Calamari Cubes

The Good
I have this game as part of a shareware compilation CD. I was pleasantly surprised to find this is a full game, nine levels I think, and it played without a hitch under DOSBOX.

It is a good, well made game with up-tempo electro-pop music that is very appropriate to the kind of game and the period and which I actually liked.

The characters are decently drawn and the game is quite challenging. I haven't made it past level two because I'm not fast enough at this sort of game, but I have seen others progress further and the later levels do look to be a decent size and challenging.

The keyboard controls are easy to use, < and > move Nigel while the A key makes him jump, the Z key activated things and the space bar picks up or drops objects.

The Bad
The object of the game is to collect crates and drop them in to a teleporter. That's where I had problems. It may be that I'm not playing the game correctly but after a couple of hours of trying and reading the help text I was still having problems.
I found that when Nigel drops a crate it lands on the square he's standing on. That makes it very hard to drop a crate into a hole, Nigel cannot go into the hole because he dies - been there, done that, many times. Nigel has to be standing right on the very last pixel of the edge of the hole for the crate to drop in.
In addition when Nigel drops the crate he drops it behind him so the process of placing a crate into the teleporter goes like this:
1. Walk up to the hole
2. Rotate 180 degrees
3. Drop the crate
4. *** it didn't work
5. Rotate 180 degrees
6. Shuffle forward a pixel or two
7. Repeat steps 2 - 6 until either a life is lost or the crate is successfully dropped into the teleporter.

The Bottom Line
All in all this was a decent little game in its day. It still plays well but I found just a bit too frustrating to be fun.