"This game feels more like it was created in a barn, actually."

Zoo Keeper is an ideal quarter-sucker; the first levels seem downright moronic, but they get tougher quickly. It ensures that the player will have some minimum time staring at the screen, but not too much, unless he's spent a couple weeks' laundry money first(well, two months' worth if he's unsanitary and lazy.)

In the main scene you have the elephantine task of surviving for a certain amount of time while avoiding six different types of animals that crawl in your path. It's easier to put a camel through the eye of a needle than to solve anything past level six. While I can't lionize this game, I'd be a cold-hearted snake to put it on a pain level with rhinoplasty or to postulate that any remaining copies be sent to a landfill outside Moose Jaw and buried. Originally animals are stuck in a rectangle in the center, and you can wall them in there by moving your man around a square path he patrols--turning the joystick quickly is key, as you can't cheat around corners with diagonal movements. Bricks appear under where he's walked until they get to the center, but the animals will bounce against them in an effort to escape. Once outside, animals are predictable, moving slower than the keeper and never turning around while running in squares. If they touch him, though, he dies.

You get points for jumping him over animals or, better yet, for having trapped them once the level is finished. You'll also get points for getting refreshments that pop up at given times(you'll have to memorize the place as there's often not time to get there from 180 degrees around the path)--when they appear is determined by the time-bar that fizzles away at the top, and you even have one chance to pick up a net(eenie, meenie, miney, met. Catch a lion by the net. No one's ever done it yet) that temporarily allows you to send escaped animals back to the center. In later levels, animals dig more persistently, even burrowing through the bricks you toiled to build instead of bouncing off and denting them, which more than balances your being able to put walls up more quickly. This seems straightforward, but in fact the scoring system for the game counters this by being egregiously exponential. For instance, trapping any one monster gets twice the points of trapping a lesser monster. You also at least double your points for each monster you vault in one jump, and on the platforms level, each platform you jump to gets you double the points of the one below each time you do it. So you can jump and fall a lot to pump up your score artificially. This strategy of course nets double the points on each subsequent platforming level. The only thoughtfully fair part of the game is that if you lose on a regular level, the bricks you've made remain intact as the timer is reset.

There are also several odd side scenes that give this game bizarre variety. On one, occurring after every other main level, you jump up horizontally moving platforms to get to the top and rescue a woman--I suppose it beats certain more realistic and menial duties this game's title would imply. A monkey throws wobbling coconuts to prevent you from reaching the girl at the top or distract you into touching the lethal board edge, and if you take too long, coconuts come down quicker. There are refreshments here as well. Then after every other of these levels, there is a cage that spits out animals and guards an escalator, and you have to time the jump so that you don't hit the cage. Make it up a few, and you reach your girl again, get something a little better than ''My Hero,'' and a bonus life to boot. The first few times, though, you'll find that this game introduced shift-number swearing to the arcades before Q*Bert ever did. It's a bit jazzier than ''Oh no'' when you're hit by a coconut or ''gotcha'' on the main stage, and it may be the game's main claim to originality.

The controls are about as goofy as you can get for moving two directions and jumping. While you have four directions in all, only two can be exercised while running in a square. Your zoo keeper can twist and turn in the air to plan where he's going down. Given the duration of his jumps(probably necessary to survive on longer levels) you'll never quite get the hang of things and will often wind up jumping into something. Add to this that you can't stop your jump and frantically have to flip back and forth when above where you want to land, and many silly deaths will arise. Amusing stuff like being able to jump over an animal twice in a leap does not make up for this.

The background for the game is all black, but the bricks you produce to keep the monsters in change with each level. The monsters themselves are distinguishable; rhinos and elephants are closest, but they have different red splotches, and the elephant's pixel-wide snout is a tip, but not terribly clear. Lions, camels and moose have yellow-and-black marks and the snake is easily visible in green, but the problems occur when many monsters start to materialize, and two similar-looking ones overlap. It's impossible to keep track of everything after a while, which cancels the other arbitrary rule that if you touch an animal's top half while jumping, you survive. However, there are cute touches. Your man flails around while jumping or walking, and he bangs his net up and down like Mario with a hammer once he has it. I also like how the background flashes blue when the net's about to disappear; although it would be nice to have a mark on the already useful time-bar when the net goes away, this is second-best. I suppose that the scene after you rescue the girl and win an extra keeper is pretty funny, especially the second time, and some of the refreshments look pretty cool even if they're unrealistic; shamrocks and rainbows are nice but seem out of place around sundaes and root beer.

Zoo Keeper has a right within reason to try to sound like a zoo, but it winds up sounding like a far-too-crowded zoo. It seems more drug-induced than Robby Roto. The opening tune has too many sharps in it. It's like eating meat with sugar poured on. There are cranky-springy noise when you jump over monsters or pick up refreshments. They drown out the tapping noises you get for putting bricks in, but the sounds for trapped monsters at the end of the level trump them. There's a different boing for each animal type, and you may often find yourself willing to give up a few points not to hear the cacophony that results from a job well done.

So Zoo Keeper is an amusing little game and possibly even better if you are deaf. Although there's a lot of cute stuff going on, I can't really recommend it as a substitute for more well-known classics. It gets arbitrary quickly and in many ways. The menagerie is silly and cute, so it's worth a look, but without cheats I mostly find myself getting stuck on the bonus-man level, which I got to on my second time through.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 12/12/01, Updated 12/12/01