Blinkys Scary School

CrashCrash Smash

Overall 90%

Nick Roberts 90%

BIG BUDGET BONANZA Nick Roberts picks through a plethora of pocket-money packs to bring playing power to your Speccy! BLINKY'S SCARY SCHOOL Zeppelin Games £2.99 Woooo! I bet that scared you? Yeh, another cute cartoon adventure. I'm a real sucker for these, you know. Blinky's Scary School is fab. You play the part of Blinky, a little ghost with big boots on and star pupil of the Scary School! Your job is to rid the castle of all the ghost proof defences set up by that rascal of a ghostbuster, Red Laird McTavish. To do this, various objects must be collected and dropped into the cauldron to cast the magic spells. The screens are packed full of colourful, well drawn and animated graphics that you just can't help but love.. Every new one you discover is a bonus, with spiders, clockwork mice and snails that look like they wouldn't hurt a fly... but they do! As well as the amazing amount of colour there's also some pretty good sound effects and a jolly ditty on the title screen. The only thing wrong with Blinky is the way he moves about. Whenever he reaches the end of aplatform he does a little jump off the edge. If you're not careful you can lose control of him altogether and fall into a spiky pit or something equally as nasty. Zeppelin have taken great care in making sure Blinky's Scary School is a real joy to play. I just can't pull myself away from the game, it's that addictive.

Read it at Crash - The Online Edition

Sinclair User

Graphics 75%

Sound 67%

Playability 58%

Lastability 59%

Overall 59%

Jim Douglas 59%

Label: Zeppelin Price: £2.99 Reviewer: Jim Douglas Mind the blood pressure! They should have games like Blinky's in high level executive stress management courses. If you can keep a civil tongue in your head for more than a few seconds of Blinky activity, you're obviously Trappist monk. Apprentice ghost Blinky must earn his spectre stripes by succeeding in his first mission; to spook Hamish McTavish - arch ghostbuster - out of his castle. Bit of a tough assignment for a novice spook, and should he fail, it's back to scarey school for another century. B.S.S. is essentially another runny-jumpy object collecting game. The only features which set it apart from a million others are Blinky's surprising cuteness and the frustration factor. Blinky half glides, half waddles along looking very appealing. Unfortunately the slightly exaggerated inertia effect causes Blinky to skid off countless tiny platforms and plummet into the umpteen chasms of filled with sharp spikes. Far from being a lonely old castle, it's positively bustling with activity. Deadly spiders bounce up and down. Deadly flying things swoop around the castle battlements. Deadly snails (?) protect useful objects. So far as I could gather, there's nothing you can do about these lurking fiends. Since virtually all of them cover an area precisely the length of Blinky's optimum jump, you inevitably lose a degree of energy every time you pass them. The preamble to the main mission is the collection of the necessary ingredients with which to make a flying spell. Once you can fly, the remaining parts of the castle are open for investigation and exploration. Frankly, by the time I'd battled through the aforementioned Deadly Things, my energy was so low that I only had the briefest chance to explore. Despite some excellent graphics and some slick coding, I'm afraid it's simply too difficult. Nothing to do with intricate puzzles, but the ferocity of the creatures you encounter and Blinky's inability to stand still when you want him to. Pity.

Blink in a loo-roll hilarity. Watch those slippery steps on the way down, B.

Shut your eyes and think of England. Energy depletion ahoy!

Your Sinclair

Overall 78%

Rich Pelley 78%

BARGAIN BASEMENT Fixing a leaky tap in the basement, RICH PELLEY stumbled across a few spooky cheapies clogging up the U-bend. So here they are (damp and slightly mouldy)... BLINKY'S SCARY SCHOOL Zeppelin Games £2.99 Reviewer: Rich Pelley If there's ever been a stupid reason for buying a game then I'm looking at him right now. It's Blinky, y'see. He's just the cutsiest ghost in the whole world! You just have to see the way he waddles about all over the place. Ooooh! He's so brill! And if that wasn't reason enough to buy Scary School then I may as well mention that it's pretty super-spiffy too. Well, perhaps not that super-spiffy. Just spiffy. You play the part of Blinky (of course), Blinky's got to float (or whatever ghosts do) around a castle, find Hamish McTavish, wake him up and haunt him all night, and all because Red Laird McTavish, the scamp, cleared the castle of ghosts a hundred years ago (or something). What's more Blinky has to complete his task in the one evening or he'll be sent back to school for a hundred years, Aaaargh! What a nightmare! Not that this has got much to do with the game of course. All we've got here is just another platform-and-ladders jobby, splashed with colour and cutsie baddies, it does look very budgety, but then we are down in the basement after all, so why bother looking too closely? Nope, a tidy little number methinks. (And, boy, is he cute!!)

Blinky - he's rad, he's bad and he's as cute as, erm, a very cute thing!

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

Overall 80%

Zeppelin Spectrum/C64 £2.99 It's been a whole century since Red Laird McTavish kicked all the ghosts out of Drumtrochie Castle, but now it's time for the spooks to strike back. Slinky, ace pupil at the school for spectres, has been sent on a mission to scare the pants off the castle's owner, Hamish McTavish. To do that he has to wander through the halls, leap around platforms and pick up magic bits to dump in a cauldron. In most respects Blinky's is like so many other budget arcade adventures, but it has really jolly graphics and the gameplay shows a few sparks of ingenuity, and these give it the edge over most games of this ilk. Recommended.

C64 SCORES Overall: 83% The C64 version looks very swish indeed, and it doesn't have the control problems of the Spectrum version either. Super.