Cowboy Kidz

 

Cowboy Kidz is one of those games you don't see a lot of people covering on YouTube or anywhere else. It was released on the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC by Byte Back in 1989 for the sum of £2.99. Maybe in that year we had Chase H.Q., Batman The Movie and Myth: History In The Making to while away the hours, but for whatever reason I never heard of it. 

It was only when I went on to a Xyphoe live stream and saw it for the Amstrad CPC that it made me think what the Speccy version looked like. By the way I would recommanded going over and watching some of Xyphoes videos as they are awesome. You get a good feeling on what the Underrated Amstrad CPC is all about. So click on the link just above this to go over to his channel.

Anyway upon loading you get a half decent loading screen and once you're fully loaded up you get a beeper rendition of Riders of the Storm. It's not bad and something you would have heard in the early years of the machine, but I was expecting better when loading it up in 128k mode. Sadly this game seems to be suited to 48k restrictions.

While the music plays you have all the normal control methods available to you and there is nothing special at all. Keyboard controls are the normal Q for up, A for down, O for left, P for right and M to fire

The game itself is a shoot'em'up, and it copies elements of a CAPCOM shooter, Gun.Smoke. You are on your horse, and you have to keep the train safe for it to reach its destination. Shoot all the baddies, avoid everything else and plan your route around the screen. My problem is that almost everything kills you, if you bump into a rock or a cactus you die, if you stay behind the train a whip comes out of the train and kills you, if you touch water it kills you and even in some stages the train fires guns and it can kill you. No matter how hard you try to avoid stuff it kills you. But the biggest mystery to me is you can bump into the train, and you don't die. WTF?

To top this all off the cowboys appear like if they were teleported by the starship Enterprise and when you kill them they get beamed back up, it makes no sense at all.

Remember I said about this being like Gun.Smoke?

The controls are almost like it with you holding left or right and then pressing fire you will shoot your gun slightly in those directions and by only hitting fire you shoot the gun ahead of you. It's something you have to get used too, but it's nothing you will struggle with.

Graphically it's OK, but the animation for the horse running is awful. The horses 2 legs that you can see go outward and not up and down like you would think happens on a normal horse. Its like if the horse jumps and fails to hover over the ground only to land and try over and over. How anyone thought this looked right is beyond me.

Sound during the game is just a bunch of farts which reminds me of the scene in Blazing Saddles. I guess our hero has eaten too many beans.

All in all it's not a great game and not an average game either. Maybe, below average and that could also mean why not many people talk about this game.

The Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC ports do not fair better either. Sure, they have music during the game, but you will run into the same problems over and over again.

Graphics        5    Sound            3    Playability     3    Overall          11/30