The New Zealand Story

My love affair with this game started as soon as the main theme twinkled and bounded into my lugholes as I booted it up for the first time on my brand spanking new Amiga 500. The day before, I was a proud owner of an Atari 65XE, so to hear proper arcade quality music coming from my Solavox TV was a total mind-fuck.

It was the first game I ever played on my A500, and to this day remains my favourite platformer of all time. The premise is unapologetically simple: your little Kiwi friends have been kidnapped by an evil Walrus and stuffed in cages all over New Zealand, and you must rescue them.

Anatomical Inaccuracy No.1: Walruses have up to 700 hairs on their snouts.
This one has 4. Not that it matters.

It's actually quite a twisted game, full of understated perversions shrouded in yellow downy fluff. From a casual glance it seems as though it's just another cutesy platform romp, but within minutes your character Tiki The Kiwi is doing battle with a wide variety of strange entities using an impressive arsenal of weapons. Starting with a bow-and-arrow, Tiki soon graduates to wielding lasers, bombs, and fire-staffs against his Antipodean aggressors.

The baddies are numerous and cute in a killable kind of way. Amongst the mescaline menagerie are bondage wear-sporting cats riding metal chain balloons, spiky yellow orange beasties who regurgitate copies of themselves, and distinctly genital-inspired anemones.

Yes, it's subtly subversive. Even in the six-second introductory animation, one of the kiwis that is soon to be nabbed and bagged-up by the evil Walrus is smoking a sly ciggie! It's little things like this that hint at the attention to detail and secrets that TNZS harbours within its chirpy corpus.

Anatomical inaccuracy No.2: Kiwis are brown with
long beaks. Not that it matters.

Such examples of hidden secrets in the game are the warp-holes. Shooting certain patches of what seems like thin air eventually creates a dimensional rip that will transport your adventurous kiwi to later parts of the level, or even several levels forward. Discovering one of these is deeply gratifying in itself. When you notice that one of your arrows suddenly disappears, you know you've hit a hidden spinning warp hole waiting to be revealed.

It's the kind of game that you just don't get anymore. None of your patronising half-hour long tutorial here, baby. Jumping about, curious bad guys, twee music, an insane collection of weaponry and balloon hijacking insanity is the soup de jour.

It's a touchingly sweet experience, like a newly released convict in a straight-out-of-the-packet fluffy cardigan. It seems ready to fit into society, but pull up the sleeves and you'll see twisted tattoos and scars of long-forgotten brawls.

Still not convinced? The cheat code to enter on the title screen on the Amiga version was ‘MOTHERFUCKENKIWIBASTARD'.

SWITH, October 2004.

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