Mega Menagerie

Seven pets and farm animals have grown to the height of a house, and they’re on a world tour. Ten cities, three monsters, and no building left standing.

Pick your animal, and the computer plays two of the others. All three of you climb the buildings, punch holes in them until they come down, and eat anyone who leans out of a window. You’re on the same side, more or less, but only one of you gets to be Beast of the Day.

THE CAST

Each animal plays a little differently.

• Binky the rabbit jumps highest.
• Rufus the dog has the hardest punch.
• Tiddles the cat is the fastest climber.
• Gruff the goat smashes walls fastest.
• Baabara the sheep has wool that stops bullets.
• Daisy the cow is the biggest and toughest.
• Nibbles the hamster has cheek pouches, so food does twice as much good.

Every animal also has a favourite food: carrots, bones, fish, tin cans, turnips, hay and sunflower seeds. Any of them turns up on a windowsill now and then. Any animal can eat any of them, but its own favourite heals far more.

HOW TO PLAY

Walk up to the edge of a building and press up to climb it. On the wall, punch towards the building to knock holes in it. Each window usually takes two punches, one to crack it and one to break through. Knock out enough of a building and it shakes, then sinks into a cloud of dust. Flatten every building in the city to move on to the next.

You lose strength whenever you’re hit. You get it back by eating: people waving from the windows, soldiers firing from them, and anyone in the street. Punch them to grab them. Run out of strength and you shrink back to normal size and scurry off, and the next life drops in from the sky.

THE WORLD WRECKING TOUR

1. Much Wenlock: the Guildhall, Holy Trinity, the Priory and the Raven, by moonlight, with the bunting up for the Olympian Games.
2. Shrewsbury: St Mary’s, Ireland’s Mansion, the Market Hall and Lord Hill’s Column, in the rain.
3. London: Big Ben, the Gherkin and the Shard, at dusk.
4. Paris: the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame and the Arc de Triomphe, at sunset.
5. Berlin: the Fernsehturm, the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, at night.
6. New York: the Empire State, the Chrysler and the Flatiron.
7. Washington: the Capitol, the Washington Monument and the White House, at dawn.
8. Tokyo: Tokyo Tower, a five-storey pagoda and the neon, at night, with Fuji behind.
9. Sydney: the Opera House and Sydney Tower, with the Harbour Bridge behind.
10. Mexico City: the Torre Latinoamericana, Bellas Artes, the Cathedral and the Angel of Independence.

THE ARMY

The army starts with soldiers in the street and in the windows. Helicopters join in Shrewsbury, tanks in London, fighter jets in Berlin, and in Washington the artillery. Soldiers in the street run away if you get close, so you’ll have to chase them.

TIPS

• Punch down in the street for a ground slam. It catches soldiers, tanks, cars and anyone running past. Landing from a jump squashes them too.
• Punch helicopters out of the sky from the wall or a rooftop. They tend to hover just out of reach, so climb up to them.
• Watch for crosshairs. Artillery marks where it’s aiming with a flashing crosshair and a whistle. Get out from under it. If you’re on a wall, though, the shell will knock holes in the building for you.
• Bombs and shells damage buildings too. The army is not entirely on its own side.
• Eat when you can. A soldier is worth more than a civilian, and your favourite food is worth more than either.
• Get off a building before it falls. When it starts to shake, jump clear. Anyone still on it when it goes comes down with it, and loses some strength in the fall.
• Punch backwards from a wall by holding away from the building as you punch. Holding away on its own lets go.
• Don’t count on your allies. The computer’s monsters are frailer than yours, and they don’t heal between cities. One that gets shrunk twice in a city sits out the rest of it, and the army has fewer targets to spread its fire across.
• You can punch the other monsters. It doesn’t do much, but it knocks them off the wall.

BEHIND THE GAME

Mega Menagerie is dressed as a 1984 coin-op rather than a home computer game, so it doesn’t use the Spectrum colours from the rest of the site. Around the screen is a cabinet with a lit marquee and arcade buttons, and the game itself uses as many colours as it needs.

The animals aren’t drawn frame by frame. Each one is a skeleton of a body, legs, two jointed arms and a head, built from rounded shapes and posed by angle. When the game starts it draws every pose of every animal, facing both ways. Each shape is lit from the upper left in three tones, dithered where the tones meet, which is why a hamster looks round rather than flat. The fur is a fixed pattern, so it doesn’t flicker as the animal moves.

Each building is a grid of storeys and window bays, and every window is painted on its own and painted again when it’s cracked or knocked through. The curved buildings, such as the Gherkin, the Fernsehturm’s ball and the Opera House’s shells, are cut to shape and then lit as round surfaces.

As with everything on this site, none of it is recorded or loaded from an image. Every sprite, building, skyline and sound is drawn or synthesised by the game as it runs. The animals’ voices are synthesised too: the cow is a sawtooth wave through a filter that opens and closes like a mouth, and the sheep is the same with a wobble on it.

Stuck? Type 1234 for unlimited lives.