Putty (Amiga) - Guest Post

To celebrate Super Adventures in Gaming's 600th post, I'm playing one of the bundle games that came with the Amiga 600!

Putty aka Silly Putty aka Super Putty aka Putty Moon.

Gotta love that Putty.

One button joystick time!

I can jump, stretch along platforms and across gaps and punch. The little bastard moves at the speed of a snail on his little wobbly toe protrusions. Kid needs to grow himself some feet.

To attack, you hold the fire button and yank to the left or right. To stretch across the ground, you hold the fire button and tear your joystick in half to the left or right. Putty will mail you his response eventually. Just like Time Commando's controls, actually.

So, here's the skinny, you have to punch the frozen robots to release them, then absorb them, then take them to the top of the screen. When you get there, you do something I haven't yet worked out to put them in.

Ugh. These jumps are really difficult. There's no indication how far you can jump. You can't grapple up ledges. Putty doesn't bounce all around the place like a rubber ball, he just falls off things like he's made of lead.

That fake Putty outside the window is confusing as hell.

Now what? Is he in? No?! Where's my fucking robot gone?!

Oh, so that's how it's gonna be? I get a massive amount of health and can replenish it by eating almost anything, but the robot I'm carrying has only 4 hit points until it disappears and reappears as an ice cube four screens below.

Damn it all.

"BLAURRGHHAAAAALAAA."

Oh, Christ, Putty's scream. That terrible scream.

No music, but it's far from silent. Every object on the screen is bouncing about the place making some kind of noise. It's... awful.

To get health back, (though nothing seems to be able to damage me at this point) you have to punch enemies to turn them into babies.

And then you eat them. Whole.

If you don't eat them, they explode. If you absorb the baby just as it explodes (say, if the controls were less than responsive for any reason), the evil cat Dweezil bursts out the background and shrieks "TOO BAD! JUST MISSED 'IM! WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Which if I'm not mistaken is nicked right out of a Screwball Squirrel cartoon.

You'll have to take my word for it that these are different levels I'm showing you. I'm sure if I showed you a couple of shots of the different Acts of Sonic the Hedgehog's Green Hill Zone, they'd all look the same too.

If you fall off the bottom of the level, you reappear at the starting point without losing a life. You even get to keep your robot and its HP. Which is nice, because Putty is so damned heavy, when he falls he easily outruns the screen. Can YOU spot the Putty?

He's dead, thanks to the instant death spikes.

This framerate is really starting to give me a headache. It feels like its running a quarter of what Wiz 'n' Liz runs at, just like Harlequin did. This is 1992 we're talking about! Pull it together!

The spitting guy on the left and his "Wshshshs. Splut!" made me giggle.

It's hard to know what you're supposed to do against enemies. Some you punch, some you jump on, some you eat. Sometimes when you jump on one of the ones you're supposed to jump on, it hurts you anyway.

When you kill one, it immediately reappears back in its original position in a puff of smoke. That takes the fun out of it a bit, doesn't it?

Most enemies don't take off any Pliability when you touch them (the Playability is already zero) and the enemies that can damage you with explosives are easily avoided by bouncing or stretching around them instead of stopping and waiting.

I'm up to level six or something and I'm finding it quite hard to die. Believe me, by now I'm desperately trying to. I'm playing this in a trance, just bouncing right through enemies without a care for whether they hit me or not.

It's a race against time to get to the robots before they automatically walk into a hazard and get destroyed and reappear somewhere completely different.

I picked up some kind of powerup and this guy called Uncle Ted popped out of nowhere and started playing music.

"TOO BAD!"

I died.

For my efforts, I'm awarded The Distinguished Order of The Overripe Tomato, The Imperial Poached Egg for Valour, The Frozen Item For Extreme Silliness and The Herring Cranium for Bravery.

Yet, The Royal Order of The Cheese On Toast and The Mashed Banana and Jam in a Plastic Bag for Heroism remain beyond my reach. I'll live.

It's time for me to crank this up a notch!

Super Putty on the CD32! The last time I played an Amiga game that got ported to CD32 was Donk! The Samurai Duck!, and that was different all over the place.

Super Putty (Amiga CD32)

Unlike Super Putty, which is exactly the bloody same everywhere. No intro. No music. Same shitty quality sound effects. Same headache-inducing frame rate. Same single button controls. The title screen is exactly the same, pixel for pixel.

Super Putty (Amiga CD32)

And if I plug in a makeshift keyboard and hit Escape, it immediately quits. I suppose that is a useful feature, because that's exactly what I wanted to do.

Perhaps the laziest port in the universe.

Putty was on the SNES too. Guess how it looks!

Super Putty (SNES)

If you said "The same but the levels are redesigned to be a bit narrower.", you'd be right!

Super Putty (SNES)

Except the punch buttons are the shoulder buttons, the jump and stretch actions have been given their own buttons, there's a level select, the framerate doesn't make me want to throw up and there's MUSIC.

I suppose if my life were at stake, I could sit down for a couple of hours and win Super Putty like this, but it would simply be mechanical action rather than for fun.

Someday I'll find a platformer that's better on the Amiga than on consoles. Someday. But not today.