[{"TitleName":"Frantic Day","Publisher":"","Author":"John Weatherley","YearOfRelease":"Unknown","ZxDbId":"0024902","Reviews":[{"Issue":{"Name":"Break Space Issue 1, Apr 2025","Price":"","ReleaseDate":"2025-04-26","Editor":"Mpk","TotalPages":57,"HasCoverTape":false,"FlannelPanel":""},"MainText":"FRANTIC DAY\nJohn Weatherly\nFree\n\nDave's Review\n\nOkay, bottom line up front, or 'BLUF' if you want a modicum of brevity: this game is a Manic Miner inspired platform game recovered from the late eighties. It features alliteration, crumbling platforms, collectables, falling too far, waggling feet while jumping, animated lives, a time bar, a 'Vat', a flashing exit, and most importantly – toilets. It doesn't make a secret of its influences: Matt Smith is even referenced on a Eugene-esque level (but will 'Eugene' do what you expect?) There may also be hints of Sir Lancelot & Brian Bloodaxe in there too. If that's not your cup of tea then go away and have a ruddy good word with yourself.\n\nFrantic Day, or 'Fred and his frantic day' as the game's intro screen calls it, was originally released on a 'Your Computer' compilation in 1986. We've known about a Spanish translation released with a different magazine, but the original English version has been MIA until the author, John Weatherby, recovered it in early January. It's fantastic to think that software is still being unearthed from attics (and it is mostly attics; sometimes it's lofts) after all this time, intact enough to digitise. Long may it continue. Fred's Frantic day starts, as some of the best days do, with waking up. After breakfast and a quick tidy of the garage, he pops out to the garden, the arcade, a visit to a castle and rounds it off with putting the bins out. That more or less sums up what everyone with a National Trust sticker in their hatchback gets up to on a bank holiday, only with more demonically possessed household items running amok, it's a treat to play - pure oldschool. That's no surprise because it is oldschool, but it looks and feels more '83 than '86. I'm willing to be proved wrong, but I don't think you could quite reproduce the spirit of such a game these days even if you tried.\n\nThe 128K Spectrum was unleashed in Jan 1986, so it's possible that AY was becoming familiar when this game was being developed. However, the thought of an AY track here is as incongruous as playing The Aphex Twin on a gramophone (though that doesn't mean I don't want to hear it). The in-game beeper music is more fitting with the genre. Yes it's a concatenation of short trills, but that's all it can be without interfering with the program. Turn it off if it bothers you.\n\nFrantic Day isn't that frantic per se, but it is very hard. On your first try you're unlikely to pass more than a couple of obstacles let alone finish a screen. The defining factor here is the jump - it's the old diagonal up and down with no change in mid-air. At 9 levels it must be do-able, and I reckon BITD I'd have cracked my knuckles, drawn the curtains and hunkered down to complete it without the aid of modern crutches. But at the time of writing, I've completed it with snapshots, but can only get about halfway on bread & water. So it goes.\n\nThese recovered games are a fascinating window to a time gone by, but we also have the treat of the author sticking around to tell us more: John learned assembly from magazines and wrote Frantic Day with the aid of Hisoft DevPac, an interface-1 and microdrives. That may be easier than ZEUS and cassettes, but from what I've heard about microdrives I bet it wasn't painless. John has since released a Next version of Frantic Day. Hopefully this rediscovered interest leads to new Speccy games, and maybe while going over his old notes he'll find the grail itself.., the graph paper he designed the sprites on.","ReviewerComments":[],"OverallSummary":"","Page":"12","Denied":false,"Award":"Not Awarded","Reviewers":[],"ScreenshotText":[{"Text":"Wish I'd joined the RSPB instead of the National Trust"},{"Text":"Bugger"},{"Text":"Familiar, and yet not."}],"BlurbText":[],"TranscriptBy":"Chris Bourne","ReviewScores":null,"CompilationReviewScores":[]}]}]