The Ottifants (Master System)

The Ottifants are apparently from a cartoon created by German comedian Otto Waalkes, and if the games magazines in the UK at the time of this game's release are to believed, they were intended to be as popular a merchandising juggernaut as The Simpsons. Obviously, that never happened, the cartoon never left germany, with this game's release across europe the only reason anyone else has ever heard of them (and even this is pretty much completely forgotten). I've never seen The Ottifants cartoon, but having played the game, I assume the reason they never went anywhere is because they're an unendearing bunch of disgusting-looking shrivelled elephants. But is their game any good?

No. In fact, it's terrible in several different ways. There's a common complaint with European-developed shooting games, that even the weakest enemies are bullet sponges, making the player feel weak, and the game unsatisfying. Though it's not a shooting game, the enemies in it are dispatched by shooting multi-coloured dots from the end of your nose, and the regular enemies will stand there and take several shots before disappearing. The bosses take this to a ludicrous degree, with the first boss alone taking eighty hits before it'll fall, all while you're avoiding its homing death spanners.

Other than that, the game is just aggressively mediocre. You go around boring stages collecting teddy bears and pieces of paper with bar charts on them, until you find the exit. Then you go to the next stage. The one thing I can say in its favour is that the sprites are all big, colourful, and detailed to an extent that's pretty impressive for an 8-bit consoles. But even taking that into account, The Ottifants is an awful, joyless game, and I don't recommend wasting any time on it.