Retro Review Pyjamarama Developer: Mikro-Gen Publisher: Mikro-Gen Genre: Arcade/Adventure Release Date: 1984 Platform: Spectrum, Amstrad, Commodore, (remake) Retro Review by May 3, 2007		Buy this game at Trade for this game at:

Everybody has seen or played action/adventure games in the form we know them today. Be it Tomb Raider, System Shock or Survival Horror games like Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil, action/adventures are the mixture of two genres that could appeal to action and adventure gamers alike. What not many people know is that this particular genre was around a lot longer before the illustrious Lara Croft and the more underground Edward Carnby made their appearance. In fact, Edward and Lara gave the genre a 3rd dimension, but before that there was an abundance of 2D action/adventures – or arcade/adventures, as they were called back then. One of the most major names in the arcade/adventure business was Micro-Gen, who developed 4 marvelous games, staring Wally Week and his gang: Everyone’s a Wally, 3 Weeks in Paradise, Herbert’s Dummy Run and Pyjamarama. (Automania is not included because it was a platform game)

If you have or ever had problems waking up in the morning to go to work, school and whatnot, then you will immediately sympathize with Wally in Pyjamarama. Wally has the very same problem, only this night is his last chance and his boss will fire him if he is late again in the morning. Unfortunately, Wally forgot to wind his alarm clock before going to bed, and now he is in deep trouble unless you help him out. How are you going to do that? Simple. By becoming him in his dream and looking around his house to find the clock key to wind his alarm clock. Simple? Maybe if the clock key was on the nightstand and the house was a normal house. But, as you can guess, that’s not the case. The clock key is hidden in one of the most outrageous places. As for a normal house? Can anything be normal in a dream?

Wally’s house turns into a nightmare full of all kinds of nasties and traps, which vary from ghosts to flying books and darts to hands coming out of the floor. All of them move around in looped patterns, and your platform gaming skills will be called to action in order to avoid deadly encounters. Wally has his snooze energy, portrayed as a nice glass of milk, as a defense mechanism, but when this energy is gone, Wally will say bye-bye to one of his three lives. Different kinds of food are scattered around the house that can help rejuvenate Wally’s snooze energy. Careful though, cause there are instances where Wally can be killed with just one touch. If all lives are lost, Wally will fail to wake up on time his boss will give him the boot.

Apart from the platform parts, Pyjamarama offers a good amount of inventory puzzles, which will need to be solved in order for Wally to reach his holy grail – the clock key that is! Wally can carry two items at a time and every time he walks over an item, he picks it up dropping the last one from his inventory. Items can be used in 2 different ways. One way is item-on-item, either by combining two items, which happens automatically when Wally is holding one and walks over the other, or by trading them for certain other items that can only be obtained in that fashion. The other way is having the item in the inventory when entering certain rooms to change the way things are happening in those rooms. The fact that Wally’s pockets are pretty shallow makes the puzzling aspect of the game pretty tough. Strong memory is needed in order to remember which room contains what. There are no clues whatsoever, so you need to figure out yourself how to manipulate each item, by using both the logical and imaginative parts of your brain. Not all puzzles are mandatory to finish the game and there are plenty of red herrings too. In the end you will be given a percentage of what you accomplished. So, if you think you’re good in inventory puzzling, Pyjamarama is waiting to put your skills to the test.

Since we are talking about an 8-bit game from the mid 80s, elaborating about the graphics and sound would sound more like a campfire joke, rather than a serious discussion. But nostalgia can work wonders, and if you were a Spectrum, Amstrad or Commodore owner, you might want to try out the respective version. Being an ex-Spectrum owner myself, and having drained every last drop of the game on my old trusty ZX+, I couldn’t help by lean towards the speccy version. Objectively though, the Commodore version comes out first in the visual department, but not with as big a difference as one would expect. In the sound department, the Spectrum version wins hands down. The sound effects are richer, more varied and the good old flatulence-like bleeps here and there only beef up the charm. There is also an excellent Windows remake, which, naturally, doesn’t compare to the 8-bit versions in terms of graphics and sound, and offers a beautiful new experience to old fans of the game. The remake can be downloaded for free here.

Playing Pyjamarama again, after almost two decades almost brought tears to my eyes in reminiscence of the golden old days of gaming – and it being one of my favorite games of all time just fueled the emotion. My biggest thanks to all the good people who make emulators so that we can relive those invaluable gaming moments and to the development team behind the brilliant Windows remake. Old 8-bit gamers need to check this out a.s.a.p., especially if you have never played it before. As for newer gamers, the visual shock as well as the merciless, compared to today’s standards, difficulty level may be a hindrance, but if you are not the “if it doesn’t need a GeForce 7900GTX I am not playing it” type and you can arm yourself with patience, then do yourself a favor and dig in to this magnificent arcade/adventuring experience. And remember, if you want better visuals there’s the Windows remake, and if you can’t stand the heat, emulators allow you to save!