**_Gribbly's Day Out_** courtesy of @DStrogen who has this to say:
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I MEAN LOOK AT THIS GUY
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Your mission is thus:
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“”As ‘Gribbly Grobbly’ you need to collect in 16 different levels each eight Gribblets before the creatures get them and take them to the safe cave. These creatures go through several metamorphoses. First they fall from the sky like seeds, land and then turn to green worms. If they tread on a Gribblet it will turn on its back, but it can be turned again by a jump from Gribbly Grobbly. After a while the green worms pupate and a bit later they eclose as skull worms. When they meet a turned Gribblet, they catch it and fly around with it. Gribbly Grobbly can bubble away the creatures in all stages except as walking skull worms. If a Gribblet is kidnapped by a skull worm, you should try to free the Gribblet over clear ground, otherwise it will fall into death. The psi net constrains Gribbly Grobbly in his mission, but it can be switched on and off at the points. At the same time, the psi net protects from Seon the black beast.“”
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You fly around pastel landscapes planting mushrooms and shooting bubbles at space crabs. You have one giant foot you hop around on too. It's made by a company with “”Consultants“” in their name. How could you not want to play this?"
_Gribbly's Day Out_ was developed by Andrew Braybrook and released by Hewson Consultants for the Commodore 64 in 1985. A port for the Acorn Archimedes, fittingly titled _Gribbly's Day Out on the Arc_, was released in 1992.
Cool pick. I‘ve heard of some of this designer’s other games, but not this one. I‘ve also never played a C64 game, so I’ll finally get that squared away.
I made it to stage three, the one with no floor, and I can’t play anymore lol. This is absolutely brutal. I feel for anyone who played this as a child.
I tried playing for about 15 minutes. Still in the first level. I remember from my childhood the C64 play strategy of “figure out what hurts me when I run into it,” which it turns out is most things, especially when flying. Some input lag, at least on the emulator I ran. I can tell that there is a lot of lore burbling behind this game even before reading that first post, thanks to this wild intro screen.
("No-armed, one-footed but strangely cute beastie from Blabgor" - good stuff!)
Aside from the input lag (which, again, may be me and may be typical Commodore stuff), it's one of the better Commodore platformers I have tried.
Also, I find it so funny that you can set the time in the game. "Here's a game - oh, and also a working
clock!"
I managed to get this running on the C64 MiSTer core, had a pretty good time with it. Often when I experiment with older games that were generally positively received at the time I experience a similar pattern to this one.
Initially, I am put off by the simplistic presentation and general inscrutability. Still I persevere and keep dying - lamenting the punishing difficulty but making marginally more progress and learning something new each time. Gradually figuring out what the objectives are and how different mechanics work, still doing poorly but.. always wanting just one more try, and... yeah, I get it. This is fun, this is video games.
80s computing is a huge blind spot for me, and there's just so much of it, so it's nice to be pointed to a single interesting game like this to mess around with. Thanks for nominating it!
Finally made some time for some Gribbly this morning. This is fun! But also, so difficult!
I really like the controls. Bouncing around is great once you get used to it, and the hover has just the right amount of momentum where I usually felt like I was in control, but if I panicked things could go very badly. I do think making Gribbly vulnerable to every surface and the psi-web while hovering was a bit mean. I died several times just exiting the cave after dropping off a gribblet.
The final gribblet, when the big scary crab (Seon, [the manual](https://www.lemon64.com/doc/gribblys-day-out/951) says) is loose and the psi-web is gone and you're frantically hovering looking for it, is some great video games. Though I eventually learned to just deposit a safe gribblet near the cave so Seon isn't much of an issue.
I played for about forty minutes and quit after getting a game over the second time I made it to the second level. I got as far as two gribblets into the second level. [URL=https://i.imgur.com/2sC3jPC.png][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/2sC3jPC.png[/IMG][/URL]
I just had a heart-pounding gribment (Gribbly moment). I’d made it to the baby cave with the second-to-last gribblet, but in that exact moment, Seon (or Murder Mickey, as I’d known him up until consulting the manual) appeared to demand his grisly fee. Being on my last life, I kissed my gribblets goodbye and told them to close their eyes, but in that exact moment, one of the pincermen (those flying crane game cranes) appeared, carrying the last gribblet! It had brought the final child home! In the tizziest of tizzies, I mashed the buttons just so, that I bubbled the pincerman, who disintegrated and dropped the gribblet safely directly onto the platform. (…Either that or it perished, and that counts as finishing the level as well.)
It just so happens, however, that in the very same moment, Seon got his grubby claws around Gribbly’s ankle-neck, and he breathed his last.
But. I was presented with the introduction screen for the next level! A classic “defeating the boss after you conk it” moment! However, after that introduction screen, it sent me back to the instructions to start all over again. I choose to interpret this in the following way: Gribbly’s soul went on to the Flooded Cavern, but I – the guiding hand on the other side of the screen – am not privy to his continued day out in the afterlife.
