Beauty and the Beast

"A fun old game in the same vein as Donkey Kong."

Beauty and the Beast is an old Intellivision game, drawing on Donkey Kong game mechanics with it's own little sense of style and overall flow. You play as Buford, trying to scale a tall building, chasing after the villain that has kidnapped your lady friend or mother or whatever she is.

Each screen is comprised of a bunch of floors, and you scale to the next floor by climbing up and open window. The windows open and close randomly, so you have to think and act on the fly. This leads to the game playing out different every time, which is nice when compared to other games from this time.

Ascending to the top floor on a screen brings Buford up to the next screen, and somehow the villain has moved to the top here. Along the way, rats, birds and boulders (and exploding boulders) can kill Buford. He also can gain hearts which make him temporarily invincible and able to destroy these obstacles and gain points. The boulders looked like butterscotch candies, but everything else was all right. Buford was a bit too yellow overall but how demanding can you really be of these games. You sorta take what you get back in 1982 - very few games before the 16 bit era are worth criticizing for their graphics.

As you climb, the floors get narrower and narrower, like a normal building. Falling off the edge dumps you clean off the side of the building, all the way to the bottom, in what is somewhat of a classic memory for most people that have played the game, complete with the slide whistle sound of plummeting to the bottom.

At the top, the level is small and once you reach the villain, he ends up being tossed off the building somehow, and Buford and his lady friend (or mother) are reunited. Then, you start all over again.

Aside from climbing to the top and earning points, there's just not much else to the game. It's fun and it's certainly better than Donkey Kong, but like most games of the time there's just not much else to do. It was good to plug in and play through once, every weekend when I was allowed to play games, but it was never a true favorite game. Definitely fun, though. And because the building environment was a bit more dynamic than other games of the time, Beauty and the Beast has a bit more replay value than many others of this time.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/22/09

Game Release: Beauty and the Beast (US, 1982)