Carlos

It's FATMAN!

Les Adventures de Carlos was released in 1994 by Microids and we are in control of a bearded fat man wearing a rather odd costume! This might sound strange but our best friend appears to be a parrot who tries to help you out a little. Anyhow, this is a platformer with each level stuffed with lots of baddies, however, we have no gun and need to use your enormous weight to squish everyone! You can even use some of that blubber when falling farther as this creates a miniature earthquake thus killing anything nearby. It's hardly original when you think about it but, whatever works, right?

Aesthetically, Carlos looks and sounds really nice with stunning colours and beautiful sprites. However, the gameplay was designed to have scrollable levels and the ST suffers from a lame port. Sadly, we must endure push-scrolling - and in all directions. What this means is that the gameplay stops while the screen is pushed along. This becomes extremely irritating, especially during a diagonal jump which may require the screen to scroll in two separate directions.

This game could have been great but it's most certainly not. The end result is something that looks good but plays terribly. In fact, I found it quite agonising because of the constant pauses as the game scrolls in different directions. The Atari ST has a wealth of decent platformers so we don't need rubbish like this garbage. Stay clear of this one!!

I do not recommend Carlos but masochists can download it for floppy and hard drive.

Level codes: Level 2 = BONGO / Level 3 = GALET / Level 4 = PATAU / Level 5 = SIRTA