Hi there!

Newsflash: Freddy Hardest, the notorious intergalactic playboy crash landed on an alien planet:

After Army Moves, this is another multi-part game from Dinamic. I think they made over a dozen of them in the 80s. I won't feature all of them in the "Playing..." series, because a lot of them were really bad.

Freddy Hardest is split into two parts. The first half of the game is a plain sidescrolling jump'n'shoot, where Freddy has to proceed approximately two dozen planet surface screens to the left. On the final screen he's reaching an underground base and you're getting a code granting you access to the second half of the game.

The second is a small action adventure. You have to prepare one out of four available ships in order to escape the planet. You need to refuel it, activate it's hyper drive and find a code to open it. It's pretty easy to do that. You just have to run around the base and activate every single computer terminal you find. They then answer stuff like "red is full" or "blue code is bartax", so once you have done all 3 tasks e.g. for the green ship, you can just go down to the hangar and fly away with the green ship.

I didn't even need a map to get there:

Well, Freddy Hardest is a rather small game. It's still difficult, because you're constantly being attacked by Aliens, which are causing often enough an unfair death, e.g. when one of them is appearing right in your path while you're jumping

Still, overall it was a slightly better experience than what I was expecting...

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see its sequel "Freddy Hardest in South Manhattan", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel