The Ooze (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Eww, glowing skull.

The picture of the slime monster isn't bad at all, but that colour cycling effect and the blocky text looks really amateurish. Not a good sign.

Hey, I had no idea that SEGA made computer monitors.

Oh right, "FILE: OO-Z", I get it.

One day, at the evil chemical plant...

... Dr D. Caine was caught resting his hand on the numeric keypad again.

Damn, now it's got me trying to figure out if 'D. Caine' is a pun too. Probably not, seeing as they're one letter away from the obvious 'D Raine' and they didn't go for it.

Operation Omega? Oh no!

I... have no idea what that means, and the game doesn't seem to want to let me in on the secret. Though I get the feeling that the guy watching this security footage probably isn't happy to find out that this guy's found out what his company's up to.

Wait, is this guy watching security footage of himself bursting into Dr Caine's office?

I gotta admit, I'm impressed with their security camera set up. They've got every angle covered. Or at least all the dramatic ones.

Wow, this guy is a terrible boss. The penalty for snooping around in the computer files is apparently an armful of green.

Well, they gotta find out what the stuff does somehow I suppose. Half the fun of creating evil drugs comes from testing them on innocents.

Man, they must really not like this guy. Apparently he started dissolving into green goo, so they shoved him down the sink. Or maybe they're just forcing him to take a bath in the stuff, either way he's fucked.

Hmm, a cryptic DNA screen. I'm going to guess that this shows how many DNA pick ups I've found in each world, and I have to collect them all to become human again at the end.

I just like watching them spin.

Wow, I really am playing as a puddle of gunk. With a head. Well at least he doesn't need glasses anymore.

The graphics actually look very good, with the slime puddle moving around exactly as a slime puddle should. It's a shame though the music sounds pretty terrible, bordering on unbearable. The instruments are really harsh, like the tracks weren't written with the Mega Drive's sound chip limitations in mind.

Actually, ignore what I just said, I've changed my mind. This music is fucking awesome, it's just the instruments that are bad. (Youtube link).

Son of a bitch, where the hell did that flame come from? It just fired up out of the ground and burned up some of my slime puddle! I guess when the slime's all burned away I lose a life.

Fortunately I can get slime back by killing enemies, and I'm almost certain that green sphere on the right is going to be a health refill too. Oh, and there's a DNA pick up next to as well.

Hah, I just took out an enemy from around the corner.

Dr Daniel Slimepuddle has two attacks; he can either punch out enemies with steerable ooze... uh, tentacles I guess, or he can spit out part of his body at them. The downside of that is that he spits out part of his body, so I'm going to stick with punching them if I can.

The guy is actually surprising easy to control. I've got direct control of the head, and as I 'walk' around the puddle follows. The game reminds me a bit of the Chaos Engine actually. Only with less steampunk and more toxic waste.

This metal thing with the orange stripe on the left is a trigger to detonate certain toxic waste barrels. Normally I'd tend to avoid doing that, but there's a barrel blocking my way, and it's not like this environment can get any more fucked.

I mean, I'm being attacked by mutant snails, and spike creatures that leap out of the ground. I think it's safe to say that if there's any bunnies and squirrels left around, they probably shoot lasers out of their eyes at this point.


LEVEL 1, STAGE 2.

For fuck's sake... what's hurting me now? Is my slime dripping off the edge of the ground and into the water or something?

Well that's kinda dumb. I don't see any other way to get across.

Hmm, three paths and two of them are blocked. I guess I've got to go down each path in turn, hitting switches to blow open the barrels blocking the next path.

Oh shit, this ain't good. I'm caught in a crossfire, and their lasers are slicing through my slime. If I'm quick I can throw out a tentacle and grab some of it back, but a fair chunk of it has been burned away.

I think I might have to resort to spitting here. I don't like it, it's a disgusting habit, but it's safer than staying in one place and trying to punch a laser turret. Fortunately either way the enemies go down pretty fast in this, so it plays fair.

Ah, motherfucker... that's just not fair!

I didn't have enough slime left to spit, so I ran off to find some more. But I was so low on health that getting too close to the water was instant death.

2 LIVES LEFT.

Crap, I got hit by the fire jets, again. The cracks they shoot from aren't invisible, and they do stay inactive long enough for me to get my whole puddle across. But it's hard to spot one particular kind of crack in the ground when the level is covered in the damn things.

Aha, I've spotted the fire jet this time. It's that crack over there on the bottom right, beneath the bush.

The exit's blocked, but all I have to do now is find the switch and make a run for it, and the level's done.

Fuck, the blue monster shot me. I took a direct laser hit to the head. Instant kill. And that's it, I'm out of lives and there's no continues.

Excellent animation though. Very Terminator 2.

Oh damn, they shoved him in a lava lamp? That's just... mean. I still don't really know what the poor guy did to piss everyone off so much.

Fun fact: if you go back and look at the intro, you can actually see the empty jar sitting on the guy's desk by the security monitor. FORESHADOWING.


EVENTUALLY, ON LEVEL 1, STAGE 3.

There's no saves, no passwords and no continues, so I had to start again from the first level. So basically there's no way I'll ever get anywhere in the game, and I should quit now in despair. But I just can't stay frustrated at a game that lets me pour my character down a tunnel.

Plus it does have checkpoints. So there's that.


LATER.

I love the expressions on this boss creature. I'm not so enamoured by the way nothing I do seems to hurt it though.

It keeps hitting me with tongues, and little brains keep crawling out the middle and attacking me, and it's getting on my nerves.

I just wish I knew what I'm supposed to be doing here to kill it. I need some feedback from the thing indicating when I'm hurting it.

Wow, that's really not helping. Stop that.

Fortunately I can snack on the little brain rodents to recover my slime (which is, like, way gross) and I've finally figured out how to hurt the damn thing. Or at least I've figured out that I was probably hurting it all along, and it just wasn't really reacting to it.


LEVEL 2, STAGE 1. AT LAST.

Hmm, the music's not as good as level 1's theme, but it's pretty decent.

Hey, what the hell just killed my poor sludge monster this time? Was it that valve/turret thing on the wall or something? I suppose I should check that out after I respawn.

Uh, what? Did my final life really just pour away down a half obscured drain?

The penalty for failure: more bad colour cycling.


It wasn't bad, I suppose. Though I wasn't exactly enthralled by it even before I learned it had no continues. Plus the game seemed very eager to catch me out with hazards I couldn't really see or never registered as a threat, and it got kind of frustrating. It's hard to enjoy sliming around a level, sliming out multiple opponents with my slime powers, when I can get killed just by straying too close to the wrong bit of water.

The soundtrack gets a definite gold star though. Someone needs to make some decent cover versions with proper instruments and stick them online, because for whatever reason the sound chip really doesn't do the songs justice.