This morning, I was going to the broken links forum to report some link issues, when I noticed a topic about Mudsplat, and it suddenly occurred to me that here was an arcade style audiogame I hadn't yet tried.

Now, I knew the game was obviously aimed at kids, so I wasn't expecting anything particularly astounding, especially given the rather large proportion of audio space invaders games knocking about.

The first thing I noticed aabout the game, was that the file was absolutely humungus! 192 Mb? even monkey business is only 104 Mb, and games like shades of doom only come out at about 40 or 50.

When I loaded up the game I found out why. Loads of very bright multi-coloured menues, and one of the most extensive audio help systems I've ever seen, all (presumably), recorded in big fat audio formats like Wav, which explained every aspect of the game in very careful detail.

as reguards the bright menues, while unneccessary in an audio game it was stil rather nice to see anyway. As to the help system ----- being as the game was supposed to appeal to kids as young as six, I suppose that sort of careful explanation of gameplay was neccessary ----- though a "Quickstart" option for anyone older playing the game might have been welcome.

so, after waiding through a rather fun litle story about mud throwing monsters randomly appearing, I started the game.

the first thing that impressed me about this game, was the audio used. When the help files and such talked about the monster's horrible voices, they really weren't joking! these things sound distinctly scary, and (and I thought this was particularly impressive), there seemed to be a huge variety of audio samples used for the different monsters! Compared to games like Troopanum where there are only four or five different sorts of identifyable enemies, I thought this was a really nice touch, which leant a lot to keeping the game interesting and avoiding monotony, even the bonuses had about five different sounds each.

The background audio of each stage was also extremely lovely, sinse it evolved in complexity with each level of the world until you got to the boss, something which I always like to see in an audiogame.

I also rather liked the idea of building up tune samples each level until you got a hole melody ----- though as reguards plots this was a litle contrived to say the least. The Sonix song Btw, I actually found quite disturbing, sort of late 80's discordently wrong electronica, ----- deffinately enough to terrify any monster!