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GAME REVIEWED: Baldies
RELEASED BY: Sold-Out
PRICE: £4.99)
REVIEWED BY: G-String
REVIEW: -
The title of this game makes everyone I've shown it to laugh. "Baldies?" they say. "What kind of a ****ed up game is that?" Well, my friends, come closer and I will tell you.
You control your little bald guys. Your prime objective is to build up a small civilisation and develop the technology to kill the hairy neighbours. That's basically it. It really is lame. I thought it was anyway. The game itself is fairly simple to understand. There are 4 icons which control your Worker, Soldier, Builder and Scientist Baldies and there are icons which lead to your usual features in games (options, exit, save game, etc).
Your worker baldies are the families, the population of your colony. You have to put them into a house for them to reproduce. The more you put into a house, the faster they breed. Workers are useful in many ways as they can be changed into any other Baldie at the click of a button, but their main use is for breeding. Your Soldier baldies are for defence against attacks from your hairy opponents. They can be changed into any other baldie as well. The builder baldies are a bit more useful. They determine the condition of the house they are in. They also upgrade the house and build more houses. The more builders there are in one house, the quicker the house is repaired (if it is damaged), the quicker it is upgraded and extended (if it is not already fully grown) and the more houses that can be built. Your scientist baldies are the only way in the beginning to eliminate the hairy competitors. The more of them working together, the more you can achieve, like electrocution, pits, etc. The scientists discover these with the help of various objects you can pick up. These can be animals, rocks and plants.
This game is pretty weird, not in it's structure or anything like that, but the fact that you are supposed to kill the hairy people makes you wonder if all the bald people out there are in fact, planning a secret war in which they'll kill all us hairy people. Bloody psychopaths if they do, that's what I think (no offence to bald people). But you have to admit that this game is severely weird and pathetic.
The graphics are pretty smooth but they are using an ancient style. Everything is smooth and nice, all one colour, not much texture involved, but this suits the style of the game. The game is probably aimed at younger people because I did not find it appealing at all. Many games which are aimed at children, I have found funny and liked (for a laugh), but this game did not match any of them, it didn't come close. I think the creators were straining for ideas and this is all they could come up with, and it's not very good. This is the only explanation I can come up with.
The sound effects are probably the best part of the game. The music is pleasing and not thrashing away, and the sound of the sea and the waves crashing on the shore is a pleasant change from screams of pain and anguish, as heard in Half-Life and Unreal. This is one good thing going for Baldies at present.
This is all I can say about the game. It is really pathetic and lame, and I found it a chore to play. The graphics are lame, but smooth. they're not up to the standards we expect in this day and age. The sound was ok, pleasant and nice, but the game's playability was very poor. OK, you could maybe sit for hours and play the damn game, but there was very little enjoyment for me.
SCORE:
68%
MINIMUM HARDWARE REQUIRED:
CPU: 486+
RAM: 16MB
15MB HD Space
Windows 98\95\NT
LINKS: www.maxis.com