Hi there!

Let's have a look at the one and only game from a publisher named "Shades":

Easy to guess from the screenshot already, this is once again a sidescrolling platformer in the tradition of Super Mario Bros. It actually borrows ideas from several NES games, not just from SMB. E.g. I spotted elements from Mega Man as well and I've seen a character using a Yo-Yo as weapon in "Goonies 2" before.

The cutesy presentation is a good mixture between Giana Sisters and SMB. The 12 levels show quite a variety of background themes and enemies, but maybe for a memory trade-off it only as a single little ditty that is repeated over and over again, until your ears are bleeding...

The games controls are finicky: The character needs a while to gain momentum and also decelerates slowly, so it's hard to time jumps and steer the character through a series of pixel perfect jumps. His Yo-Yo is also troublesome, since it gives the player sprite an insane amount of force feedback when hitting something. This is pushing him some 4-6 pixels back, quite often even straight off a platform, without any mercy

These issues and the generally tough level design overall render this game very hard and frustrating in my opinion. The lame bonus round that is played after each level also is rather annoying than entertaining, so this is far from a game I'd recommend playing, at least not the C64 version. It is rated quite high amongst lemon64 visitors though, so if someone is into the genre and has a high frustration tolerance it might be worth a look.

I was very glad when finally reaching home though:

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another sidescrolling platformer in the form of "Creatures", but first it'll continue with something different.

Greetings,

Manuel Rotschkar