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It
almost brings a tear to my eye when thinking back to watching
this great cartoon series as a young kid. So much so that when
I found the game in a second-hand shop, I was quick to buy it.
Loading
up the game when I got home, I was sadly disapointed to find a
poor arcade adventure game based around a murder at a circus.
When
researching for GTW and generally playing various games, I came
across this interesting preview of the game, which is nothing
like the abysmal game that was released.
This
version of the game is much closer to the style of Melbourne
House games which was typical at the time (Muncher, Street
Hassle), with a chunky main character (Though accurate and bloody
well animated!).
Gadget
has to run through a horizontally scrolling level (Very much best
described as a Metro Cross clone),
jumping obstacles and getting Gadget skates and other gadgets
like the Helecopter, spring legs and other bits. Very faithful
to the cartoon original, and much more fun!....
Collecting
certain objects, makes you jump to other screens, which I can't
quite make out. This can be put down to the fact that its an early
preview, and one that crashes fairly frequently, but its damn
playable!
No music exists in the preview, apart from an awesome
rendition of the theme tune in the intro sequence, far better than Jason Brooke's version
in the released game, and much closer to the the cartoon and the
style of old Melbourne house music. You can check it out for yourselves
from the link above (Make sure you have a good sidplayer).
Graphically
very funny, and the animations for each part of Inspector Gadget
are very faithfully reproduced.
Recently it has been discovered that the version in Gamebase 64 has the missing intro sequence, which is a very faithful rendition of the cartoon's intro... superb!.... Plus it has the music which has been sitting in HVSC for a while. This updated version has been added in the download recently.
Well, the scanned advert (thanks to Peter Weighill for supplying a link) proves that this WAS to be Circus Of Fear..... So it seems that there must have been some kind of problem with the game, or disagreement over pay maybe?.... We are not too sure yet.
Thanks to Mat yet again, the creators were recently found and
now we find out exactly what happened to this game. Check out
the Creator Speaks pages for more details.
Essentially, the game was being developed by Ian Chia, and was
almost getting to a complete stage. But towards the end there
was a bug that kept crashing the game, and unfortunately after
many banging of heads, the developers could not find what was
causing it. With deadlines looming, Melbourne House had to
concede defeat, and so new developers were very quickly drafted
in to knock out a quick effort which was the dire arcade
adventure game which was released... Dire maybe because it was
rushed.
What is quite sickening though is the fact that soon after the
contract was passed over to another development team, the
developers of the original game found that it was something
startlingly simple that was causing the crash, and that they
could have after all fixed it and finished the game. Sadly bad
luck prevented what should/could have been an excellent licensed
game.
It is not known exactly how the game has managed to sneak out,
but it is believed that this is the final version, and indeed it
does crash on occasion. Both developers did not know how the
game was sneaked out, and were quite surprised to see it after
so many
years. Ian was only around 16\17 when he was developing the
game.
The main thing to be taken out of this, is that the preview has
sneaked out. It is possible more graphics, level maps and
enemies are hidden in the code and haven't been implemented just
yet. Possibly this is something that can be explored in the
future.
It is a game that could be finished maybe. But one thing is that
we can close the case on this game at long last, and we now know
that this was never more complete than what we have here. Enjoy
it, and dream of what could have been..
Wonderful
representation of Gadget on our C64...
Frank.
(Additional source credits - Peter Weighill, Mat Allen,
Mat (Bondclone))
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