UGH by Playbyte on Amiga (1992)
It’s the days of the dinosaur, and while sitting around trying not to get eaten our hero Ugh (played by you obviously) has the great idea of inventing a helicopter style transport cage. Wifey wants to see some money from this great new invention ad so you are tasked with setting up a taxi service to ferry the cavemen between platforms at various levels.
The mechanics of the game are simple, you collect the people by landing near them and picking them up and they show you which level they wish to get to. Using the up, left and right on your joystick you pilot your helicage to the customers destination. Sounds easy but when you add in gravity and inertia physics things get a little more difficult to control. Bringing your heli thing down on a platform takes careful use of the up direction as too hard a landing loses a life. Moving left and right is easy until you need to accurately land near your client, land on them and a life is lost as they plummet to the lake below.
In addition to the other problems, hit a platform with your rotor, and it’s once again curtains for Ugh. Add in a time limit and things get a bit frantic as you juggle time, controlled landings and avoiding everything. Then you get the prehistoric animals getting in the way and ending your life too. With level codes so it doesn’t get too frustrating when you run out of lives, you can type a code in to restart where you were if your lives run out.
Ugh reminds me a little of the lunar lander games most old computers had versions of, but with some cute background graphics and some nice sounds. The characters are a little small but recognisable as cave people and the setting is obviously prehistoric. It’s quite a challenging but fun game. Not great but it isn’t terrible either.
Score 6/10
