The Bobby Yazz Show Review

So what is it? Is it a game show? Because it looks like an Old School maze-puzzle oriented arcade game from the early 80s… Developed in the late 80s… But not released until the early 90s. (1991, to be more specific. On a cover tape on Crash magazine.)

STORY

It’s the future after all. You don’t need to have the entire history of the world or the complete works of the most famous authors in recent memory to be able to compete in The Bobby Yazz Show. It’s way less sophisticated than that and it doesn’t even involve any quizes. You just play with your life at stake. And if you are a bit of a masochist, it’s merely to your benefit.

Okay, not quite. This is a top-down maze-action game and nothing really more complicated than that.

Bobby Yazz is the quite spiteful and seemingly shallow host of the show in the title. And his co-host Linda always presents the various segments. The participant (you) has to roll a sphere around four different mazes each “week” you manage to stay in the game. You start with four spheres. Lose all of them, and you’re out. Likewise, if time runs out and you have no spheres left.

Bad luck isn’t rewarded. And those recurring commercial breaks doesn’t provide the tiniest bit of consolation.

THE GAME

Colour Level, Blind Level, Key Level, and a Bonus Level – These are the four challenges that return twenty times with increasing difficulty. All the top-down perspective levels are built from tiles, and in the Colour Level, the objective is to turn the blue tiles red. A tile switches color as soon as you touch it, which essentially means that you have to move around the entire maze to be able to complete it. This looks and feels piss-easy at first, but you wouldn’t for one moment believe that the levels won’t get harder very soon. Because there are these other beings that revert the tiles back to blue. These beings are destroyed when you collide with them. “Week 2” and on, there are also randomly appearing and disappearing pods that materialize on equally random tiles. These affect you in different ways, e.g., the one marked with a “G” freezes you for a couple of seconds, the “X” kills you immediately, the “arrow pointing up” automatically completes the current level. And so on.

In the Blind Level, you have to get the ball from one point to the on-screen exit. One problem – You only see the tiles that you have rolled over. The rest are invisible, and there is only one correct path. And a time limit.

Key Level has you collecting keys that are lying around the maze-like playing area. But you have to avoid the beings that float around and kill upon contact. Once you have all the keys, you have to exit via the portal that opens in that very moment. After the first round, the aforementioned pods start appearing on the Key Levels as well, for example, the pod marked with an “?” usually hides a nasty surprise and “O” restores all the keys on the level, which means that you have to collect them all over again. (In the Colour Level, “O” switches all red tiles to blue.)

The Bonus Level is simply that. Collect as many randomly appearing and disappearing green pods before time runs out.

After the fourth level, there’s a screen displaying your “Completion Bonus” and how many tiles you collected. (100 points for each.) After yet another commercial break, it’s back to the competition.

In the top left corner, there is the word: “Holding”. By default, the word “Nothing” is displayed in the top right corner. Occasionally, bubbles with items float across the screen. Touch these, and you can get “Speed”, “Gun”, “Shield”, etc. Always useful.

CONTENT

The Bobby Yazz Show has eighty (4 x 20) single-screen levels, so if you know that you can complete the first couple whilst half asleep, you should start sweating somewhere around Level 17 and on. The main menu lets you initially start the game at Level 1, 9, 17, or 25, which means that you don’t need to play the first levels over and over again. For each “week” you complete, you can skip four more levels, e.g., if you get to Level 17, you can start at Level 33 after next Game Over.

The commercial breaks are simple, animated captions advertising products like: “Gleemo – The radiated toothpaste. (Make your teeth glow.)” There are about half a dozen of these, and two appear randomly after every few levels. The same commercials? Yeah. Just like you get in front of a real television.

The game of course has a Hi-score list, but also a Top 3 Hall Of Fame with three (Dead, of course.) x-contestants: Jake Fury, Joe Public, and Zac Deth. (Fury managed to stay on the show for eleven weeks!)

CONTROLS

Keyboard or Kempston interface. The main menu lets you define the keys for movement in the four self-explanatory directions as well as for “Fire” and pause.

The controls are as responsive as you could ever wish for. And you certainly need those reflexes once you start making some progress. Also, if you’re one of those video game players who tear out their own throats from anger and frustration when balls in maze-games fall off the edges à la Marble Madness, you can breathe easier. None of that shit here. (But plenty of other shit to get mad at.)

GRAPHICS

Yeah, how spectacular and exciting can quadrangular tiles in arranged patterns be? Not very, even if they’re in different colors with different decorations. But the game also has quite a few sprites that luckily don’t clash with the backgrounds. And it has animated game show hosts. Bobby usually laughs way too much and shakes his head with comments like: “Unlucky!”, “Hurry!”, “Phew!”… Yeah, he won’t be doing stand up comedy too soon. (Or perhaps this is big comedy in the future.) Linda just smiles and winks as she presents the next Level.

The panel at the bottom of the screen, with the smug Bobby, your life- and score-counter plus a nice-looking timer, is a neat touch. As are the backgrounds with some planets. That’s always nicer to look at than a black screen.

Plus Bobby Yazz looks like a close relative to Freddy Hardest. (Bobby has his own presentation screen in the title screen sequence if you just leave it looping.)

SOUND

A future “90s mobile phone”-ring tone tunelet for the title screen and a short scratching sound every time you move. Plus a handful of other nondescript effects. The title-screen music won’t stick in your mind for too long either, and it’s not exactly as catchy as the “Wheel Of Fortune – Spin To Win” theme.

SUMMARY

You may have played any of the four mini-games in some other form earlier “somewhere”. But it can’t be denied – The game has some features of its own, and it does tickle that old addiction gene. You might even play “a couple of rounds”, and then discover that half an hour has flown by.

The Bobby Yazz Show was originally to be released by Big Apple / Destiny Software, but the company went tits up before that ever happened. Thanks to Crash magazine, people eventually got to play that peculiar game with that zany ad. (A happy dude in a monster’s mouth as he’s being interviewed by Linda.) Those three tiny screenshots didn’t do much apart from increase the confusion, and the description didn’t quite tell you what the game was about – “Introducing the fastest, craziest game show on Earth. Requiring fast reflexes… Nerves of steel… And a passion for pain… And to guide you through it, here’s the man who can… The host with the most… The one and only… Bobby Yazz!!!”

Still, it’s a bit unfair that the game didn’t get a fair chance on the market.

Note: The Commodore 64 version was listed in the ad (Along with the game “coming soon” for the Amiga, Atari ST, and IBM.), but it was most likely never made. (Plus the ad had screenshots from the Spectrum version only.)

Developed by: Cybadyne Software
Published by: Crash
Version Reviewed: ZX Spectrum 48K
Genre: Maze
Players: 1
Also Available On: N/A
Released: 1991