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The music playing during the title screen is quite nice.
The Story
Within the asphalt jungle everything is gray. The streets, the walls of the houses, even the sky. Mickey (not the Mouse!), a guy with 52 keys on his key ring (you know, the more keys you have the more important you are), walks among the grayness through the rain coming to the conclusion that color needs to be added to the city. There is a group hated by the police called “l’Art de Mauer” (so we know it is a city in Germany) who spray colorful graffiti all over the gray walls. His decision to join them is made within a second, but they do not accept everyone. The group only admits artists – true masters of the innards of a spray can on the wall. So, Mickey heads home to his apartment where Lord Chaos rules (not literally the one from Dungeon Master, but a close relative who keeps the comb next to the butter) and digs some old spray cans out of his packing cases. After the rain stopped Mickey heads back out again to prove his worth to “l’Art de Mauer” on the grey walls of the city.
Observe how your opponents moves and then wiggle through them.
The Game
The goal of the game is to run along the street (or level) from left to right. There are also a lot of other people out there and everyone hates you and tries to kill you on sight. Every opponent is moving along a certain lane of the street so the whole thing plays somewhat similar to Frogger, but instead of moving from the bottom of the screen to the top you move from the left to the right. Once you reached the end of a level you are presented with graffiti that you have to spray over with your own paint in a certain amount of time. Do not spray outside of the original graffiti because you will get no points for that. Once you run out of time or paint, you will move on to the next level if you scored high enough. Three lives are at your disposal and each one comes with twelve spray cans. Contact with enemies will cost you one life (you explode in a cloud of purple paint), but some of the projectiles hurled at you will just drain some of the spray cans you carry with you. Once you made it through all four levels (streets, train station, harbor, and park) and have collected enough points you are presented with a simple paint program (with twelve colors and three sizes of spray brush) which lets you create (and save) a graffiti of your own. The levels all play identical, just background graphics and sprites are different. Among the enemies you will find drunken sailors, pirates, old men in wheelchairs shooting missiles, old men with walking sticks shooting … something else, a squid or octopus walking on land, and I swear there is an African guy who looks like a slave carrying luggage. If you scored high enough you get an extra life, but sadly there is no high score table.
The game comes on a single disk. Running along the streets is controlled via the joystick and spraying via the mouse.
Check out this Amiga Longplay to get a general idea of how to play Graffiti Man.
The Game Over screen. Get used to seeing it a lot.
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Not very exciting, but not too bad either. Solid middle ground, also the constant jitter of the sprites (who look weird and sometimes grotesque) is not a sign of good programming.
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The title music is quite good and probably the best part of the whole game. The music playing during game play is average – not good, but also not annoying. There are few sounds, but the one accompanying the spraying is somewhat nice. Also you die with a solid explosion.
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The controls are a bit too slow. Also young Mickey is not the fastest sprite on the screen. There are old people moving faster than you. Loading times between losing a game and beginning a new one are a little too long and break the flow of the game, especially if you are trying to figure out how to evade the enemies.
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| It takes some time, discipline, and devotion to get into the swing of things. The first experiences of the game will very likely be quick deaths interrupted by too much loading. Once you find your way through all of your opponents you will find out, that the game is criminally short. Four to five minutes and you have solved it. Not much for a full priced game. The general idea is not bad, but the execution is. |
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