I remembered that Spin Doctor was one of my favourite games to play as a child, and I remembered playing it for hours and hours, but I must admit that until I found it in my basement last week, I had forgotten just how much fun it actually was. The simplicity of the game made it easy enough for me to play on my own (unlike some other games of that time period), but it was always difficult enough to keep me entertained for hours on end.
The premise of the game was to get from one starting point to a finishing point without being killed.
Your character was the hand of a clock rotating around a center point. There was a grid of these points, and as you rotated so that you came into contact with another dot, you could press a button to release from your original point and rotate around the second point. By performing this manoeuvre continuously, you could swing across the entire level until you reached the end. Starting at a very simple, almost mind numbing lever, and progressing through various twists and turns which made the levels more and more difficult with everything from moving dots, to other multi-colored clock hands that could not be
touched, even to dynamite used to blow up enemies, right up until lever 100 which seemed nearly impossible to complete. I must admit, the graphics were nothing to write home about, but there were plenty of colors used, which made it seem very state of the art and very enjoyable to use.
There were also a few animations in levels that made me want to play them again and again just to watch the chain reactions that occurred. One that jumps right to mind is in one of the latter levels, where you swing over a fuse, and it snakes around nearly the entire level until it sets off a stick of dynamite, which in turn blows up barrels of explosives to clear the path to the finish.
This is far and away one of my favourite computer games of all time, and I would highly recommend it to anybody willing to give it a try. It’s a classic, and if you don’t like it, downloading it for your kids, and I can guarantee that they will. I have yet to encounter anybody who has ever played it, and did not like it.
