Oscar

Year 1994, it's raining outside, I'm sitting in front of a monitor with that characteristic VGA glow on my face and I'm launching a platformer that I didn't pay much more attention to than half an afternoon back then. Oscar from Flair Software didn't pretend to be anything — it knew what it was, and wasn't ashamed of it.

The game has nothing to do with film awards, even though the name suggests otherwise. The main character is an adorable squirrel-like creature who finds himself inside a cinema and walks through various "screens" — that is, levels thematically set in film genres. Western scenery, horror, sci-fi environments. The idea isn't bad; action platformers of that era liked to play with similar environment variations, and Oscar uses it as an excuse to change the visual style.

Gameplay is pure old-school platforming: you run, jump, dodge enemies or jump on them from above, collect items. Nothing that would surprise anyone in 1994. The controls work, the jump physics are acceptable, difficulty increases appropriately. The game originally came out on Amiga and the DOS version is essentially a solid port — colorful, smooth, without major hitches. On Sound Blaster it sounded as you'd expect: percussive melodies that stop bothering you after about an hour.

Oscar wasn't and isn't groundbreaking. It's competent middle-of-the-road fare for its time — better than plenty of shovelware titles that flooded the market back then, but far behind what Apogee or id Software managed with their platformers. What aged the worst about this game is its length and depth: levels are short, enemies repeat, and variation is mostly cosmetic. Anyone who bought CD compilations of hundreds of games for a few hundred bucks back then simply had Oscar on them — and it entertained them for a while.

Today, this game will probably be played by someone who remembers it from the nineties and wants to check if it was as good as they remember. Spoiler: it was average then and it's average now, but nineties average still has its specific charm. You can run it in a browser through DOSBox emulators without problems, it takes about an hour and a half, and nobody gets a headache. I've experienced worse ways to spend a lunch break.