Avoid the Noid (Commodore 64) review "Oh gee, the Noid. Certainly a lost character of pop culture such as this would denote a classic and entertaining experience... "

Oh gee, the Noid. Certainly a lost character of pop culture such as this would denote a classic and entertaining experience...

In a perfect world, perhaps, but this game is quite far from perfect.

Certainly an...interesting day job.

Your objective in this game is to deliver a pizza. This is your first pizza delivery to be inducted into the Domino's Pizza business. Sounds exciting, eh? Well, your 'client' is in the penthouse of a thirty-floor building. And, of course, ''Noids''(Domino's hating, red bunny mutations if you need an idea of what they are) are running rampant through the entire building. For ''the client's safety'', he's locked himself behind a password-locked door as well as several normal locked doors. Oh yes, and you have that famous thirty minutes or less guarantee to stick to(which starts at thirty minutes when you begin the game...Were you parked right outside when the order was placed?). Sounds like a daunting task for a recruit pizza guy, but those are the risks...right?

Seriously cheesy...

Unfortunately, the game falls apart right at the gates. When you jam the stick, does the pizza guy go running, hurrying to his destination? Not a chance. Instead, he shuffles slowly from floor to floor, taking his sweet time(must really be new). Doesn't really matter, as three floors are small enough to fit on a single screen. If you need to speed him up, you could always have him leap or roll. Unless there's a door nearby, in which case he'll just stand still with his hands on the pizza box instead of at least walk...err, hobbling. Concerned about the timer? Done be, as it is easily possible to reach the top floor with twenty minutes still remaining!

Then a Noid will show up and present one of the worst hit detection systems in the history of the C-64. Sometimes, while you are next to a stairwell, the Noid will simply walk THROUGH you! Other times, when landing from a leap a good three feet from the Noid, your pizza guy will fall over and ''die'' anyway. WHY?! That's okay, because the Noids are still easy to dodge...until later when they rip out their rocket launchers. Then you pretty get hit most of the time, simply because the rockets reload and fire/fly far too fast for most players. Eventually, you'll reach near the top...and locate a password-locked door. So where's the password? In three different phones, and since the password changes from game to game, you have to check those phones each game while dodging Noid rockets! Worse yet, you must be standing in just the right place and FACING the right direction to answer a phone. Oh, and let's not forget that there are trapdoors that will drop you down a floor or two should you step on them(usually right into a Noid or one of its rockets).

Atmosphere was nothing special.

While you'll falling through traps, answering phones and dodging rockets, you'll feel slightly creeped out as something seems missing...any and all sound. There's no ringing, laughter or explosions. You just take hits or cause them and it's pretty much just *POOF*...taken care of. There's not so much as a jingling key sound as you unlock doors. As for the music, it's just a little monotone diddly that repeats every ten seconds or so for nearly the ENTIRE game!

This is one dish that shouldn't have been served cold.

So, should you finally beat this game, what is your reward? A single small statement in a poor-looking comic panel. Thus you jab the button for another go...surprise! It seems that the geniuses that made this game decided to prevent masochism by locking you in this screen. The only way to restart after seeing this screen is to reset your machine, of which you should be able to find another game lying around to play instead.

Speaking of which, why not save yourself the time and just go on to finding another game/download by skipping this title entirely. No one should ever order this dismal item off the menu...

Community review by MercenaryCobra1 (July 11, 2007) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.