Fatman: The Caped Consumer

The Good
The intro isn’t bad, and is done in simple story board type fashion, with minimal animation and some okay sound effects to liven it up some. Comic touches like when Fat’s wife is about to be nabbed by the kidnappers, the news man on the TV scuttles off the screen when the villains are advancing behind her. Roy Fat’s transformation into the Fatman is also a bit of a chuckle.

The controls here are simple and easy to pick up. You simply guide Fatman about with the joystick, and attack with the fire button. Selecting a weapon is a simple combo of pushing down on the stick and pressing fire, or if you prefer, by hitting the space bar. You’ll also find our weight impaired hero to be surprisingly agile, and he can leap about with the best of them. The controls are quick and responsive, and generate no real dramas.

Giving old Fat a variety of attack methods makes things a bit more interesting. The time-bomb mushroom is good for taking out nasties below, while the straight flying carrot is perfect for taking out more immediate pests. Fatman’s hardy belch, which acts as a smart-bomb, can be used to get him out of particularly sticky situations, but it’s severely limited so you have to use it strategically. Fatman’s primary and most basic attacks are his gut thrust and leaping bottom slam. The balance works reasonably well.

The contrast in level designs varies nicely, and some of the levels are just huge. The early sewer level, which introduces switches, sees you moving about back and forth a lot, as you have to figure out what switch triggers open which door, to make different areas becomes accessible and so on. Some other clever designs, such as the haunted castle level, have retracting platforms, where as you fall through them, but they pop out again later, so that you can return the way you came, which I thought was quite smart. Some of the pitfalls and various traps presented are quite devious, and you simply have to learn from your mistakes.

The visuals here are solid, and get the job done. Fatman himself is decently animated, and his cape flails when he is running and jumping. If you leave him idle, he will pull fried chicken legs out of his pockets and stuff his face endlessly. The assortments of backdrops are often colourful, with some rainbow type gradients and grinning stars and suns, fluffy clouds and the like. While other indoor levels have a more moody atmosphere, like shadow laden dungeons, with subtle pre rendered candle lighting, foggy skies, acid pits and other dark touches. Enemies range from evil babies, bees, shifty looking guys in overcoats, through to ghosts and bats, snowmen and more besides.

Sound effects and music are reasonable enough. There are some reasonable samples like the big thud when Fatman slams his ham to the ground, his superior burping skills, and gleeful “yippee” when he hits a checkpoint. The music varies each level, but is usually some simple rock track with guitar and drum synths, which is okay for this type of fare.

Even though this comes on a hefty four disks, the routines are actually mildly painless for a change, and the game only calls for the next disk in a sequential manner, every couple of levels.

The Bad
I can’t say I was really thrilled by the checkpoint system. There is a bunch of flags scattered about the level, which saves your progress to that point, and you resume play after being snuffed from that position. It doesn’t sound so bad in theory, but if you have an unexpected accident it can sometimes mean backtracking huge sections to get to where you left off, which is quite annoying.

The game play gets very repetitive. Each level essentially consists of collecting a certain quota of objects, whether is be hamburgers, golden goblets or whatever. The whole process is very formulaic, and the only thing to break it up is the occasional boss battle.

With the huge size of most of the levels, some sort of map to call on could have been helpful. Also, when on a high platform, you can’t pan the screen down to see what is below, and if you fall a great distance Fatman’s goose is cooked.

Among some more minor niggles was some dodgy collision, where collecting floating ammo supplies required some skipping about to pick it up.

Fatman’s little gut thrust attack is some what unconventional, and having to cautiously approach nasties that don’t move around a whole lot is a bit naff.

The Bottom Line
I have to admit that I was rather taken by Fatman. The game is a perfectly competent platform and ladders fare, with a decent amount of levels and varied designs packed onto the four floppies. I suppose my beef with the game is that the play style presented here has been previously done to death, and this outing offers little in terms of anything really new or innovative.

Solid as the game is, the visuals look a little long in the tooth for a game released around 93-94', and some more amateurish qualities leave it a bit overshadowed by similar outings from the likes of Core Design and Team 17.

Not bad by any means, but needed some extra oomph to be a real draw card in this over saturated genre.