Kid Chaos (Amiga)

 According to legend, this game started out as a pitch to SEGA for an Amiga port of Sonic The Hedgehog, or possibly an original Sonic game made for the Amiga. I don't know if that's true, but surely anyone would just pre-emptively assume that SEGA wouldn't endorse a port of their mascot character and hardware showcase to another company's system? Though rumours of an Amiga Sonic were pretty prevalent in the early nineties, with screenshots of something claiming to be such a thing appearing in some magazines.

 

It's clear that even if the above legend isn't true, that the gme was definitely heavily influenced by the Sonic games, at least. Your character (a caveman brought to the future by scientists, and inexplicably given a flat-top haircut and a leather jacket) runs really fast, with momentum being gained or spent running up and down hills. He attacks with a spinning jump attack. 

 

There's also a non-conventional health system that's different enough from Sonic's rings, but you can see the influence in there: you start a stage with ninety-nine hitpoints, and after taking damage, you slowly recover at a rate of one HP per second, plus one for every one of the half-apples flowing around that you collect. One original element is your destructive quota: in each stage, you've got to destroy a certain amount of objects to open the exit. The objects in the first set of stages are flowers, which I did like. The idea of a game where a caveman who's dressed like a stereotypical modern-day thug on a mission to destroy every flower he finds has a kind of Beano-ish charm to it. One of the later stages has the object literally just being ring monitors from Sonic, which does dampen the originality points a little.

 

The weirdest part of this is how damage is dealt: instead of different enemies and hazards dealing different amounts of damage, each stage has a "damage factor" announced on the introductory briefing screen, and everything that can hurt you in that stage will do that amount of damage. These start out at a reasonable thirty or fourty points of damage, but rising to the ludicrous heights of eighty-five later in the game. Which brings up the game's biggest problem: the difficulty. I actually got as far as the second section of the second set of stages under my own power. That stage is run under a strict time limit, you've still got to find your quota of things to destroy, and there's spikes on almost every surface. Furthermore, the spikes are very small and don't stand out much visually when you're stood still, let alone when you're moving as fast as you can to beat the clock. On top of all of that, that most hated bugbear of European microcomputer platformers is also present: tiny drops of liquid that fall down from the ceiling and hurt/kill the player.

 

So, I used passwords to see later stages in the game, both to take more varied screenshots for this review, and to see if this stage was just a weird difficulty spike in an already-hard game. Nope, the game continues to be a miserably harsh experience. All the stupid comments people say about Sonic games, about how they're meant to be about speed, but the traps and enemies never let you go past (it's very telling that such "critics" have such a hard time with a series of games that are incredibly easy to complete) are actually true about Kid Chaos. Except it's not just that there's lethal enemies and hazards all over the place, but also that the eponymous Kid is so unruly in his movements. That is to say, he's always sliding arond everywhere! The game demands precision, but doesn't allow you to give it! 

 

I'm really disappointed in Kid Chaos. The idea of a weird reskin of a rejected Sonic project was interesting, and of course, being a Sonic-like means that the old "one button controls" problem wouldn't have mattered, either! This could have been one of the best Amiga platformers, and maybe one of the best Amiga games in general, but actually playing it is just such a thoroughly unpleasant experience.