Another Monty game. It’s very similar to the first one, really, but with the added feature that you have to collect five specific items en-route to the exit or you can’t escape.

I think I was lucky in that I found them automatically or accidentally, because I certainly remember when I’ve played this previously a very long time ago I must have missed some. It wouldn’t surprise me if backtracking to find them again was impossible too.

The jumping physics and general collision detection seems a bit improved over the first game, and graphically it’s a bit nicer too. There is a teddy that looks like you should pick it up but it kills you, which seems a bit unfair as there’s no warning. Bloody teddy bears.

The Monty Mole games were always Too Hard. You only have to look at the random nature of the instant-death Crushers to see that. I sort of liked them at the time, but not enough to struggle through with not-my-fault deaths threatening to cut my play short – it was just too frustrating. Plus on the Spectrum I had a million other games I could play instead.

So, why I bought The Monty Mole Collection, a set of three Monty and one Monty-adjacent games on the eShop, I don’t know. Madness.

But! Save states! Sure, emulators have had these for a Very Long Time but it’s just easier to play things on the Switch these days, isn’t it? And with these save states I can work around the stupid randomness and relieve some of the other frustrations that are always part of pixel-perfect platformers with slightly wonky collision detection.

And so it came to pass that I played and completed Wanted: Monty Mole. Obviously it’s a simplistic, if not exactly simple, game these days but it was fine enough. There was a bit where you have to collect items to get past a certain screen and the items I needed did nothing. Not sure if that’s a bug or I did something wrong, but I ended up starting the game again, did exactly the same thing, and it worked. Haunted.