Vegetable Vacation

Review by Graham Goring from the Sam Coupé Scrapbook

Oh dear. This game came out at almost the same time as the SAM, and it shows. The sound is screechy, the controls slightly sluggish and some situations in the game are almost impossible to get out of.

It all revolves round you (and Tomato with wings and a ball orbitting your body - it get’s odder) flying round a castle, trying to get objects to use in some other place. Now the thing that cripples the game, is it’s gimmick.

You can only control your character when he is touching a wall, as soon as you become detached you can only sit back and home that he gets to another wall before he hits some nasty. If it weren’t for that, this could be a decent ‘explore and map’ game. But the fact that you have to have leaps of faith all the time (which mostly end up in you dying horribly) means that exploration of a previously unseen area will normally end up in a little ‘Game Over’ message being displayed on the screen.

Luckily, to slightly combat this, you do have an ample supply of lives at the start, but I feel that less lives and an energy bar would have been better.

This game is a missed opportunity. With a little fore-thought and planning I would have loved it. Shame.