"Unjustly forgotten"

The first time I saw this game I was pretty skeptical. Another Circus clone, I thought. Approximately after 5 minutes of play I changed my mind. It is one of the best games of the era and one that hasn't been remade hundreds of times so it is actually fresh and fun to this day.

The idea is pretty simple – you are a clown who tries to catch balloons placed in rows at the top of the screens. Actually, saying that the game is about catching the balloons might look quite inaccurate – in the first level you have to pop them on your head but from the second level on, the situation changes. It is easy to see why – it is much harder to catch the balloons because you have a growing stack of balloons on your head. Sometimes it is impossible to catch the balloon, it falls too fast or you were to far from it – in this situation you don't just lose your life – you can kick the balloon and try to catch it when it starts to fall again. Unfortunately there is a pretty irritating flaw in the game mechanics, in the later levels when you have to deal with more then one falling balloon the balloons just fly through each other instead of bouncing. The game gets harder after the fourth level and the kicking becomes the essential part of the game-play – thus the title I guess.

There is a funny side story with the title of the game itself. It was called just Kick, and the ‘man' part was lately added in order to create an association with Pac-Man. The title isn't the only indication of this marketing plan, after the first level Pac-Man and ghosts play an active role in the game – ghosts act as balloons and the Pac-Man eats all the balloons you stacked on your head if you manage to catch him. In fact there is a problem with this inclusion of Pac-Man, in many levels there are more than one Pac-Man on the screen and in my opinion it is incoherent with the way Pac-Man has been portrayed later. Pac-Man is an individual, not a type of creature. Here it looks like it could have been an army of ‘Pac-Mans'.

I ought to say something about audio and visuals. The music is kind of generic – just imagine your typical circus tune. The graphics is actually very good, of course relatively to other games of the era. The game looks like a cartoon, the resolution is 640x480 so everything looks unusually sharp for a 1981 game. It's a shame that this game seems to be completely forgotten because it is pretty fun to play and could have been remade or just ported to consoles with changed difficulty – like many arcade games, it is pretty hard. On this very site you can see that this game has been ported to Atari 2600 but I just couldn't find any additional information about it on the Net so it is probably a clone or bootleg, not the proper port.

I recommend checking the game on MAME because it is probably impossible to spot in real arcade saloon, it is nice to play and it looks surprisingly modern.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/01/05