Higgledy Piggledy
First appeared in ZXF issue 10 (Spring/Summer 2005)
Author: Jonathan Cauldwell
Publisher: Cronosoft (www.cronosoft.co.uk)
Another year; another Cronosoft release; another game by Jonathan Cauldwell. The first that the denziens of WoS Forums knew of this upcoming release was Cronosoft's Simon Ullyatt asking for entries in an inlay designing competition. A very strange thread followed, but Simon got his entries nonetheless and the cover for Higgledy Piggledy is one of the best Cronosoft inlays so far.
The game? It's to do with Interplanetary Pig Farmer Eadwig Addlethorpe. Of course it is. Eadwig's pigs - through some sort of odd evolutionary quirk - can fly; this, of course, is not normal porcine behaviour and frankly it makes things rather awkward for Eadwig when it comes to round-ing them up for slaughter. He's installed a number of teleporters - like you do - in order to send them off to the pig processing plant, but can he direct those pigs successflly into the telepor-ter? He can not. And that, of course, is where you come in.
If it was down to me a rifle and a pointer dog would do the trick quite nicely; instead we are given a fiendishly addictive puzzle game where you both move around the playing area and attempt to influence the direction of the pigs by picking up and moving blocks one at a time. The pigs, you see, move along in straight lines until they hit a block, at which point they take a right-angled turn. It's a bit like a combination of Lemmings and that game where you control the light with the mirrors. But more frustrating. Oh yes - and better.
In my opinion Jonathan Cauldwell has already made a permanent name for himself in Spectrum software, simply due to the fact that it's the twenty-first century and he's the only guy around banging out Spectrum games at the frequency and high quality that he is. All of his games to date have been highly competant, attractive and fun-to-play pieces of work but, with the possible exception of Fun Park, I can't say in all honesty that anything he's done so far stands out as a Specrum classic in its own right. But Higgledy Piggledy does.
There are a number of simple, but very effective ways in which he achieves this - we're not talking multicolour effects or border graphics here, just striking visuals and simple gameplay. The back-grounds against which Eadwig and pigs move in particular are cleverly managed patchworks which look like they shouldn't be possible on a Spectrum. Of course you quickly realise that the effect has more to do with good colour placement than it does any tomfoolery with the TV beam, but by then the illusion has done its work and what you're left with is a 'look' that will now always be associated with this specific game. Higgledy Piggledy has that ultra-special quality: it doesn't look like something you've seen before. Add in a wacky series of title screen animations (pigs flying; sausages sizzling: you know the sort of thing) and you have something completely unique. I've applauded Jonathan's work before, but this gets an ovation.
