Bad Cat

Bad Cat dates from 1987, is presented here in its Commodore 64 form and was published by U.S. Gold. The premise is gloriously stupid: the year is 1988, Seoul is preparing for the Olympics, and the city's stray cats respond by staging games of their own. You play the roughest of them and work through a run of events that resemble athletics about as closely as a scrap behind the bins does.

The game is a chain of separate events linked by city sections in which you mostly dodge traffic on your way to the next one. Then it drops you into the next act. You hurdle obstacles and vault walls, balance on a large ball, swing hand over hand along monkey bars, bounce on trampolines, squeeze through the sewers punching white mice, outrun a dog, and finally face that dog in a bowling duel where you hurl a ball down a lane at him.

The trouble is that almost every event controls differently and the game explains none of it. Without the manual some sections are simply impassable — the ball balancing above all, where you have to alternate the stick backwards and forwards to a rhythm you cannot see anywhere on screen. Collision detection is loose, brushing an obstacle kills you outright, and the closing bowling match is decided more by luck than by skill. The one mercy is unlimited lives and a return to a checkpoint.

What remains is a good-looking, likeably daft game that does not actually play well. The graphics are above average for 1987, the cat is animated with real wit, the title music is audibly better than the program attached to it, and the concept holds together. Pick up the stick, though, and it becomes clear nobody tuned the individual events properly. It is worth a look as a curiosity rather than as an evening's entertainment.

On oldgame.cz Bad Cat runs directly in your browser with nothing to download.