"Avoid the Noid!"

"Avoid the Noid! Avoid the Noid! Avoid the Noid!" the pizza delivery boy would shout as he's thrusts his freshly baked delivery into the hands of a small child, before being devoured in a heroic death scene by hordes of Noids. ...Okay, I made that part up, but it sounds good, don't it? For those that don't know, the Noid was an unofficial mascot for Domino's Pizza during the 80s and 90s who sought out pizza to sabotage them and ruin the good name of Domino's. These furry little red rabbit like creatures were feared and loathed all over the world, but where do these little critters feature in our humble world of video games?

...In the corner. The dark, dark corner where it should stay.

As the aptly named title suggests, it's your job to "avoid the Noid" - so as the unnamed Pizza-Boy, you've got the task to deliver one very special pizza to Doom Industries positioned on the 30th floor of an apartment building. Sound simple? Well, you've not only got to battle against the wits of the Noid, but Father Time himself. If you're a single second over the famous "30 minutes or your pizza's free" limit, you're fired. Can you survive 30 floors of pizza-hating Noids and their devious traps? Well, the clock's ticking.

Enough Noid-bashing; how does the game stand up? Surprisingly...not very well. Our hero of a pizza boy can walk, run, somersault and roll his way across the game, but unfortunately he must be a retired veteran pizza-boy or something, called in by the Domino organisation to do battle once more with the Noids because...HE'S JUST *THAT* SLOW! He stumbles forward slowly without a care in the world. If the simple task of walking along is too much at this point, just wait until you get a few floors up, as you'll be trying to dodge armies of Noids, and then? ROCKET-LAUNCHER holding Noids with HEAT (or should I say pizza?) SEEKING MISSLES. It's tough stuff to avoid these things, so once you're hit a few times and it's Game Over, don't expect to be playing it again anytime soon unless you enjoy being annoyed as hell.

To reach the top floor and deliver your pizza, you've got to manipulate elevators. To work the elevators, you need keys, and these keys are inside phones scattered all over the building....which are under guard by the Noids. Notice a pattern of repetition and dullness? Yeah. That's the whole game. Avoid the Noid! scores very little in the way of gameplay.

The sound is not another hot aspect of Domino's pizza-thon, as it's a weak bunch of noises thrown together with high-pitched tones. The music is on a similar wave length (no pun intended), and is just one long drone of similar sounding notes...

What about the next aspect? If the gameplay's terrible, than surely it's all about the graphics, right? Well, Avoid the Noid! has got to be the living exception - each floor is a different colour, and the architect knows nothing about style, as bright blue clashes with fluorescent yellow if I'm not mistaken. Granted, it's a Commodore title, but other titles from the same year (we're talking 1989 here, just one year before the graphical adventure that was Monkey island) were pushing the boat out to new limits, so I couldn't help but feel the developers were lazy and uninspired.

Final words?

Avoid "Avoid the Noid!" at all costs.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 04/03/06