Barchou
While many people probably think I just sit here and write whatever comes into my head, I do actually try to research the games I’m playing. In the case of Barchou, I am having a difficult time finding any information.
This is also a short review because the game is awful and I ran out of ways of saying it.
Story:
There is probably an official story, but I am having a really hard time tracking it down. Therefore, I will be writing the official story. You ready? This will be fun.
So you are minding your own business in your flying chair when one day a vision appears in the sky, it is an alien spaceship! Flying out of the ship comes a fleet of mechanical butterflies. They are flying straight for your model LEGO cities, which you spent the last 4 months setting up in your garden.
They start to drop fire bombs onto the Lego cities because they do not believe in great Architecture in model form.
Your job is to take your flying chair and save your cities!
Game Play:
You press fire, and you shoot some laser beams. Sometimes they hit an alien, sometimes they don’t. You move around a bit, but it’s not really that important because as long as you go up and down and press fire, you’ll be fine.
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And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the full extent of the game play in Barchou.
There is an Oxygen level to be aware of, but I’ll be honest, you’ll either be killed by aliens or boredom before it runs out.
Graphics:
The main character sprite is nice and large, well-drawn, but it flickers all the time, which is really annoying.
The Aliens are as basic as possible to be without perhaps giant A’s to represent them.
Box Art:
I could only find the Spectrum box for this game, possibly because everyone who bought the Amstrad version burned it in protest of such a shitty game; Spectrum owners were used to it by then.
It’s a person sitting in a chair wearing a space suit. For some reason, he is holding a lollipop, which is madness because he can’t lick a lollipop in space.
Impression:
The sprite for the player is pretty cool, but you quickly realise the game is awful.
It may have only cost £1.99, but it still feels like daylight robbery that this was ever released.
Central Solutions, who produced the game, also produced “surprise surprise”, which will forever go down as one of the worst games in the world and will definitely be a future article once I have the energy to try and write about it.
