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WITTY CAT (SV)
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Publisher: Watara.
Developer: Bon Treasure. Released: 1992. Genre: Maze. Posted 22nd November 2024. By Tom Clare © 2024 |
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If you’ve visited the site regularly over the years, it likely won’t have escaped your notice that we love obscure hardware and the obscure games that inevitably accompany them. Take the Mega Duck, for example. When you pair its commercial failure and deeply dubious name with a library totalling fewer than 30 games, it’s hard to envisage software worthy of a player’s time. Sometimes we’re rewarded for covering these deeper cuts, however, and a surprising majority of the handheld’s games proved to be very decent efforts.
While we’re on the subject of early nineties Game Boy-alikes, this brings us neatly to Watara’s Supervision and Witty Cat. Ah, how I appreciate games with slightly odd-sounding titles. Bon Treasure were likely angling to portray a character that channelled enigmatic tendencies and landed on a near-ish synonym. You’ll be largely unsurprised to hear that humour plays no role in the game, but it’s a nifty name nevertheless. Lured by a rather nostalgia-inducing title screen reminiscent of the old Tom & Jerry cartoons, how would this 1992 maze/platformer hybrid fare?
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The levels have very little to differentiate between them, and the action quickly grows dull
Witty Cat is a clone of Namco’s early-eighties arcade game Mappy, only with a bit less personality and a lot less enjoyment. Here you play as a generic mouse (rather than a truncheon-wielding police rodent) and your job is to navigate multi-tiered levels using trampolines, collecting all the food and evading cats ‘n’ kittens, as well as a nightmarish (but otherwise unidentified) monstrosity who makes straight for your position if you dawdle around. The cats can’t get you whilst you’re airborne, so make ample use of the trampolines to navigate to safe areas, but beware of becoming surrounded! To help your generic mouse, certain doors can be opened at opportune moments to release a draft that blows away any tailing felines. Use them well though, they’re your only means of defence. Locate every piece of food, and it’s on to the next level.
The trouble is, when modelling a game so closely on a near decade-old coin-op, it doesn’t look great when it’s lagging so far behind. A lack of technical sophistication is understandable amid portable games of the early nineties. However, Witty Cat desperately needed more impetus and variety to better sustain its austere gameplay. Levels become a little more complicated as you progress, adding dead ends and more convoluted routes to reach the fruit, but there’s little discernable evolution. Long sections of platform without gaps to jump to safety mean some deaths feel unavoidable.
The trouble is, when modelling a game so closely on a near decade-old coin-op, it doesn’t look great when it’s lagging so far behind. A lack of technical sophistication is understandable amid portable games of the early nineties. However, Witty Cat desperately needed more impetus and variety to better sustain its austere gameplay. Levels become a little more complicated as you progress, adding dead ends and more convoluted routes to reach the fruit, but there’s little discernable evolution. Long sections of platform without gaps to jump to safety mean some deaths feel unavoidable.
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Where Mappy is quick-fire and unpredictable, Witty Cat feels ponderous and unsure. It’s harder to plan because you can never see much of the level layout at any one time, and less spontaneous due to the jerky, laboured sprite movement. The gameplay is functional, but trampolining takes too long and door-opening controls are hit-and-miss. It counts as a reasonable distraction in the extreme short-term, but quickly becomes tedious. Witty Cat never threatens to become moreish or addictive, and the one-more-go factor is weak.
Still, it’s nice that there’s a modest variety of fruits and sweets to collect for points and the ultra-plain levels are at least clear and uncluttered in their make-up. The action produces a reasonable number of sprites at any one time, but unfortunately, like a great many Supervision titles, it suffers from noticeable sprite-flicker. The presence of only one BGM track only heightens the sense of repetition that’s quick to set in.
Still, it’s nice that there’s a modest variety of fruits and sweets to collect for points and the ultra-plain levels are at least clear and uncluttered in their make-up. The action produces a reasonable number of sprites at any one time, but unfortunately, like a great many Supervision titles, it suffers from noticeable sprite-flicker. The presence of only one BGM track only heightens the sense of repetition that’s quick to set in.
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Take too long and this hellish flying spacehopper will begin a chase, killing you on impact
Games can always be measured on the metric of enjoyment, addiction or immersion, and Witty Cat doesn’t really register on any of these scales. However, it’s too slow and samey to make for a good maze game and too uneventful to make for a decent platformer. Add to this its stuttering performance, lacklustre presentation and gameplay that becomes repetitive very quickly, and you’ve one gaming kitty that uses up its nine lives in about half an hour.
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VERDICT
"A functional but austere Mappy-clone. Witty Cat desperately needed more impetus and variety, but in the absence of any flare, it grows quickly dull and repetitive." OVERALL: 3/10 |
OTHER MAZE GAMES LIKE THIS REVIEWED
Pac-Mania (1988, Amiga)
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Pac-Man: Championship Edition (2007, Xbox 360)
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