Game of the Day - Funky Fish

It'd been several days of GOTD without an old school game - I was having withdrawals.  So I went Funky Fish, a weird and fun old school horizontal shooter.

Funky Fish has the primitive graphics you'd expect from 1981.  They take the form of a big, goofy looking fish that shoots out bubbles (in the first few levels) at alien life forms that are attacking (you die if they touch you).  If you hit one of the enemies, it turns into fruit (of course) and then you have to go eat it.  If you don't eat the fruit, it floats to the bottom of the water and is resurrected in its alien form and attacks you again.  You have to be careful to not be close to it (trying to eat it) when it changes back.  By the way, the fruit on the first two levels are cherries and strawberries (sound familiar?).

In subsequent levels, as time goes by, seahorses and other creatures float up from the bottom and are lethal - so they add to the things you need to avoid.

There is a lot of info at the top to help.  There is a radar that shows where the "Big" aliens are.  The big aliens each shoot out the smaller aliens that attack.  When you have killed a certain number from one of the big aliens, it dies and turns into fuel for you to gas up your fish.  The faster you get to it, the more fuel you get (and bonus).  You need fuel to continue fighting or eventually it'll run out and you'll croak.  There is also a number that shows up every time you kill a small enemy - that number represents how many more of that type of enemy you have to kill before that particular big boss dies.  It sounds a little confusing, but it'll be obvious when you play.

To recap:  Big aliens launch little aliens.  Kill the required number of little aliens AND eat the fruit they turn into and the big alien dies.  Kill all the big aliens on a level to advance.  Get fuel after each big alien dies.

Another change in future levels is that instead of shooting out bubbles to kill you enemies, you use your tongue (insert joke here).  Also, as is traditional, things get busier and harder.

The game is fun mostly because it's quick and twitchy.  You use the joystick to go anywhere, turning back and forth quickly.  There's not a shot limit, and the controls react quickly so there isn't any frustration shooting like in some old school games.  The little aliens twitch and jump and jitter and that makes it hard to shoot them and hard to eat them when they fruit out.

They just don't make whacked-out stuff like this anymore.