Retro Review: David Bellamy’s Endangered Wildlife

Well I am quite bloody drunk right now Sir, so what of coourse do I share of my mental genious than to say I have discovered a brand new idea for a pivoting topic point of blogging. Here is the amazing review of really bad software, video games and gadgets from the old days. I SHALL CHRISTEN IT, THE RETRO REVIEW.

First up, as per the title, David Bellamy’s Endagered Wildlife, for Windows 3.11, 95, and Macintosh Whatevercrapitwastheyhadthen.

For those not familliar with David Bellamy, he is a large bearded man who, for many years, fronted some namby-pamby shows on the TV about pandas. He later went on to do these very disturbing advertisements about Dettox disinfectant. Of course, with the Bellamy bandwagon at full roll, a video game release was inevitable.

Now the first thing to mention about this game is that, rather unpredictably, David Bellamy has absaloutely feck all to do with it. His voice, photograph, not even his name appears at any point except on the Compact Disc cover. This is, of course, something of a major dissapointment.

The plot opens up with a poor quality video of a pod crashing in what looks to be the surface of Mars. Then a video message is beamed into your brain, of two really cheesy actors in bad Star Trek costumes. They claim to have come from the future using some mumbo-jumbo technology, and have come back in time to warn us that the Pandas are all dead in the future.

Oh fucking n0es! – it’s now your job to meddle with the timeline and save all the forest-life from extinction. Now, to acomplish this task, you have to partake in one giant wordsearch puzzle for each endagered species that requires rescue. Now call me crazy, but, I’m not entirely sure what they hope to accomplish there. Now if we could sort Afghanistan out by doing a wordsearch and some really stupid mini-games, then the world would be a far better place.

Along the way you have to partake in various wordsearches, jigsaw puzzles, and watch various video clips of monkies randomly eating Bamboo. Once you’ve completed each puzzle, you move onto the next animal until eventually Bill and Ben pop back up on the viewscreen and say “cheers”. They then fuck off back too the future without so much as offering a cup of tea for your efforts.

Overall then, this game is severly lacking in any real substance. Duke Nukem it is not, with it’s cheesy MIDI soundtrack and total misrepresentation on the front cover, this game is bound to bring hours of sheer boredom too any household.

My grandparents love this game, by the way.

Danny’s Retro Rating: