Arachnaphobia

Copyright : Disney | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

For those of you with a fear of spiders and of course those with good taste in films we at CPC Zone hope you stayed away from this movie and never have to endure the awful acting and content. This is of course the game based on the movie by Hollywood Pictures and Amblin Entertainment in which a killer species of spider is taking over America and plans on murdering the entire human race.

Graphics

Although the movie was total and utter rubbish someone has managed to pull a half good game from there arse with this official movie license. The graphics are very colourful and the game spans over 2 images and a single double sided floppy disk (around 45 minutes of audio tape) it?s not hard to see why it looks so good. Those that have ever played Ghostbusters by Activision will be more than familiar with this game as it starts off just the same (take a look at screen grab #1 for proof) but it looks a whole lot better when you stop off at one of those houses (see screen grab #2).

There are plenty of colours on offer and despite the slightly (ever so slightly) slow pace at which our hero walks along the floors it?s still a very nice looking piece of software and what that will show the C64 fans what the Amstrad CPC is capable, despite being made out of a bad movie license.

Sound

Sound is also very nice with some great music on offer at the start of the game, plenty of in-game explosions, bangs and taps when blasting those pesky spiders and much more. Unlike some other half done movie licenses it seems a good job has been done on this one - maybe the execs of Amblin watched closely this time knowing how bad the franchise has been in the past.

Gameplay

Despite copying the basic idea from the much earlier Ghostbusters game by Activision the gameplay offered by Hollywood Pictures Arachnaphobia is fairly great. The graphics look almost 16-bit and there has been a lot of attention to detail, control systems are simple enough despite the slow down problem we mentioned earlier and it?s not overly difficult to play. The only problem is how quickly our bug blasting friend runs out of ammunition and you never seem to have enough to complete the evacuation of the house.

All in all - not a bad game but it could have been done a little better - not much though considering the poor movie it is based on.