"This game needs more than TWO four letter words in its title."

I'm sure I wasn't the only youngster beguiled by Make Trax's cute graphics. Back when Pac-Man clones were still in vogue, you didn't need many excuses to pretend a game was good. I thought I'd wised up to the various clones on the Apple, but Make Trax seemed to change all the rules. It looked original. Perhaps it was even as good as Munch Man for the TI, which had different monsters each level. This was extremely impressive in the early eighties, especially since you didn't have to pay a quarter to play it. It just took twenty seconds for the tape cassette to load the game. Whoopee!

Make Trax features you as a paint brush, trying to paint an entire maze. Only two small kite-shaped fish get in your way, and of course fish are less vicious than ghosts. While there aren't any power pellets, you have two bridges over which you can push a roller between each end as often as you'd like. You're invincible then, and the points for each fish crushed double from fifty to a maximum of nine thousand. When you've painted about half the board, a distraction pops into the maze and dirties up the tracks you made. It's annoyingly frisky, and, when the bird comes out and drops white stuff, awkward when you realize you're supposed to laugh and can't. But with three side tunnels and brushes that render you almost constantly invincible, it all appears a matter of finding the right time to complete this or that piece.

But everything is much harder than it should be for a game this simple looking. Make Trax is the video game equivalent of a chess hustler who pretends he doesn't quite understand en passant and then goes and whips your average master eight out of ten. The graphics are less smooth than Pac-Man, and the sound is terrible. But the challenge behind the quirky graphics is distressingly prevalent.

It's quite possible you'll get stuck on the first level, even though you're a bit faster than the fish, and you can actually catch the cat, which is a more natural antagonist to fish than paint rollers, by following it. The fish still do a good job of cornering unawares, but the emergency tactic of crossing back and forth over a bridge a few times usually buys enough time to take out a patch. You also have to figure that the fish trapping you in a bridge underpass or using the tunnels to get from the opposite side of the board to nail you is fair game. And you can't blame them for wising up and running away from the roller after being hit a few times. Crushing them requires exact timing on the later levels, as you need to time your reverse precisely when they chase you over a roller.

Not that you'll get there soon. Make Trax just doesn't seem fair by the second level. The fish become slightly faster than you. The messy things that pop out are truly annoying. You can be touching them, but that's not good enough. You have to envelop them to stop them from tracking everywhere and--just as bad--stopping that clinking noise which stays even after they retreat to the hole they crawled from. Your main survival strategy consists of twiddling around on the bridges and taking out a chunk of the board before returning to the other bridge. This isn't exactly exciting. Eventually the fish will reverse before they get to an intersection, surprise you, and get you. The end feeling is of getting a C in a class you don't much care for.

And the big kicker: you can leave a small two-pixel triangle unpainted, and the game will consider the level undone. It's the most complex part of the game, where if you turn, a small sliver of the square you turned on doesn't get painted. Playing this hide-and-seek with the rest of the level seemingly complete, all while ducking the fish, is no fun.

The sound is, quite frankly, terrible. Many even tunes are worth hearing once but are simply too long. They have aged badly. The introduction is a tinny hoedown, and you're treated to a warbling for each piece of the map you cover. It cuts into the whiny background music, but the serial clinking when those distractions appear--or escape unharmed and still don't shut up--is a horrendous accompaniment. Best to catch the things and put up with four seconds of computerized growling. The only thing time the machine's silent is when you get an extra brush at ten thousand. Graphics aren't much better and you frequently need to sort out when it looks like you caught the fish or distractions and when you can flip over the roller and push it back. Even the colors you paint the maze are disturbing: light green, pink and orange. Yech.

Make Trax is a bait and switch(Look! Easy! Cute! Nonviolent!) that suckered me too frequently when I was a young lad enraptured by the video-game alcove in the back of the K-Mart across the state highway. But it wasn't until I went mucking with MAME and looked on the GameFAQs FAQ contributors' board that anything resembling a joke dawned on me. I noticed that another hard game was entitled Tom Sawyer something or other. Hmm. Young kid is convinced that fruitless work with a paintbrush is fun. Young kid sacrifices time and money for the 'privilege' of using said paintbrush. Demonstrator of paintbrush walks along to his next swindle. It's the closest Make Trax will ever get to classic.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 12/04/00, Updated 03/29/04