Spectrum Analyzer: Head over Heels

[Phillyman]

This week’s game is Head over Heels, which has nothing to do with the

of the same name but was nevertheless responsible for making British gamers weep bitterly throughout the late 1980s. It’s the hardest Spectrum game I’ve played since, uh, the last one I reviewed, but it deserves credit for its depth and innovation. The massive game world and isometric viewpoint bring to mind Solstice, released in 1990 for the NES, while the two heroes, each with their own unique abilities, predates Blizzard’s The Lost Vikings by a half-decade.

The title characters are a pair of round, furry space animals. Head is a ghostly canine who can leap great heights but has trouble getting around thanks to his lack of legs. Heels is a vaguely cat-like creature who can run quickly but has all the airtime of a sumo wrestler on a cake binge. When Head hops onto Heels, they combine to form a Catdog-like gestalt with the powers of both. The only problem is that they’ll have to find each other before they can do their best Voltron impression, and that can be tricky in a game spanning hundreds of rooms, with such dangers as spiked floors, roving androids, and lethal toasters in many of them.

Even once you’ve got Head over Heels (sorry) you’ll still have to split the duo apart to complete some puzzles. Here’s an example… one of the later rooms has two doors separated by spikes. The only conceivable way across this great pointy divide is by riding a robot that looks suspiciously like Prince Charles. (For those readers who weren’t born when this game was created, he’s a bumbling, big-eared member of British royalty. Imagine George W. Bush with bad teeth and you’d be on the right track.) The Prince can be controlled with the bumpers on either side of the room, but one member of the team has to stay behind to man the bumpers while the other takes the Royal Express to the other door.

When the game’s puzzles aren’t clever, they’re maddeningly difficult, due in equal parts to the early British game design mindset (“if the player hasn’t stomped through the floor in blind rage, you’re just not doing your job!”) and an isometric viewpoint that makes the locations of platforms hard to determine. Near the end of the game, you’ll be forced to make curved jumps, carefully shape stacked blocks into stairs, and pick up the blocks you’ve stacked immediately after you jump to stack them elsewhere. While it’s technically possible to finish Head over Heels in less than an hour, it will take many more hours of trial and error before you’ll be able to do it.

Just to prove that it can be done, here’s an

of the more colorful Amiga version of Head over Heels being played from start to finish. If you were thinking about climbing this mountain yourself, you can also find a walkthrough for the game on the ShadowMagic.org web page.

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