Krusty's Fun House

Ask any Simpsons fan and they will tell you it’s not just Bart, Lisa, Homer, Marge and Maggie that make the show worth going to a BSkyB-owning friend’s house to watch. It’s the subsidiary characters too: people like Itchy ‘n’ Scratchy, and Krusty the clown. Krusty’s Super Fun House is a good-looking, nicely thought-out platform game which should be able to keep the most jaded of gamers on their toes for a while.

You move Krusty about a few platforms, each of which contains a number of doors. Simply stand outside a door, soak in the strangely menacing music, press the fire-button and in you go to one of the sub-levels. Then all you have to do is to play a kind of reverse Troddlers/Lemmings in which you have to lead a bunch of rats to their deaths at the hands of a major Simpsons character. Like Troddlers you have to make use of blocks to achieve this aim. Unlike Troddlers you have to search for these blocks along your way - and this search becomes more difficult with the later levels.

The game looks excellent, there’s some great use of colour and neatly designed levels, but it’s let down by strange parallax scrolling and poor collision detection. Despite the moans Krusty’s Super Fun House is a mightily enjoyable piece of Amiga gameplay. Once you’ve got over the initial amazement that Krusty himself can outleap Bob Fosbury from a standing start, you will find yourself coming back for more and more.