Scrungle 1.0Game Review

Scrungle 1.0
Company: Silicon Creen Software
Shareware: $15.00
http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~davidson/SCS

Mike: Scrungle is a simple but entertaining
game from Silicon Creek Software. It’s one of those action/strategy combinations that’s easy to learn and hard to put down.

Adam: Now that Mike has upgraded his downgrade to an LC (did I say that right?) he can at least play some half-decent games. Scrungle fits that category. It’s a fun game with great sound effects and leaves a small footprint on your hard drive, making it a great game for anyone with an older Mac.

Mike: Your character is placed in the middle of a playing field, with blocks surrounding you on all sides. There’s some empty space in between these blocks and the walls of the room you’re in, and in order to make room for you to move around, you must push the blocks around and fill up the empty space.

That’s not the only object of being able to push the blocks around, however. Even more importantly, you must push the blocks in such a way that you squash your enemies up against the wall. The bad guys move around even as you are pushing the blocks into them, so it’s important to use some strategy in positioning the blocks to create “dead-ends” to trap them in.

Adam: In order to kill an enemy, they have to be against a wall or a special kind of block that can’t be moved. The enemy has to be trapped in one space, so there’s nowhere for it to move when you push the moveable block against it. As Mike said, this will kill the enemy.

Mike: In later levels, the enemies become more varied and nastier, so luckily you have some of the obligatory power-ups and bonus items to aid you.

Adam: You can freeze the enemies on the screen for a period of time, warp from one area of the playing field to another, gain extra points or an extra life, or even find a gun and ammo so you can shoot your enemies instead of just squashing them.

Mike: The game is a lot of fun, challenging, and addicting. The documentation is solid, and there’s a very large number of levels to keep you coming back. My only complaint is that the playing screen is so small – it only takes up about a third of my 12 inch screen! I would have liked to see a bigger window, and have larger sprites – your character and the bad guys are all rather small.

Adam: I’ll second Mike’s complaint. I’ve made mistakes playing because I can’t tell the difference between a block and me, or me from my enemy! And why do I make these mistakes? Because everything is so small! That is just unacceptable.

Requirements/Availability
Scrungle requires 1.5 MB of RAM to run, around 2 MB of hard disk space, 256 colors, and any Mac, though a 68030 or higher processor is recommended.

You can download Scrungle (598kb) at the My Mac Software Library, at https://www.mymac.com/software
, or at Silicon Creek Software’s home page, at http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~davidson/SCS
.

The Summary
Mike: Scrungle is a good game. It also runs with a low overhead (1500K of RAM), which is a great plus given my less-than-speedy dorm room computer (seeWall Writings, September 97 or https://www.mymac.com/columns/monthly/wall_writings/sept_97.htm
for that story). My personal feeling is that, as shareware goes, Scrungle is more of a $10 game than a $15 one, but it’s worth checking out anyway. Happy Scrungling!!!

Adam: I have mixed feelings about Scrungle. It’s a great game, and it has that classic addictiveness to it. It requires you to think, which I like, because I don’t want the same thing happening to me every time. But the tiny representation of a playing field and a $15.00 shareware fee makes this a “straight-to-the-trash” game for me. When my eyes are hurting after playing for only 5 minutes, I’m certainly not going to pay a $15.00 shareware fee.