Zool

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Zool is a "Ninja Of The 9th Dimension", forced to land on Earth. To gain ninja rankings he has to pass through six hostile lands. The game is an original arcade platform game, relying on smooth, fast moving action, colorful graphics and a wonderful intro soundtrack by Patrick Phelan that has inspired several modern electro/techno remixes. You control a "weird" ninja by running and jumping onto a variety of platforms, traps and...candies! Oh yes! You collect lollipops, Smarties and you fight with jelly pops and other candy-style creatures! You have to trigger the scattered check-points of each level in order to be able to progress to the next one and also to have a progressive start point every time you get killed by a moving chocolate (!) Zool is a classic (and...tasty!) arcade platform game that can offer much fun. Note that the game was bundled with the Amiga 1200 upon its first release on the computer market, but not with the AGA version of the game since it followed later. Generally the original Amiga OCS edition (and later, the AGA) is still widely considered to be among the finest platform games for these computers.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The DOS version has nice colorful graphics and huge sprites. Although the game runs on VGA mode (that supports up to 256 colors), the game looks inferior to its Amiga counterparts. Each stage has up to 16 colors on screen (I wonder why the color gradient in the sky is missing here!) while there are occasionally several framerate problems. There are also a few details missing from the Amiga version. But still, the game is playable enough and looks great. The game's sound is pretty good, featuring the original intro music and in-game sound effects as long as you have a 16bit stereo sound card installed on your DOS PC.