FRANKY, JOE & DIRK ON THE TILES

When I saw this game on my giant list of puzzle games, I assumed Joe was IREM's Joe and Mac. I didn't think that Franky would be Frankenstein's monster from another Game Boy puzzle game and Dirk would be, wait huh Dirk the Daring from Don Bluth's Dragons Lair??? How on earth did this insane crossover happen?

Well it's all tied to this games publisher, Elite Systems. Their history goes back to 1983 with the publication of Manic Miner, which I understand to be quite a hit on the home micro. As such they published ports to heaps of games, Space Harrier, Dragon's Lair, Bomb Jack, Rare's Jet Set Willy, plus tons of licensed games for Scooby Doo, the Dukes of Hazzard, and Frank Bruno's Boxing, which I know best for being a semi-licensed clone of Punch-Out with a real boxers likeness, years before Mike Tyson's Punch-Out.

It seems that Elite Systems only had the rights to these characters and properties in Europe, since I couldn't find a single US copy of this game online. This has gotta be the craziest video game crossover since Sega Fighters Megamix let you play as the palm tree from the sega AM2 logo. So that's how they had access to all of these characters, what is the game like?

Well, it's a sliding tile game. And as the tile suggest, Franky, Joe and Dirk are in fact on the tiles. I'm alright at sliding tile puzzles when the tiles are numbers, when an image is scrambled my brain struggles to figure out how to put it back together. The original image is shown for half a second when you start a level, not enough time to memorize what goes where. You have to match the tiles in a very strict time limit, or you game over.

On occasion, a hazard will spawn. Sometimes it'll scramble your tiles again, or lock a tile, or it's a bomb that you have to very quickly move or else it'll explode and you game over. Some of the spawns are bad, and you don't want to move them. Some are good and you do want to move them. Some are letters. Then a gyroscope showed up and I moved it and I uh, won?

The next stage came up with Dirk the Daring on the puzzle. Some of the tiles are almost entirely black, suck me to the base. I learned that pausing shows you the finished puzzle, so I actually had a chance to solve it and then a skeleton walked across the screen and messed with my tiles. And then I ran out of time and I game over'd. That's my experience, I tried playing the game about ten times and that's what happened every time.

I never promised I was a particularly bright person, but I can do a sliding tile puzzle if I have enough time. This game tells you to beat the clock, and blows you up to bits sometimes for fun. I hate this game so much, and it's almost certainly the second most disappointing Don Bluth production after Troll in Central Park.