It’s a great time to be a retrogamer, not only do we have all the new ways to quickly load a game but also lots of people creating all new content for our all old computers. Toofys Winter Nuts is one of the new games made for an olf computer, in this case the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and it benefits from many of the tricks coders have learnt over the years of Spectrum programming.
The titular Toofy is a squirrel, an industrious little chap busily preparing for the long cold winter months ahead, and stocking up on nuts. Your job is to guide Toofy in his quest to locate his nuts in this colourful and fun 2d flickscreen platformer. To guide Toofy you can use a keyboard, or Kempston compatible joystick to move him left, right, or up and down ladders (a squirrel needs a ladder to climb trees) to reach the higher platforms, you can also jump to avoid the other animals in the forest and reach some platforms.
In a nutshell that is all there is to Toofys Winter Nuts, walk around, collect nuts and avoid getting killed. Obviously that’s not as simple as it sounds, with some jumps between platforms requiring some very accurate positioning, and some nuts only accessible by traversing multiple screens and back again. The other animals also move around seemingly randomly making the task of avoiding them quite difficult at times.
The graphics for Toofy are big and bold, with only minimal colour clash which reminds you it’s being played on the Speccy. Sound effects on the 48k Spectrum are used sparingly, a jump sound and a sound of death when it all goes wrong. Controls are responsive, the only bugbear is getting up or down a ladder needs exact positioning and sometimes missing the one spot will get you killed but that will improve with practice.
Toofys Winter Nuts is a very good game on the Spectrum, fun, quirky and reminiscent of the golden years of the little Sinclair in its heyday.
Score 7/10
Short play of Toofys Winter Nuts on our YouTube channel:-
Toofys winter nuts short play: http://youtu.be/SKbT1LSFDxk
