As for the game play itself, well... there's just something to it, you know? It's quite similar to Crossfire, if only for the game board. Not quite as violent. But as the game title suggests, there's a more long-term goal than just trying to flip the score... and you really shouldn't try to here. Spoiler Alert: there are four rounds for each... unnatural-colored fruit you're supposed to harvest. You are Ozzy, gentleman farmer extraordinaire, forever trapped in your beekeeper / Hazmat garb. You must protect your evenly-spaced grid of trees from the man-sized bugs that are constantly lining up to plague you and your crop. There are two colors of man-sized bugs: brown and white. The brown ones are relatively harmless; you can walk through them. Your only weapon: a 'gun' that shoots slow, brown bullets that will knock the bugs out. The white bugs? A little deadlier! I already forget if you can walk through them... I don't think you can. Hey, where's your sense of adventure? Don't you like just jumping into the deep end of the pool on these things? Figuring it out on your damn own for a change? To make matters worse, the white bugs shoot their own bullets at you; mostly just to show off, but I tend to run into these things anyway. And so, if you can survive three levels of this bedlam in paradise, the fourth level is the big payoff. As you may notice, the levels... rather, the four rounds that constitute a level, correspond to a given season. The fourth level is the fall, when the trees start giving forth their bounty of fruits! But you gotta pick 'em up quick, because the giant bugs like 'em too! They're not worth a whole lot of points, so I more or less just keep shooting at the bugs, and hope to run across one fruit or two in my travels and travails.
Yes, Ozzy is but a mere pawn in the game of the Agro-Industrial complex. All hail the giant ruthless seed company whose Name Need Not Be Written Or Spoken! And the game company responsible for this minor masterpiece is called TG Software. I do like that logo! I'm just a sucker for a great logo. Also like that ZiMAG one. If I had to pick one... and it seems like I do... I'm going to have to go with Abracadabra! as TG's best title. A fast-paced orgy of magic and moving maze walls you'd be hard pressed to find; on the other side of that spectrum, you have Brøderbund's Labyrinth, where the maze walls move too slowly, and usually not in your favor, either. So, to recap: slow maze walls, not enough magic. Night Strike! is pretty good too. (AKA Der Blitz!) It doesn't lend itself well to hour upon hour of game play, but that's all right now; if you had to spend $34.95 for a diskette to play it, that's another story. As for Droids, well... the '20s style font and the theme song are probably the best parts of this sleeping pill of a game. It makes the similar game play of, well, Ozzy's Orchard, seem suave and sophisticated in comparison! A shame that no forward-thinking game developer ever thought to get those proverbial country and city mice together in the same game.
Ozzy's Orchard's home in particular at Atarimania.com
TG Software's home in general at Atarimania.com
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