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Up until the release of Booty at Christmas 1984, budget games had been treated with contempt. They normally consisted of unwanted titles that had been bought up by a company looking to enter the games market (check out the Pulsonic back catalogue for an example of this) or quickly produced, tacky efforts which assumed that any taste the buyer might have would be put aside in favour of the low price. Firebird (owned by British Telecom) changed this preconception with Booty. You play Jim the cabin boy and must explore an old galleon collecting (you guessed it!) booty. Apart from avoiding nasty pirates, you also have to find keys to progress past the numbered doors that block your way. Great fun and an enduring favourite of the time.

BOOTY
Firebird Software / £2.50

Dave: Booty is a platform game in which you have to move around in the hold of the Black Galleon collecting - not surprisingly - booty. There are 20 holds to empty and, when all have been cleared, you have just 45 seconds to find the key to the next section. Hazards in the game include deadly parrots, ghost pirates and exploding treasure.
Each screen has a number of doors (some of which lead to alternate holds and others which simply get in the way) and there are various numbered keys lying around which can be used to open the corresponding door.
Music plays throughout the game but can be switched off when it gets too annoying. However, now we're onto the annoying features. The thing that really bugged me was that when you die you always return to the first hold.
For the price, Booty is very good value, but it does rather lack addictivity. 2½/5

Ross: This represents good value for money. It requires a slightly different approach to other 'ladder and levels' games - but I still didn't find it that compelling. 2/5

Roger: If only my daily life had 'doors' to escape into the next screen ... but cabin boy 'Jim' has to cope with parrots that bode terminal illness reminiscent of the Inland Revenue on heat ... 3/5

BOOTY
Producer: Firebird
Memory required: 48K
Retail price: £2.50
Language: machine code
Author: John F. Cain




Sixteen men on a dead man’s chest...

From its excellent, animated title screen, you can see at once that this is a salty sea-dog of a game in which you play Jim (me lad) the cabin boy on a hazardous quest to collect all the booty strewn around the decks of an old galleon.

This is the first game from a very new company, but hardly an unknown one, for Firebird is the trade name for British Telecom (Firebird being the evil alter ego of that much loved feathered fellow Busby).

There are 20 holds in the ship (screens) with eight rooms making up each hold. All the doors are numbered and require the appropriately numbered key to be collected before going through the door. These keys are dotted about in different rooms, so it requires some nifty thinking to work your way round. Additionally there are doors which lead out of the screen here and there into other screens.

Each screen is arranged as a platform game (there’s a logic here — each level being a deck of the galleon of course) with the platforms connected either by ladders or by lifts. Some deck floors on certain screens tend to vanish now and again, and on some the combinations of lifts are very complicated. Cabin Boy Jim’s life is not made any easier by the prowling activities of the ghost pirates who march up and down within a room, cutlasses drawn. There’s also the occasional rat and the Captain’s berserk parrot that signal instant death. Collecting booty is done simply by touching it, but beware some items are booby trapped and explode a second after contact, so Jim must get out of the way fast!




...yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

CRITICISM
‘I’m always wary of cheap games but interested, with this one being British Telecom’s first (arcade) game. To say the least, I was astounded by the superb, very solid graphics. The idea of a ship’s interior is quite a novel one. Collecting booty at first seemed quite trivial but this is made considerably more difficult by needing the right key to open the correct room to be able to even get at the treasure. On some screens you need to wander all over the screen to get at the doors, and this can take ages to say the least. Each screen is inter-connected very nicely, each one needing a different type of skill. I especially like the way the lifts on some screens have been used, for example in one case there are five lifts all spaced next to each other, travelling in different directions at different speeds, which requires good timing skills to hop across to get a key, only to make you recross the lifts again several times — an excellent idea. Sound is continuous — a well known sea shanty tune, but if it drives you mad you can turn it off — I found I was able to pace myself by it. I’m amazed that Firebird are selling a well programmed game like this for a measly £2.50, when it could quite easily have sold for £5.95. This makes it tremendous value for money, and destroys the fallacy that cheapies are always nasties.’

‘The first impression of Booty is its lovely title page, second is a rather flat looking platform game, although the graphics are lively, animated and well designed. On beginning to play the game, this impression of okay-ness doesn’t fade, as it’s reasonable fun, just a matter of getting the right key to the right door and collecting the treasures. A few minutes later and this secondary impression is beginning to evaporate rapidly as the rich complexities of the game sink in. Not so simple after all, then. Not damned likely! All the screens are inter-linked and you cannot really just clear one and move to another — well you can sometimes, but the ghosts often make this impossible. Some of the screens which incorporate lifts, horizontal moving platforms, collapsing floors and lift stop floors which vanish after a second or two, start to give you the nightmare feeling that you may have been here before — is this galleon the true insides of the Yacht moored at the end of Je