Exterminator

STORY / GAMEPLAY
As the title implies, you are a professional Exterminator and your mission is to clear a bug-infested, five-rooms house. You actually control you own, beautifully animated, hand that moves around the screen trying to kill swarms of pesky insects. Along with the bugs, there are often some tiny toy tanks that get in the way and make your mission even harder. You can squash on the floor or grab every bug and every time a room is cleared, the floor map changes from white tiles to blue. You change the tiles by exterminating moths, bugs or even bees. There is also a wasp that angrily buzzes around and if you accidentally squash it a great bolt of pain instantly slams your hand. There is also a bonus round in each house, involving shooting rats inside a basement as they run across the shelves or crashing cans and tomatoes as they roll towards you. The game can be played by one or two players, each one controlling his own hand. At times, the action is fairly frantic, especially when some dragonflies start to drop mines (!) and tanks fire projectiles. There are in total 7 different houses to clean and once you do that the action moves outdoors, where you fight against several swarms and waves of insects. Exterminator offers a challenging gameplay and its two-player mode is pretty addictive making this game stand out of the crowd.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The game's visuals look great and the animation is beautifully done, reminding effectively the original coin-op version. The interior design of the houses is impressive, offering up to 40 colors on screen, but they are just static backgrounds and they don't actually interact with the gameplay at all! The movement of your "disembodied" hand is smooth and looks almost real, while the creatures are nicely drawn and animated. Soundwise, the sampled music and the digitized sound effects of this game are cool, but they get rather repetitive after some minutes of gameplay.