 Ssssss... that's drunk. Let's keep plugging away at those single screen puzzle games. This one is called Push Over, developed by Red Rat Software. They usually publish stuff for platforms like the Amiga, games like Wild Wheels and Screaming Wings, and sure enough Push Over is also on the Amiga and the Atari ST. Turns out this is the only game they developed for the Super Nintendo. Push Over has some weird trivia associated with it, though. The Amiga and Atari ST versions were sponsored by a British snack called Quavers, and And the story of the game revolves around finding lost bags of the stuff. These things are not in North America, and as far as I can tell, they look like puffy potato versions of Fritos. The Super Nintendo version, both in North America and PAL regions, does not have anything to do with Quavers. Instead, the story's been changed to some rat stealing all your money or something. You play as an ant, G.I. Ant, to be exact, some kind of super soldier ant, I guess, and its mission is to dig down into this cave, level by level, to get the money back that Captain Rat stole. Boy, they really got creative with the names here. Thankfully, the gameplay is a bit more creative. Your task is to manipulate these dominoes into a sequence that ends with this trigger block that has three stripes. Like most puzzle games, you're given very simple stuff to solve it first, so you can get the hang of the game. And you'll need that practice time, because the controls here are a little odd. There's a bit of a 3D effect going on here, where you press up behind a certain domino to get behind it, and down to get back out in front of everything. You can pick up, move, and put down any of the blocks by pressing B, except you can't move the final trigger block. You gotta set up a sequence that leads to that spot, and you gotta do it within a time limit. First, you get behind a block by pressing up, then press Y to push to the left or A to push to the right. That's an important distinction that took me longer than I'd like to admit to figure out. There's tons of special dominoes here, too, each with their own particular function that activates either when pushed or knocked into. There's an Ascender block, with one vertical stripe that floats upward until it hits something. There's a Splitter block, which knocks over blocks in both directions. There's a Stopper block, which stops everything coming toward it. There's even the Tumbler block, which is inconsolable and goes on the internet to write about how difficult it is to be a teenager in the United States. No, I'm just kidding. It keeps going until hitting a Stopper block or falling off a ledge. There are nine total special blocks, and already you can see the problem with this arrangement here. They're all red and yellow. What was the visual designer, a big Hulkamaniac, or something? This game would be a lot easier if each domino had its own color, or something, to make it a little more distinct, because the entire time I played this, I was constantly going back to the start menu to remember what was what. The stripes didn't really help me a whole lot, and with the incredibly short time limit here every second counts, so the quicker you learn the domino patterns, the better. There's a hundred stages here, spread out over nine different worlds, and the backgrounds and sprite animations here are pretty nice. The platforming here is reasonably well done, but again, that's provided you're able to quickly get used to moving your character from the foreground to the background, and how you get used to placing blocks exactly where you want them, because you have to be fast here. That's another flaw in my opinion, the time limit is just way too short. You can reconcile this by allowing you to earn tokens. Each time you complete a level within the time limit, you earn a token, and you use that to erase the time limit on a level you're having trouble with. So yeah, you're not locked into the timer, even if it runs out you can still finish the level. Also a hint appears on the pause menu once the timer expires. If you're able to finish and you've got a token left over, you can consider it completed, so that's cool. And there is a password system here as well, which is handy. I will say this game does a nice job in gradually introducing new elements and platforming pitfalls the further you progress. It's a gradual difficulty curve rather than just hitting a brick wall. It's just that, like I said, it's kind of tough to remember on the fly what block does what, especially when you've got three or four of them in one level. It's a bit irritating to have to pause the game to bring up the menu every so often. And like most puzzle platformers, like the Lost Vikings and Krusty's Super Fun House, this one gets really tough later on, beyond just knowing what sequence to set up. You have to act and react with flawless timing to get through some of these puzzles. So yeah, Push Over is a pretty decent but pretty frustrating puzzle platformer. I really wish they'd done a better job differentiating the special blocks, but whatever, maybe it'll have an easier time getting used to it than me. I should also mention this game is single player only. It'd be nice to have a split screen competitive mode against a second player, even the computer, but it's not here, oh well. Still, if you're looking for a creative puzzle game with platforming elements, Push Over is pretty decent.