but unfortunately, they are up to usual Games Creator standards, which means one channel of cacophony, together with the same set of sound effects heard on many other games.  Not good enough.

Final Thoughts

Mind Control is another case of the Games Creator cow being milked for all what it was worth. Whilst there is at least an initial first level of platform action, which makes it improve on the original release, the second maze stage is utterly tedious and repeating that all the time should you get past it once is just a sign to switch off the Commodore 64.  Even with that first level, it is less than acceptable to release it, especially with bugs present.  An unacceptable release on many levels and one which I would suggest that you do not play if possible.  A waste of time.

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