Developed by Chris Gray of Gray Matter and published by Mindscape in the early nineties, Fiendish Freddy’s Big Top O’ Fun is a third person perspective platform game with a circus theme and an interesting story. It was ported to numerous formats besides DOS.
The story behind Fiendish Freddy’s Big Top O’ Fun involves a bankrupt circus. The Big Top is in trouble and owes a large sum of money to a corrupt businessman who is intent on tearing down the circus and erecting a series of luxury hotels in the circus’s stead.
Developed by Chris Gray of Gray Matter and published by Mindscape in the early nineties, Fiendish Freddy’s Big Top O’ Fun is a third person perspective platform game with a circus theme and an interesting story. It was ported to numerous formats besides DOS.
The story behind Fiendish Freddy’s Big Top O’ Fun involves a bankrupt circus. The Big Top is in trouble and owes a large sum of money to a corrupt businessman who is intent on tearing down the circus and erecting a series of luxury hotels in the circus’s stead. He demands that the ringmaster pay his debt immediately, and if payment is not received, the Big Top is over. Of course, the businessman wants the circus to fail so he can get
his hotels. When the ringmaster organizes a series of six centre ring shows to amuse and amaze the masses, the businessman unleashes his evil little lackey, Fiendish Freddy.
The six events are basically a collection of different games. The events include: the trapeze, juggling, diving, knife throwing, tightrope walking, and the human cannonball. After each event, a judging panel consisting of five clowns will offer up a sum of money based on the performances during the show. The goal is clear, and that is to make $10,000 in order to save the circus before Fiendish Freddy steals the show.
The game runs similar to a decathlon style of video game. The user will take his turn at each of the events and in each of the events Fiendish Freddy will try to hinder the user’s progress somehow. In the trapeze, the user must jump from rope to rope, through rings of fire and around moving targets. The player must keep moving, because Freddy is carrying a scissors and is propelled by a jet pack and will cut the trapeze if the user is too slow. In juggling, the player goes through four levels of juggling, each one becoming more and more difficult than the last. Occasionally, odd items will find their way into the routine, such as babies that will have to be thrown back to their mothers. Freddy is lobbing bombs into the mix. The diving stunt is the standard leap into a glass of water, with the diving boards getting higher and the glasses becoming smaller. Freddy has a huge hair dryer to blow the diver away from his mark. A rotating wheel holds a series of balloons and lovely female assistant for the knife throwing event. The user has to break the balloons without killing the assistant, who will scream and bleed if hit. The player has a time limit and a finite number of knives. Freddy clogs the user’s vision with smoke bombs. With the tightrope, Freddy is back with his jetpack trying to launch the user off the tightropes. The human cannonball sees the least obstruction by Freddy. If the user takes to long to line up his shot, Freddy will destroy the cannon. Otherwise, it is all up to the player to launch the character into the target without hindrance.
The game contains an inordinate amount of graphic violence and blood, and features some dark humour, which many people will fall over. It most certainly isn’t a bad little game, but despite its fun and lively title, may not be suitable for the wee ones. Give it a try and save the circus.
