Just in time for Halloween, here’s a game by PROSM in which you play a spider and have to catch flies. WoooOOOooo! Scary! Okay, so that’s a very tenuous link to cover up the fact I’ve had this game since the middle of September and have only just got round to reviewing it. It wasn’t like this in the days of Eq Tetrachloride and Dave The Lurker, but to be fair, they never wrote 400-word essays about these games, like what we do at Sqij Towers. “Quantity, not quality” – that’s my motto, along with “better late than never, but even better really really late than just late”.
I was going to write down all the things that I thought PROSM might be an acronym for, just to pad out the review by 100 words or so, but could only think of “Patricia Routledge’s Octopus Smells Musty” before my brain started to hurt. So I stopped again.
In this game, you are a spider, and you must catch flies. I quite like spiders. I’ve never been the sort of person to go “Aaaargh, a spider, help, mummy!” and climb up the nearest tree to escape it. I’d probably make an exception for anything bigger and hairier than a kitten, or those Australian Arsebiter Killer Death Spiders who lurk underneath toilet seats and in underwear drawers, but on balance I’d rather have Boris the Spider and his chums as house guests than a bunch of dirty flies, zzz-zzzing around and vomiting all over me.
Now what some people don’t realise is that when I first load a game for reviewing, I always turn flash loading off in my emulator, so I can experience the full experience of the loading experience, just like I would’ve done thirty years ago – that way I don’t miss any screens or fancy loaders. When I came to do this with Fly Catcher, I couldn’t help but notice there was a suspiciously short BASIC bit, followed by an even shorter piece of code, and then the game started. Now even with my limited knowledge of machine code I know that it takes more than 10 bytes of code to make a playable game – but to give PROSM the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it’s a 2K game compressed with zx7 or something. So I press a key to start, and… ahem. PROSM has entered what appears to be not a game into the crap games competition. Although at least it’s crap, so it ticks one out of the two boxes.
On the other hand, I might be missing something. The intro screen says “For more instructions see inlay”, so perhaps you’ll get further than I did if you can find it. I certainly couldn’t – I suspect this Holy Grail of inlays is at the very back of the kitchen drawer full of old batteries, rubber bands, and Soda Stream instruction manuals – so if you do succeed in finding it, you could say there’s no flies on you! Ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ha! Ha. Christ on a bike, I’ve still got two months to go of this shit.
Score: 8 out of 100 (one for each spider’s spidery spider leg)
Download here.
