Review of  Ooops Up for the Amiga 500

Ooops Up was one of the first original games I got for my Amiga 500 back in the beginning of the 1990’s. The first one I got was I Ludicrus, but that is a different story. 😉

This game was developed by Silicon Warriors and published in 1991 by Demonware. It comes on one floppy disk and runs on a stock Amiga 500. I fired it up on my Amiga 1200, but it didn’t work straight away. I therefore had to access the early boot-menu and select the original chipset option. I also disabled the CPU caches to be safe. The game ran perfectly with these options, so if you’re having trouble running Ooops Up on your AGA machine, this should help you out.

As for the music in the game, it is a bit special compared to others as it was made by a band called Snap!. The name of the song is (not surprisingly) Ooops Up and it was quite a hit back in 1990. I’ve included the music video at the end of this review if you’d like to listen to it.

The background story of Ooops Up is not very complicated. You’re an astronaut that crash-landed on a distant planet in a galaxy far, far away. To save yourself, you must rebuild the craft using parts that are scattered around on various hostile planets. You are rewarded with a part for your ship after completing a level.

If you’ve played Pang, you’ll feel at home right away. Just like in the 1989 classic, the aim is simply to clear the screen of bouncing balls (meteors). Your weapon is some kind of high-tech harpoon that splits the balls into smaller ones, until they finally disappear from the screen. You’ll also find power-ups that enhances your weapon or freezes the activity on the screen. The latter can be very helpful in hectic situations (and believe me.. there are a lot of demanding situations in this game..).

Ooops Up is easy to learn and you’ll get to grips with it quickly. The difficulty in general is a different chapter though. The game is not an easy one, that’s for sure. The first levels are quite OK, but it gets more and more complicated as you make progress. There are ladders that needs climbing and jumping off, while an army of balls are doing their best to flatten you.. Needless to say, quick reflexes and an itchy trigger finger will be an advantage. There’s a grand total of 100 levels to complete in Ooops Up, so it’s quite a challenge to survive until the end. I’ve never managed it myself. Fortunately the game includes level codes, so that you don’t have to play all levels each time if you don’t want to. That’s a good thing.

A positive thing I have to mention about Ooops Up is that two people can play at the same time and co-operate to complete levels. If the going gets tough (isn’t that a song by the way?), why not ask someone to help you in your attempt to rebuild the crashed spacecraft? It should prove very helpful in the more difficult levels.

My impression of Ooops Up is that it is a fun game to play. It’s very similar to Pang!, but due to a completely different setting and style of graphics, it’s unique in its own way. It’s well worth a try, especially if you enjoy old-school shoot’em ups. The music is catchy and the graphics are well drawn and inviting, which is a plus.

As promised, here’s the Ooops Up music video from Snap!. Enjoy!

Downloads

Download Ooops Up (.ADF file) for the Amiga 500 here.