Head over Heels Inspired no doubt by two years pondering the literal semantics of Tears For Fears' 1985 hit, Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond's Head Over Heels was an absolute masterful exploration game for the 8-bit era. Drawn in the same isometric vein as Knight's Lore and Ritman and Drummond's own Batman - no, not Arkham City, although I'd …
Seeing as the 'Buy from Amazon' link at the bottom of this article helpfully suggests the riveting books 'All About Joints: A Maintenance Guide' and 'The Science of Beauty Therapy', may I suggest this rather more helpful link to the free download of the remake, available for Windows, OSX, BeOS and Linux:
http://retrospec.sgn.net/games/hoh/index.html
The only way out was up, and the only means of getting there was to build a tower of blocks by placing them on top of each other. If you had no donuts, you'd have a robot to contend with whilst doing it too (which could knock down your tower if you're unlucky). And if you did reach the top, but exited in the wrong place, you'd immediately fall back in causing the blocks to reset and have to start all over again!
So much frustration, and so much relief when reaching the top after finally learning to avoid falling in in the first place
Finished it on C64, Amiga and Linux with all the crowns. Amazing game. :)
I could be wrong, but weren't you only Heels at that point, so you couldn't even use your donuts against the robotic rapscallion? Worst of all, upon entering the pit, because the robot moved at random, it was quite possible to land on the little git with absolutely no way to controll your fall and avoid him!
No, you were Head. You couldn't pick anything up and the blocks were already stacked. The problem was you had to gradually nudge them across a little each time you jumped to form a staircase. If you knocked any right off the stack, you had to try the other way out, and if you fluffed them both you had no choice but to top yourself to reset the room.
Ah, I'm thinking of a different room then (told you I could be wrong :P)
The room I'm thinking of had a similar vibe; I'm certain you were Heels, because you uncontrollably drop into this small square room, and in it are four stackable boxes and a little circular robot, and to get out you have to stack the four boxes up to escape via two possible exits. As if stacking the boxes alone wasn't enough, the little bugger would often bump into your stack, rupturing all your hard work, and could even go so far as knock them onto his head, so he's wheeling around like an idiot going "gettem off, gettem off!"
I remember one of the reviewers (Marcus, IIRC) for Your Sinclair being stuck on the Safari world shortly after its release. I remember my joy at being able to work out this puzzle for myself, and wrote down the instructions for the puzzle. I remember salivating at the idea of getting my name in YS, for my Warholesque fifteem minutes.
Anyway, it seemed that month pretty much everyone other than Marcus worked it out that same month and I didn't even get a mention.
Still bitter, hence the icon.
Does one perhaps mean "Knight Lore"? And the intro waffle is rendered a tad worse than it is by knowing that the working title of this game, until very late in the process, was actually "Foot and Mouth".
A truly excellent game though.
The remake has a slight imperfection, in that its rooms are all slightly larger such that it allows you to get stuck around the side of a doorway or fall off the outside of platforms that should be against the wall. Other than that it's a lovely rendition.
One would almost imagine this story was a plant, only a very short time till HoH is released on the iPad (and the iPhone a little while after that)
Glad you enjoyed the game and a sorry to those who found it too hard, good to have it remembered after such a long time though
Cheers
Jon Ritman
Bloody hell, between this and Batman you were a gaming God.
I remember one room (fairly early on) where there was an opponent - one of those little pepperpot thingies - sent to auto-seek you as soon as you entered. The trick was that if you moved to a certain location you could jam it against the scenery. This was a very early introduction to metagaming for this once-teenager.
Thank you for many shamelessly squandered hours on the Speccy.
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Nice Star Wars quote, but that's a screenshot from the very start of the game. Head and Heels start in adjacent rooms; Head can enter Heels's starting room, but they're separated by an impassable wall. It's pretty mental when they do meet up, but there's only a short period when they have to combine.
Fantastic game, though. Verily, they maketh them not like they used to.
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