Crush Roller

Known in the US as Make Trax, I actually knew this game as Crush Roller as a kid, though it was exceptionally rare to see it anywhere around. It's an interesting little game.

The premise of the game is maze based and very much in the spirit of Pac-Man. Rather than being chased by ghosts and stuffing your face with pills, in Crush Roller you take the form of a paintbrush with the task of painting all of the paths of the maze. Your job is made more difficult due to the constant attention of a couple of… what are they anyway… sperm…? Drops of turpentine…? Whatever they are, you can think of them as surrogate ghosts. Only in this game there are no power pills with which to defeat them. What you need to do is to lure the sperm to one of two special sections of path where you can crush them with the…ahem… CRUSH ROLLER (what is this American "Make Trax" shit? It doesn't even work as a descriptive title. It would be like calling Pong "Equestrian").

One evolution this game does make is that lurking in the maze is a cat, a mouse, a bird and a car, and from time to time one of them will come to life and mess up your new paint job. It would be like if a piece of fruit appeared in Pac-Man and started laying down fresh pills to pick up. So your job is to run that fucker down fast and repaint the damage. Interestingly, the bird makes the exact same purring sound as the cat. I've heard of a bird-dog before, but… So does the mouse and the car, come to think of it. As the game progresses the maze disappointingly stays the same - it's just that the speed of the game increases with each level-up. Aside from some startling introductory music, the sounds of the game are quite fun. The little jingle that plays when losing a life is sure to raise a smile.

Not the most mind blowing experience out there, but good fun.