Review Version - Amstrad CPC 464
Developer - Central Solutions
Publisher - Central Solutions
There have been lots of slightly misguided attempts at turning TV programs into computer games over the years but this one is a shocker.
Cilla Black was "Saturday Night TV" in the 80’s so making a virtual version seems, on the face of it, to be a money making idea. But Surprise Surprise is hardly the kind of show that fits a gaming format. It was more “Here’s your long lost relative” and less “Lazer blasters shooting everything”. But hey, let's give it a chance.
Story Time
You have been invited to a banquet held by Long John. I am not sure if he is related to Long John Silver but he has a banqueting hall so you have to assume he is in the money. Maybe he is Long John Silver, retired from being a pirate and spending his ill gotten wealth on parties.
When you arrive you can’t get into the banqueting hall because it’s locked. In order to unlock it you have to journey around the house and find four buttons which you have to press. Why does Long John have such a bizarre system of locking internal doors? I guess if he was a pirate he wanted to keep his plunder safe, One Eyed Willie from The Goonies had his whole ship full of booby traps.
Fits R Us
When the game begins loading it starts to draw these lines on the screen while at the same time flashes the background and the frame colour different colours. It, as far as I can tell, has no connection to the game at all but it’s still there in all its fit-inducing glory.
It is hard to show you just have fit inducing this is, without inducing a fit.
Once the game starts proper you are presented with a view outside a house, drawn by what I can only assume was the 6 year old niece of the lead programmer. It’s says to "press enter" to start the game but you have to wait for Cilla to make her way slowly across the screen before it registers the key press.
A house by Emily aged 6
Eventually she skips across far enough to enter the door to the house. From here you have to navigate your way around being careful not to touch, well, anything because everything seems to kill you. I swear I am not making this up, everything in this game seems to want to murder you.
Fruit Based Fun
Each room has different obstacles you need to avoid which bizarrely all appear to be fruit based. It feels a bit like the programmer was working on a fruit machine simulator and then changed his mind at the last minute. Bizarrely the fruit are the best drawn items in the game.
Deadly lemons and those multi coloured things... they kill you as well
Timing is critical and would be a fun thing to work out except for the fact the Cilla barely moves across the screen which makes absolutely everything a chore. When you die (it’s not an if) the game doesn’t tell you, it just goes to a black screen for about 20 seconds and then starts back in the first room!
When the developer can’t even be bothered to mock your rubbish attempt at their game, you know something is wrong.
Even something as simple as going through the doors is painful. You have to be lined up in pixel perfect precision for the doors to work. You spend so much time shuffling up and down you don’t actually notice the giant lemon coming to kill you.
At some point you have to press a button, but I have never gotten this far, I have never found a button, just bouncing killer fruit!
Curly Wurly
I mentioned earlier that the house was probably drawn by a 6 year old, this extends to the Cilla herself. The character on the screen looks nothing like our Cilla. I am starting to think this game has nothing to do with Cilla Black at all and was just a cheap marketing ploy to trick old people into buying the grandson a video game a bit like the PolyStation years later. Although how many kids were big enough fans of Cilla to want a computer game I don't know.
The Polystation a gift from grandmas everywhere
What is the character supposed to be then? They are clearly happy and they wear a jumper with a 1 on it. Is this why they are happy despite being in this horrible game, are they no.1 at being happy perhaps?
The animation (if you want to call it that) for the main character is a bizarre choice.
Walking left or right he appears to be kicking his front leg with his back leg to move. It gives the sense of someone doing the cancan across the screen or it’s an early attempt to portray a person with walking difficulties.
Walking up and down involves flapping shoes, honestly they look like the ducks people have on sticks.
Walking up also means they suddenly grow a glorious blonde head of hair which is missing in every other direction. Given how glorious it is, I feel somewhat cheated that it isn’t shown more.
This is the full sprite sheet for our hero... behold it's glory of design.
The energy and time gone into making these sprites.
Fake Game Art
What is quite worrying, is if you had come across this game and bought it based on the box art alone, you were in for a surprise (the name is starting to make sense).
You see there is a knight with lightning coming out of his hand. Wow, that sounds like a pretty awesome game, can I play that one? It’s a bit like those mobile game ads where the game in the ad look really good but when you download it, it’s a match 4 game with no reference to the awesome ad.
Does the knight appear in the game at some point, who knows, no one has gotten that far.
I want this game
Awful and boring is not a combination that wins
This game is slow, boring and very very confusing. You spend half your time trying to time a shuffle across the screen and the other half trying to line up with the doors.
Central Solutions who wrote this also wrote Barchou which as you will remember from this review is an awful awful game. They also produced a game called Battlefront but I can’t find this anywhere at all so I have to assume it’s just as bad.
I try really hard to review these games with the mindset of the limitations of the systems of the day. You can’t review a 464 game and go well, The 3D isn’t as good as the PS5 version, for madness lies that way. But I can honestly say this game is awful. It’s awful for the time it was written, it is awful now. It should have been buried with all those copies of ET.
Other Systems:
It wasn’t released for any other systems as far as I can tell and in an interesting twist of fate it doesn’t actually run on anything other than the 464. Normally the 664 and the 6128 have software not compatible with the 464 but in a move so daring I have to assume it was on purpose (it wasn’t I just like to be dramatic) Surprise Surprise is 464 exclusive.
Why it doesn’t work on other Amstrad machines is most likely down to the fact that the programmer made some rash judgments about memory management or they were an evil genuis who hated 464 users.
Surprise Surprise
I don't know who programmed this game, but I imagine you are a terrible person!
Pretty much unplayable