Top Cat in Beverly Hills or In Praise of Game Demos
In all honesty this was going to be a blog about cartoon characters in games, those treasured childhood TV heroes that our friendly ZX Spectrum brought to life. To do that I was going to re-visit possibly the only game I owned that featured a cartoon hero, Top Cat. But then I realised I didn't in fact own the whole game, it was a demo, on a cover tape. That made me think....what a wonderful idea those things were.
This is the cassette that allowed me to play Top Cat and the cartoon character in 'person' . You'll also notice it featured Lightforce as well, January 1991 was a bumper month. Not all months were with cover tapes, some months would just feature 4 games that were a little lacking shall we say, but other months you struck gold!
Back in the day having a computer game featuring a TV character was always a bragging point, you didn't have to explain to people who the main character was. Indeed if the software programmers had done their job properly you could just load the game up and wait for your friends to go 'WOW, it's ......' at least that was the dream! Or just lie about who the main character of the game was like I did with Alien 8 !
But this was a real Top Cat game ( even though he is in Beverley Hills, keeping Benny the Ball safe from a sneaky butler ) . When I loaded up the game , you had to admit that was certainly Top Cat !
But this was a real Top Cat game ( even though he is in Beverley Hills, keeping Benny the Ball safe from a sneaky butler ) . When I loaded up the game , you had to admit that was certainly Top Cat !
I went into college the next day , my home computer owning friends hadn't played the Top Cat game, now I was used to having weird software that they hadn't heard of , but surely this was a mainstream title? Then I suddenly remembered that little word 'demo', as I was the only one of us that subscribed to Crash Magazine , I was the only one with the game. But let me stop gloating for a moment and tell you about the game. It's a collect objects game, drop objects near things to have the desired effect to progress through the levels. It's also quite a tricky game, and is hampered by the fact that a lot of the screens look the same. But.....it's Top Cat, off the tele and he's on my computer !
The sheer novelty value for me of having a TV character in a game outweighed the actual game play. I hadn't had the Trapdoor games, or Scooby Doo, Ed the Duck , Thundercats or Hong Kong Phooey (and some of those I'm glad I didn't have!) So just about every family member that would listen got forced in to watching Top Cat on the ZXSpectrum. But just remember that back in the early 90's, these TV tie-ins were still quite rare. Plus for a little while , in my gaggle of friends I was the only one with this demo. In fact when the full game came out I don't think any of my friends bought it as they'd already seen what they needed to see on the demo version.
I've written before about the joy of getting a cover tape which meant that games that would normally be classed as 'uneducational' got past the parental censorship, but here was another use of the covertape. Now you could get game demos that could be used as evidence of how wonderful they were to buy the full game.
Although not in Top Cat's case, I'm afraid, once the novelty of the TV character wore off, it did just become a rather yellow collect the objects game.
I've written before about the joy of getting a cover tape which meant that games that would normally be classed as 'uneducational' got past the parental censorship, but here was another use of the covertape. Now you could get game demos that could be used as evidence of how wonderful they were to buy the full game.
Although not in Top Cat's case, I'm afraid, once the novelty of the TV character wore off, it did just become a rather yellow collect the objects game.
So why is this game included in my list of treasured games? Well these days I mainly write about cartoon computer games on more modern systems . This is probably the first cartoon game I came in to contact with and I can still remember that buzz from playing a demo that none of my friends had.
These days it's common place to be able to play a demo so you can decide whether to buy the game or not, but for me, back in the early 90's it was like being part of a secret club, with early access to gaming goodies each month.
These days it's common place to be able to play a demo so you can decide whether to buy the game or not, but for me, back in the early 90's it was like being part of a secret club, with early access to gaming goodies each month.