Pinkie (Amiga) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, it's guest poster mecha-neko's turn to play a game! I can't be expected to write about all the games all on my own, there are about 10,000 of the bloody things... added to Steam each year. Plus if anyone can find the good in an old Amiga platformer starring a naked pink worm man with no teeth or elbows, it's him. I hope.

Developer:

Data Designs, Scott Williams Games

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Release Date:

Winter 1994

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Systems:

Amiga

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Hello everyone! How are you doing?

I love a good mascot game, don't you? I'm in the mood for an obscure-as-heck Amiga mascot.

Say 'Hi!' to Pinkie, a brave new kind of hero!

Don't you just love him? Look at this happy guy! He's bounding from a platform, cheesing all the baddies off and having a right ball. We're sure to be having some good times jumping around on things together!

Ready?

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We begin with plenty of opening logos, including this one from DADA I've never seen before. Very fancy!

Somebody had to anti-alias all those lines manually, drawing in every transitional pixel by hand, with an Amiga tank mouse and no multi-level undo...

I wonder who this mysterious watchman could be. In the Amiga days, this would almost certainly be the work of one those swanky-pants demo-scene artists - a rare breed who actually knew what they were doing and didn't mind showing it off. Perhaps they're the same watchman of the group LSD, as can be seen on the Techno Warrior Amiga music disk? (external link)

There's no game intro, no plot - we go straight to this still image of the Pinkie King offering me a selection of fine planets to choose from. He's also exchanged the thumping bass of the title screen for some nauseatingly bold and twee planet select music, like I've just walked into a NES game RPG town.

There's no descriptions or names for any of these planets, so it's up to me to describe them for you!

We've got:

1. The Orange Planet With Pink Villi Protruding From It Surrounded By Floating Pyramids... World.
2. The Jagged Metallic Yarn World.
3. Just A Blob Of Slime.
4. An Inside-Out Heart. (?!?!?)
5. A Second Jagged Metallic World.

Nothing so banal as a forest world for us, we're heading to the weird side of the universe! None of them are particularly appealing holiday destinations to me, though. To be frank, they look like a catalogue of microscopic contagious diseases.

Let's try the default selection: villi world it is.

Welcome to Planet Beige!

Pinkie's ship descends to the surface and the man himself is revealed... riding what looks like a spring, or perhaps a unicycle?

When he touches down, a little wooden track extends towards the first level with a little bibbly-bobbly-boo. I can either proceed southwards, or (I assume) return to Pinkie's ship to select another planet. For this is no ordinary platformer! No, sir. This is what Amiga Format would call a 'superplatformer'! It has a world map and everything! Just like a real game!

Concepts like branching world maps took a goodly long time to slip through the collective digestive system of European Amiga game developers before they emerged en masse in '93 and '94: games like Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad, Donk, Brian the Lion, Woody's World, James Pond 3, Puggsy, and, of course, Pinkie.

You've heard of these Amiga all-time classics, right? No? ...surely they couldn't all have been bad?

Enough negativity. This unusually tuneful world map music is signalling that we're supposed to be enjoying this pleasant wander through this swamp, and that's what I intend to do.

Onwards, Pinkie!

Wahey! Get a load of him! Pinkie's got himself a unicycle after all! He's the happiest damn little dollop of Instant Whip I've ever seen.

It turns out that Pinkie is a vehicular platformer! That's new! (If you haven't played Car-Vup.)

I started in the lower right, strangely. I'm free to trundle about on these paved hills as I please, with no time limit to dampen my mood, listening to the grating background tune. It sounds awful and, worse, somehow somewhat basic. There's no sophistication to it. It's cheap and simple like a public domain Amiga game, beeping and booping with its organ right down my ear.

Getting out of the unicycle is easier said than done. This is a one-button Amiga game, so all of Pinkie's (and Pinkie's car's) moves are going to be executed by manic contortions of the arcade stick combined with button presses and holds. C'mon Pinkie, put your back into it!

Got it. Hold Up and press Fire, then while holding Up for extra height, shift to a diagonal to move Pinkie away. And it's Up to jump, as Amiga convention dictates.

Let's see where all these steps lead.

Nowhere. There's absolutely nothing up there. Just more of these pink and blue platforms leading upwards for a very long time, followed by some flat, longer platforms. This place is huge!

All the enemies here seem to have been designed to frustrate our fellow Pinkie. There's no jumping on enemies here, not while I'm barefoot and they're all decked out in vicious looking spikes. Evade, Pinkie. Evade and fly!

I've found a special flower-thing! This is the first thing I've found to pick up in a very long time of searching. On contact, the flower exploded in several directions off screen with the sound of a firework whistle. I got 180 points.

There's more of these flowers dotted about. Might as well pick them all up before I go, seeing as there's not a lot else going on around here.

Left to its own devices, the car rolls about on ramps. A nice touch! Though I shouldn't be too surprised: everything I've seen so far has been lovely and slick, as far as Amiga games go. There's no parallax scrolling background, and the game runs at 25 frames per second, but this is as good as it gets for a full screen of graphics all moving around at once. This is running on an original Amiga 500 - this is still 1985 tech here!

On the Amiga, it's an achievement to have sound effects and music happening simultaneously. (It isn't difficult, but folks were lazy.) You can even hear Pinkie panting for a little bit if you tire him out!

With the Amiga's limited, somewhat oversaturated palette at their disposal, the designers have gone for a pink/blue combination much like the later Behind the Iron Gate. They've mercifully spared us any blinding vertical gradient rainbow backgrounds (like in Doodlebug), or any fancy copper effects at all. Having something back there to look at all makes this so much nicer than James Pond 3 or Bubble and Squeak's pitch black hell-worlds.

If it isn't up that giant sausage staircase, the exit is going to be in the lower left on the opposite side of the level from where I started, in a nice car-accessible location. Right? Right. Off we go.

I couldn't find an exit door, machine, teleporter or anything else there. Only a yellow downwards pointing arrow...

Alright, that certainly could have been more obvious.

If you park Pinkie and his car beneath the arrow, it'll stop animating. This is your hint to hold Down and press Fire to summon a flashy twirling cylindrical elevator to whisk Pinkie back to the world map.

Intuitive is not a word in Pinkie's adorable bubblegum-dog vocabulary.

Back on the world map, nothing has changed. Whatever little gold medals I'm supposed to have found, I haven't, and I'm stuck here until I have. Let's go back to the ship and report my complete failure to the King. Perhaps he likes flowers?

Or perhaps I'll stumble into a storeroom!

Like Private Your Name Here from Hunter, Pinkie has his own secret warehouse containing various gizmos to help him on his adventure. On offer today is a boxing glove, some bubbles, some fast tyres and an electric robot ray of some uncertain description. A boxing glove sounds like a good start.

I move Pinkie over to the button and give it a bop. A little cute crate comes out and trundles off down the belt, and my score decreases a little. Ah, it's a shop! Flowers for powers in Pinkie-land. I'll take the tyres too. Anything that upgrades the car is useful since it seems to be pretty important to our journey.

Back to level 1... whoosh - and now the car is uncontrollably fast!

Well. Uh. Sorry, Pinkie. Looks like your dreams of smashing an alien crab in the chops with a pneumatic boxing glove just aren't to be.

Oh! By the way, Pinkie's unicycle has an extending column that allows me to reach unlimited heights by holding Up! I didn't buy that in the shop, I think. The car could do that right from the start!

The chair retracts back down when I alight, but it's still useful for getting Pinkie up to high places. At least that means I can't get the car's cockpit stuck up here because that would be a real pain.

I've found an egg! And another egg!

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with the eggs - they didn't explode into a shower of points like the rotating flowers did - and I had to press Fire to pick this one up. No sign of a nest to return it to just yet, but I'm not letting that chunky jaw-on-legs get a hold of my spotty pal. Maybe it'll hatch into a friendly, totally non-copyright-infringing not-Yoshi for me to ride! But then, I already kinda have a car...

Don't worry, egg! You're in good hands! I'll protect you! We're off to the exit lift!

It's a long way down, flopping from platform to platform all the way to ground level as carefully as I can... oooh wait, the flowers reappeared. Infinite money!

Made it. I couldn't board the car with the egg, so I'm here on foot.

Now Pinkie, PINKAIE! WHAT ARE YA DOING!?

YA LEFT THE EGG BEHIND PINKAIE!!

Yeah. Let's try that again.

Actually, I'm going to reboot the game and choose the other Music first. There's only so much clown music a man can stand.

Got the egg again. This time I'm going to have a bit more of a look around to see if there's an egg receptacle where these guys have to be delivered.

I've found a variation of one of those ogre-types who has a button on his head rather than a spike! I'll give him what for!

Yikes! Didn't see that coming!

Pinkie survives! And somehow so does the egg! It's making a run for it!

Get 'im, Pink!

A little tap on the head and the egg gets stunned long enough for Pinkie to apprehend it.

Ahhh... I see. The unicycle has a secret pocket where you're supposed to toss the egg for safekeeping! That gets me one hundred flowers as a reward! Aren't videogames fantastic?

Though one hundred points isn't that much. I get almost double that from finding a spinning flower, and they're reappearing every time I enter the level. Maybe I should... no. No, go straight to the exit, Pinkie. You're a disaster area and you've finally done something right. Go, go, go.

With the egg stowed in the sidecar pocket and the car safely whirled away with me to the world map, a new bridge bubbles into existence leading towards Level 2! We did it, Pinkie!

It's been a few years, but we've managed to figure out what it was we were sent here to do and how to do it. The King is going to be so proud of us.

According to the map, there's two more eggs left. Although Level 2 is open, we can't leave the job half finished, can we?

But first...!

Back to the shop!

Retrieving the egg has revealed some more gadgets for Pinkie and his wagon. We've got a spring or a pile of discs, a tyre on a slope, and some flippers.

This game could certainly use some descriptions of what these power ups do and how much they cost. I'm fairly sure I already have the boxing glove and the fast tyres, but they've reappeared again. Does that mean I can upgrade them? (For example, maybe I can find an upgrade that lets the boxing glove make physical contact with enemies?) Or if I buy them again accidentally will I just waste my money?

Let's just get everything until I run out of money. I've picked up the bubbles, the spring and the electric claw.

I'm really liking Music2, by the way. It brings back the rave samples from the title screen and uses them in a whole new sci-fi-inspired soundtrack, with new ambiences for the shop, the world map and the levels. It's much more coherent and frankly just more pleasant than the default. It suits the game so much more than the clown music did. This world and its palette aren't pleasant enough for that sickly pep. This place is all machines and spaceships and robot cars and bubblegum.

Heavens to Betsy. This car's getting all kinds of ridiculous abilities now. Hold Down while in the car and Pinkie will start twiddling with the controls. Release Down and... bloooop!

This is just as awkward a manoeuvre to execute as it seems, even though the car is steerable in mid-air. There's lots of joystick wrenching involved in getting the car to land safely on one of these floating sausages. Folks attempting to play this with a Master System or Mega Drive pad are going to have fits.

I can't collect flowers while in the car which reduces its effectiveness and fun for exploring immensely. I keep having to jump in and out to collect them. However, the Pinkie-car seems to be completely invulnerable - I can just roll right through the bad guys as if they weren't there.

The first egg I rescued didn't reappear this time. He's saved for good. There's two left, and I'm sure I've seen them both already in boxes like this one.

Get a load of THIS! Kaboom! One egg liberated!

Wait, oh nuts!

Sorry egg! I'll catch you!

I'll catch you if you'd just keep bloody still!

Pinkie is only stunned by falling damage, but the eggs semi-hatch and start panicking. He can run faster than a fleeing egg, but finding the right opportunity to jump on the thing without bumping Pinkie's head on an enemy is a real challenge.

I've figured out what the thing I called 'electric robot ray' was. It's a lateral bracing tool for the unicycle!

If you raise up the Pinkie-car vertically so it's resting between two platforms, then twist Pinkie so he's facing directly towards you, pressing Fire will cause a pair of brackets to extend outwards from the sides of his car, lodging it securely between the platforms. Once braced, you can slide Pinkie side to side, and deposit the car where you'd like it. Something you don't see every day!

There's no time limit to this ability, or the ascending column. None of them, not even the jump, use the fuel from the E--F gauge. I honestly haven't got a clue what it represents.

Rassin'-frassin'!

Seems like the eggs can only take so much punishment before they decide being saved by Pinkie is way more dangerous than it's worth. The eggs're perfectly fine with fleeing through the legs of enemies, but if Pinkie himself is struck while holding a semi-hatched egg, a cute little dino fellow will hatch and scoot right off the screen, leaving Pinkie feeling like a right buffoon.

Now I've got to exit the level and come back and do this egg all over again. At least the egg does reset. I'd be in a pickle if it didn't.

The last egg is scooped up: that's all the eggs accounted for (not that it says anywhere).

Let's get the heck out of here!

Ohh yeah! I am officially the King's number one favourite guy!

He gestures to us in complete silence, with no sound effect, musical fanfare or voice sample spared for our enjoyment.

There's no ceremony at all at the end of a level, egg retrieved or otherwise. I could do with some encouragement now and then. A little Sonic-esque Pinkie Retrieved An Egg! ending card, with Eggs Remaining: 🥚🥚 written underneath. The little square on the world map doesn't even change colour to indicate I've found all the eggs. (I have found all the eggs, right?)

It's time for Level 2. And not a moment too soon. After those couple of hours wandering all over that open level back and forth, I've had about all I could stand of that lurid puce background and all those floating sausages. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the next place looks like.

It's the same. It looks the damn same. You're a cruel, cruel game, Pinkie.

Okay. I can take it. I'll just put on my shades I set aside just for Knuckles' Chaotix and see how I do.

Level 2's put the exit right next to the start. Hmmm... so the puzzle is either going to be figuring out how to use the car's powers to get Pinkie over to the egg, or using Pinkie's agility to bring the egg back to the car. Why'd you have to get all interesting all of a sudden, game?

Blerk. I'm dead.

I managed to slip the car into a gap that it totally shouldn't have been able to fall into. Pinkie doesn't like riding the car underwater and bounced out the cockpit seat. I fumbled around for a while trying to get back inside, got bumped by a crab and died immediately.

Wait - Didn't I buy the bubbles power up earlier? What the heck happened to that? I thought that would have made the car waterproof. Grr.

And the car! The car's stuck where I bloody left it! There's no way for me to reach the car from the starting position - I needed to use a canny combination of jump moves and lateral braces to get up there in the first place. I can't get to the car without the car! And I can't recover eggs without the car!

Now what? I suppose I have to go back to the shop and see if they have a spare...

ONE TRIP TO THE SHOP LATER...

When Pinkie arrived at the shop, he'd already managed to rustle up a spare unicycle from off-screen somewhere, but without any of the powers I'd acquired up to now. I had to blow all my money on getting the boxing glove, the lateral braces and the jump move again just to get anywhere. I couldn't recover the first car from the pond for some salvage cash either. It's just plain gone.

I decided to get the heck away from that level as soon as I found an egg. I only rescued the one, so don't know what I did to deserve this, but the game's given me a secret level! But it's unmarked and unnamed on the map, so I don't know which one of the two new paths to choose! One is going to lead onwards to puzzles, and the other one is going to lead to flowers and powers and wonderful things to pick up.

There's still three eggs to find in each of them, so let's just try north.

This level hides its eggs on the other side of an absurd number of car-only jumps. Sure, perhaps you could take Pinkie over there alone and defenseless, but what if there's a tall gap or a chequered wall that requires a car power? You need to take the car as far as it can go, always. And that means doing these damn jumps.

The sprites in Pinkie are pretty huge already but Pinkie riding the unicycle is gigantic. When he jumps the scenery disappears from the screen completely leaving you to gauge your landing through instinct alone. I needn't worry about hitting the bees, but if I miss a platform it's all the way back to the start for me.

I've bought all the upgrades for the car, but none of them was an egg radar or a map. A bit of an oversight there in space-dog R&D, I reckon. The only way to maintain your bearings in these huge, featureless levels is to orient yourself relative to the extreme edges of the world. Aimless wandering only interests for so long, and it's not a long so long.

There's one egg left, and I'm certain it's behind this guy in the top right of the level. I'd like him to stop spitting things at me and naff off a little so I can figure out if I can jump over his head.

I've been waiting here on the extended unicycle for a while and the E--F gauge still hasn't moved an inch. Why would they dedicate a full half of the interface to a gauge that doesn't gauge anything? Maybe it's the health of bosses, similar to how Castlevania always shows a boss health gauge labelled ENEMY throughout the game?

The difficulty in Pinkie has two extremes: in the car it's slow and fiddly but there's no way to lose. Outside of the car, you have to do an awful lot, but one misjudged jump means you have to repeat the entire level: Pinkie dies in one hit, from anything.

Of course, I'm great. Just over this platform is the final egg for this level and an extra life. I still had to make it back past this enemy and his fireballs while holding the egg, and take a chance chucking the egg blindly down the shaft where the descended car was waiting for me.

And this level was a dead end on the world map. There's nothing quite as satisfying a reward as nothing whatsoever.

Time for the next level!

In a manic driving frenzy triggered by having to see yet more of the exact same fuchsia madness, I scooted the car down what seemed like it would be a safe gap. Right down...

... into deep water!

But Pinkie knows what to do - when the car hits the water, the wheel retracts into the chassis and out come a pair of flippers!

The car is still invulnerable, even down here. I was momentarily stunned by the sight of this unholy spiked cube heading right for my face, but the magic of Pinkie's car once again leaves him completely unscathed.

Also how is Pinkie breathing? Does he breathe through his belly button and his car is some kind of cute-blob-cybersymbiotic-forbidden-tech... I don't even want to know where I was going with that sentence.

I can disembark the car freely with the flippers now. It seems like outside of dying on foot, there's no way for me to lose the car any more. Thank you, game.

The flippers make the car completely controllable underwater; the only threat to it is narrow gaps like this, where a current could easily separate Pinkie from his vehicle. Those trails of bubbles push Pinkie about, but getting in and out of here was no issue at all. The E--F gauge is Pinkie's breath, by the way.

The difficulty has taken a turn for the non-existent here. The eggs are lying out in the open, completely unharassed, next to a whole bundle of flower boxes that do nothing except spew free money at me. These things even reappear when I restart the level.

I guess this is supposed to be a reward for the player, so they no longer need to grind for money on one of the other, more frustrating levels whenever they need to replace the powers on their car after a mishap.

The designer could have instead made the game so that one single instance of bad luck doesn't force the player to have to walk back to the very start of the world map through several loading scenes and buy a whole new damned car! There's no reason for that except malice.

The game is a puzzle game based around clever navigation of the level using the car, and parking the car in a suitable place for the car to be used as an egg depository. The car is essential. You cannot play the game without the car! Just give the player the damned car at the start of every level! Have it gradually gain powers as they progress from level to level if you must, even though making players repeat early levels not because they're not good enough players but because you don't feel like letting them neatly complete them yet is malicious too.

But! Oh no! This level doesn't let you use the car!

The car and the exit begin trapped in a tiny room; Pinkie must climb out of the room and figure out a way to release these eggs from their chequered boxes without the aid of the boxing glove upgrade!

I've figured it out. Have you?

Ah, I feel like I might have just spoiled the one good puzzle in the whole of Pinkie - sorry. In fact it's such a good puzzle the game gives it to you three times in a row with only a slight variation each time. I didn't quite pull it off here... but it doesn't matter too much if I die, as long the car is fine. The Car is All.

I feel like the game has exhausted all the possible permutations of car and barefoot action there is. There doesn't seem to be any other way to affect the levels other than smashing chequered blocks. I'm not seeing any switches or ramps or keycards or conveyor belts or pipes. What could come next?

A tedious, trial-and-error underwater maze of currents, with Pinkie's oxygen as a time limit. If you hit the wrong tile the currents push you away from the egg all the way back to the start of the level.

I am so very glad I only need to rescue a single egg.

On this level all the eggs start off already free and running and there's enemies everywhere. You've got the car, but what good's that? You can't pick up eggs while in the car. You've gotta jump out, bop an egg, stick it in the pocket, and get back in the seat sharpish before anything untoward happens.

So I suppose you're wondering why I'm standing out here on the world map, carless. See what else I'm missing? Remaining egg indicators. The map says there aren't any eggs left to find on this level. What happened?

Imagine what would happen if you were to put all three eggs into the car, then die before you get Pinkie back into the cockpit. The eggs are gone because they're in the car, but you didn't exit the level correctly so the next one won't appear on the world map...

Why, you'd be unable to unlock the next level because there's no more eggs to be found! You'd be completely donking stuck and have to replay the entire game all over again.

You could go back into the level and retrieve your car, and you'd even get a NICE ONE PINKIE! from the King again, same as you do every time you repeat a level that's been cleared of eggs already.

But the eggs are no more.

The car has eaten them.

And you are a prisoner here, for ever.

THE ENTIRE GAME AGAIN LATER...

Here's the final map of all of World 1!

A completely bland, featureless wasteland of barren, brown nothingness. No landmarks, no level names or numbers, no secrets, nothing to look forward to except the trail abruptly turning back on itself and heading up to the final plateau where victory awaits.

The path branches at Level 2, with the north path leading to that level with all the car jumps. There was nothing special about that level at all in the end, just another pink zone with three eggs to find. The path didn't branch again and, looking at the map, there isn't any space for it to do so.

I've tapped every key on the keyboard on the map screen and there's no secret inventory menu to tell you what car powers you have or what levels you have yet to fully complete. There's also no way to save or ask the King for a password. Whatever you need to do to earn a password, I haven't done it yet. You're in Pinkie for the long, long haul, it seems.

It took me a few minutes to realise why Pinkie refused to head up to the final level. At first I thought it was because I hadn't rescued every single egg up to this point, but the real reason was a little more, uh, reasonable... the path to the final level is up a ladder and the car can't drive up it. I had to leave the Pinkiemobile in one of the other levels and advance on foot.

Whatever's up there, Pinkie has to do it alone.

Let's do it!

A boss! A boss! Aaaaargh!

Pinkie's a pacifist! He can't hurt a fly! He can't even run very fast! What's he supposed to do?!

Well dang he's dead.

Pinkie hasn't suddenly developed any kind of special skills like, I dunno, owning a gun in his travels through World 1 so far. It would be a bit more in-character for him to use some gadgetry here to gain an upper hand, or perhaps to lead the boss into injuring himself somehow. Maybe by making him bite the stage awkwardly or perhaps using the egg grabbing controls to manipulate levers or throw explosive traps onto the stage?

Having Pinkie jump into the boss' teeth from inside his mouth feels like I'm just doing the boss' job for him, you know?

The boss has a completely predetermined repeating sequence of attacks, but that doesn't make this any easier. Pinkie only just fits in the gap between the boss' instant-kill claws and his instant-kill upper jaw when he chomps down. After that you've got to quickly jump back in to the boss' mouth to take shelter from fireballs that fall from the sky.

Oh, by the way, you get a Game Over when you lose with one Pinkie face remaining. They're not like Superfrog's heads, representing -extra- Pinkies you can send into the levels: in this game if you lose the left-most Pinkie you're back to the title screen without a password. You might want to know that if you want to avoid finding out the hard way that Pinkie doesn't have continues.

There's extra lives all over the sides of Level 1, just waiting for a masochistic player to wander all the way back across the world map and retrieve them for another shot at the boss. I just assumed I had one more go left...

But I'm going to beat this boss. For you. For posterity.

The boss doesn't flash when you hit him, and doesn't make a sound. There's very little evidence that you're hurting him at all. This is something that B.C. Kid does a whole lot better. (In addition to having continues.)

You'll know when you've defeated the boss when you've knocked all his teeth out. They go flying to the right where they form a disturbing suspended platform for the exit lift to appear on. The music doesn't change, the boss doesn't start crying, and his damned hands are still one-hit kills.

I don't even think he was worth any flower points.

The King is delirious with gratitude!

There's no mention of how many eggs I've rescued, or how many I've left behind. I know I left some behind, but I must've found the King's favourite ones because he doesn't care at all.

There's no listing of bonuses or totalling of time. No picture of a planet with a big red X or a big pink 'thumbs up' overlaid on top of it. Nothing at all, except the eerie buzz of the modulated TV signal playing with your speakers.

This is a bit lame, guys.

Hah, there's a very British computer game screen: "'ere ya go, love, 'ave a password."

Is that ZZZZZZZP or ZZZZZZZT, do you think?

Phew. Alright. That's Pinkie, I'm done. All that's left to do now is the conclusion-type thing, but first let's have a quick wander through the other four worlds to see if there's anything interesting to show you. I might as well, since I can select any of them from the get-go. Consider it an apology to all the readers who've sat through me slogging it through all of World 1 three times expecting a change of scenery and receiving nothing for their patience but rivers of pink.

The mechanical world has animated background cogs and new fancy graphics and all kinds of things going on.

It's got floating helicopter gadgets that pick up Pinkie by the head and carry him off to new areas of the level. You can't tell where before you use them though! You might be dropped off miles away from your now-stranded car! How exciting!

It even has enemies Pinkie can jump on. Though trying to take the enemies up on that offer is tempting fate to the extreme. One pixel off on your landing, or if you hit the wrong palette swap of the wrong enemy, and you might be throwing away all your progress in the world so far.

The grotesque rotting custard world is full of background orbs just itching to come alive and randomly explode and take out Pinkie in one hit.

The ice world just looks like World 1 again except recoloured blue.

The difficulty is still all over the place. The levels just chuck money at you, expecting you to get a fully upgraded car just to attempt Level 1 properly.

And finally...

I was joking about this being the Inside-Out Heart World but... damn.

What the hell is this place supposed to be?


CONCLUSION

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Pinkie is an awful experience. I'm glad I gave it a thorough playing at last, so you don't have to. But, more importantly, so I don't have to. Ever again.

Parts of this game are a well-oiled machine. Most of it is, really. It's a beautiful cartoon game with a distinct, if sort of dull and rigid, toy-like style. But when you actually sit down to play it, the game confuses and frustrates and confuses again. It's so close to being playable it hurts. It resembles fun, but it isn't.

The game makes little sense unless you're willing to spend an hour just trying things over and over. There's no clue that you're supposed to get eggs or put them into the car or that the things in the shop are upgrades for the car. The attract mode helps a little, but not much. Once you've figured out what to do, you'll be paralysed with terror since a single wrong move will set you back an obscene amount of progress, with the extra special jackpot possibility of being reset right back to the beginning of the world.

This game doesn't need lives at all. Ditching the concept of a persistent score was a good start, but it really didn't embrace its puzzle game nature enough. The boss battle difficulty is absolutely off the charts, and not having any way to record your progress is patently absurd. Imagine if Lemmings had lives and kicked you back twenty levels when you retried too many times. Ugh.

This game shares a designer with Bubble and Squeak and Krusty's Super Fun House, and knowing that I ought to have been able to tell from a mile away: every level is a tedious, slow-moving rescue mission set in a huge featureless labyrinth. They could add Scott Williams' name to the title, like Sid Meier does. It would be a warning as much as it would an endorsement.

Exploration is pointless and at the same time mandatory. It's the worst qualities of a collect-'em-up: a small amount of difficult to retrieve items with no hints as to their whereabouts and plenty in the way of danger in getting them home safely. And there's nothing to do except that. There's no way to feel like you're improvising with the car's powers and getting to places you shouldn't to unlock new secret levels, because there aren't any.

If you give the player a branching world map, it's supposed to bloody go somewhere. I want secrets within secrets. Yep, I'm dinging Pinkie for not being enough like Donk! The Samurai Duck! Not once did I find a secret warp pipe that led to a room full of money. I want to feel super smug for finding a crazy combination of car moves that lets me pass through a wall to meet a talking sunflower that gives me the power of jam. There's hardly anything worth picking up at all in Pinkie, especially not after you've got a fully-upgraded car since that's all you can buy with the money. And past the first level of the first world, you'll need a fully-upgraded car to get any further anyway.

Each level within a world looks exactly the same; there's nothing to look forward to. That's also something that Lemmings and Troddlers figured out: there's a limit to how long a player can withstand seeing the same themed scenery before they go absolutely nuts. And also: passwords after every level.

This game desperately needed somebody to play through it from start to finish and drown it in red pen, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this game received absolutely no testing whatsoever. There's a couple of hints:

First, that password screen. It's the password screen of a programmer who doesn't or, more likely, can't afford to give a damn. And the King screens being presented in total silence as well. It gives the game the feeling of being a prototype.

Not convinced? Alright, fair enough. How about the fact that the ending doesn't work.

When you win Pinkie this is what you get.

Pinkie comes on three disks. World 1 is on Disk 1, and the other two disks have two worlds each. You can play the worlds in any order, but the developers saved you a disk swap by including a copy of the ending on all three disks. However, the file containing the end sequence is misnamed on disks 2 and 3!

If you play through the worlds in order, you end up with this garbage screen since you ended the game on Disk 3. The only way to see the real ending is to play through Pinkie backwards, ending on World 1, Disk 1.

Nobody at Scott Williams Games, Data Design or Millennium caught this, I think, because nobody played it through to completion. And I can't blame them, because this damn game is really stinkin' difficult! I can imagine the programmer sticking in Disk 1 to boot the game, pressing a key to trigger the ending magically, seeing it work, and then calling it a day.

Thanks to the users of the English Amiga Board (external link), the mystery was investigated, uncovered and solved for the first time in mid 2017. Hell, since this wasn't discovered until 23 years after release, it's fair to assume that the crackers didn't test it, and nobody who pirated it played it either. That's just how much nobody cared about poor Pinkie back in the day.

The programmer was probably making changes right up to the last second when the disks were all-but swiped off his desk by the publisher and shoved into the duplication machine to make sure the thing came out for Christmas, since it was now or never. It might have even been a Super Gem'Z-type scenario, where a pre-release but plausibly complete version of Pinkie was stolen and heavily pirated just prior to the game's retail release, and the publisher pooped themselves and decided to ship everything as it was immediately and wash their hands of the whole thing.

I'm kinda fascinated by the history of Pinkie and how it got like this. I've got a theory, and some Cool Facts, if you've got a minute?


A THEORY, AND SOME COOL FACTS

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In the early nineties, game publisher Millennium was riding high off the success of James Pond: Underwater Agent and James Pond 2: RoboCod. Millennium were already deep in producing James Pond 3: Operation STARFI5H, but they had big plans for both the Amiga and the fancy 16-bit consoles and wanted even more games in their line-up. Impressed by Data Design Systems' impressive attempt at cramming the technicolor craziness of RoboCod into the tiny, ancient Commodore 64 (and their very, very chrome logo), Millennium worked with DDS to create a fantastic new mascot for the nineties. A brave new kind of hero.

While Pinkie was in development, Millennium and DDS really, truly did their best trying to convince everybody that Pinkie was the tastiest thing since jam toast. They sent their most cryptic, blandest marketing gentlemen to every magazine who would take them. And this was in the failing years of the Amiga, when Commodore was exploding and turning itself inside out like the T-1000 at the end of Terminator 2, so any news about new work-in-progress Amiga games was tooted from the mountaintops. This is really awesome, since it means there's lots of cool interviews and pre-release pictures of Pinkie to be found! (When the Amiga magazine archive sites decide to include all the dang pages instead of missing most of them out.)

But Pinkie wasn't just a game. Pinkie was going to be a media empire; an icon.

CU Amiga Issue 53, July 1994
Pinkie was going to have a super-interactive CD music single and, oh yeah, a TV show named Pinkie & His Little Sister.

I'm absolutely fascinated. Pinkie and Kelly in the same show? What kind of show would it have been? Live action, with Kelly singing and a Barney the Dinosaur-esque foam costumed Pinkie dancing beside her? Cartoon mixed with live action, side-by-side? Or interleaved cartoon and live adventures like The Super Mario Bros. Super Show? Puppets? I would love to know!

There's a CD32 version of Pinkie mentioned on the back of the box, boasting "full-motion cartoon animation". That could mean anything. It could just mean that Pinkie has eight more colours in his running sprite. Or (and this would be the most heartwarming, daftest thing ever) Millennium might have ordered an actual animated cartoon clip or two just like in CD32 RoboCod (YouTube link). I can't find anybody who has a copy of CD32 Pinkie. It might not even exist, despite the Amiga manual having instructions for the joypad. I really hope it does, somewhere.

I can't find anything about the exclusive single "Play It!" by Little Sister promised on the box either. BUT. It isn't entirely lost it seems, because I believe some parts of the lyrics can be found on the title theme of the cancelled SNES port of Pinkie! (YouTube link)

Pinkie (SNES) (prototype)
What we have here is a rough recreation of the Amiga Pinkie with the frame rate boosted to full so it's a dazzlingly slick pink and blue wonderland. The graphics are mostly present and correct; the bosses have backgrounds and we now have proper parallax scrolling! The physics aren't quite there yet: the car madly bounces about after the ascending power is used, and the boxing glove is more-or-less useless, but the game is definitely there. You can even return to the mothership at any time and ask for a password!

There's extra scenes of Pinkie blasting to and from planets, which I think they intended to put in the Amiga versions but took out for time or space reasons. They've added in a few extra animations too...

Pinkie (SNES) (prototype)
Because making the damned heart world pulsate was a top priority, wasn't it?

I admire the raw chutzpah of developing an original mascot platformer for the SNES in late 1994 or early 1995. The 1994 holiday season would have had Pinkie up against things like Donkey Kong Country, Earthworm Jim and The Lion King. From the date on the title screen, Pinkie had slipped to 1995 which would have given it time to be polished to perfect just in time to face off against... Yoshi's Island. Not exactly a fair fight for the unknown Pinkster. But I think he would've put up a fight if Millennium's suits had kept up the marketing pressure (and actually finished either version of the game). There's plenty of action platformers on the SNES all about jumping through forests and falling into lava, but how many other puzzling platformers are there where you spend most of your time figuring out how to get from place to place and waiting for enemies to walk in the correct place to trick them into activating things? There's not a lot of games like Pinkie.

Sadly it would've been more a question of money than skill making Pinkie both complete and noticed. Millennium was always thinking years ahead and, while working on James Pond 3 and Pinkie, decided now would be the time to spend some of that Pond money and develop themselves a game based upon a major license to a well-known, popular American cash-cow character. This was just the beginning of The Simpsons-mania and the peak of Garfield's powers. American cartoons new and old were flooding into the UK: Warner Bros. classics, Hanna-Barbera cheap wackiness, remakes and reintroductions of characters were everywhere. Nineties kids in Britain grew up with ancient Yogi Bear and Top Cat episodes right next to modern Turtles and Batman: The Animated Series in between episodes of things like The Raccoons, Moomin and The Smurfs. Millennium couldn't lose.

In a spectacular example of market awareness, knowing exactly what kind of character would be the hottest choice for the mid-nineties European Amiga owner parent with needy, trendy kids, Millennium executed a flawless self-directed coup de grâce and chose... Mr. Magoo. On a scale of Avenger Penguins to Power Rangers in terms of British children giving a shit, Mr. Magoo would have scored, say, a negative million points.

According to a YouTube comment attributed to the programmer of SNES Pinkie, Millennium went through their remaining cash fast at this point, the programmer wasn't paid for months, and in the end Millennium decided the whole thing was too expensive and that was it for Pinkie.

Pinkie only ever stood the slimmest of chances. He was devised late, took too long to produce, and most likely got panic-released before anybody had ever tried his game from beginning to end. Despite results often suggesting otherwise, nobody really deliberately sets out to make a bad Amiga game. They just happen. Pinkie needed a lot more work and a lot more thought, but reality caught up with him.

Which is a shame, because if awful things like Plok can be immortalised in cartridge form, why can't dear old Pinkie?

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I'm sure that reading about Pinkie has left you with an urgent need to express your own thoughts or maybe even take a guess at what the next game will be. If so, you're in luck as this post comes equipped with a revolutionary 'comment' feature that lets you type your own words into the box below and share them with the world!

Well, everyone else that wants to read about Pinkie at least.