Merbotia

1. The medkits found in the Secret Cave do not actually provide any health, while displaying a "25 Health!" message

2. The boss's desk aboard the space station doesn't properly zap its :touch or :scoot labels after the player kills the boss, allowing them to repeat the conversation with the dead character.

3. The game's ending sequence has the player lose thirty health as part of their rough landing. If the player doesn't have this much health, the label the code is intended to jump to doesn't exist and an error is thrown. This sequence was either not coded or intended to re-use the :dead label that does successfully activate if you lack enough ammo to deal with the muggers.

(Report entered by Dr. Dos, first issue reported by Zinfandel, subsequent reports by The Green Herring)

This is a typical cant put down game until completed type thing.

It displays use of music very well and the puzzles were good.

Merbotia seems to be a game that most people have forgotten about for some reason, which saddens me; it's a perfectly good game. Considering when this game was made (1995, I think), the audio/visual was great, and this is one of the first games to have a nonsensical plot without sucking horribly.

Anyway, you wake up one day and have to save the world from some horrible monster or other. You do so, but then there's this space station... okay, so I haven't played the game in awhile and my mind has fogged over some of the finer details. Bleagh.

The game consists mostly of old-school style shooting at stuff, only the graphics don't look like pig vomit due to through STK-use and decent drawing skills on Sonic 256's part. There's also some decent music- a forgettable theme song, and a rendition of music from the first Super Mario Bros- I think it's from the first underground stage.

GAMEPLAY: Shooting, shooting, and more of it, but the game knows to cut it off just as it's starting to get old; for example, a good ways into the space station there is an interactive conversation that has several possible outcomes including death and an alternate ending. There's a good overall balance between plot, shooting, and weird humor, a fairly rare thing.

The shooting does get somewhat repetitive at times, and the game's on the shortish side with not too much replay value, but all in all Merbotia is a forgotten classic worth downloading. Play it a couple times, delete it, then wonder whatever happened to Sonic256.