Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O' Fun

Here I am scrolling through new Steam releases and... There's that clown. That clown who, in an odd little way, represents one of the milestones of my gaming childhood. You see, kids... Circa 1990, good old Commodore had decided to relaunch the C64 to appeal to the console market. And since it seemed console users essentially wanted a computer with less features, they took the venerable 8-bit and shaved off the keyboard, removing all ability to program on it, load software from tape and disk, etc. Surprisingly, the Commodore 64 Games System was a huge flop. So the following year, Commodore had a lot of weird keyboardless C64s they couldn't give away. They also had a lot of copies of the cartridge that was intended to be bundled with the C64GS... Which included an odd little circus game called Fiendish Freddy's Big Top o' Fun. Fortunately - despite Commodore's best efforts - demand for the C64 as a home computer was still there, so they were able to get rid of the excess cartridges in a new C64 bundle called the Playful Intelligence Pack. Which your overly wordy reviewer would find under the Christmas tree in nineteen mumble mumble. And, by pure virtue of being at the top of the menu... Fiendish Freddy's Big Top o' Fun was the first game I ever played on the Commodore 64. All of which is to say, Fiendish Freddy's Big Top o' Fun occupies a weird little place in my heart but it isn't actually very good. My attention was almost immediately stolen away by Flimbo's Quest, and even doddering old warhorse International Soccer held more lasting appeal. (Then there was Klax, of course. There was time for it, it being the nineties.) Very occasionally I might once again pick the first game on the menu just to confirm that, yep, Fiendish Freddy's Big Top o' Fun was a weird little thing and I didn't care for it. But it's not Flimbo's Quest that suddenly showed up on Steam today, so here we are, driven entirely by nostalgia for one of the odd little misfit games of my childhood. To get to the actual game concept in my fourth paragraph, Fiendish Freddy's Big Top o' Fun is a collection of circus-themed minigames, somewhat resembling the earlier Epyx Olympics-themed multi-event games. One or more players can participate, playing through each event with the objective of getting a high score and ultimately saving the circus from the titular villainous clown. None of the events really add up to much, all of them having some weird mechanic that requires frequent reference to the manual. (A PDF manual is included, which is one point in favour of this rerelease. Should be standard really, but still.) It's maybe not even the best circus-themed multi-event game on the Commodore 64, given that I remember Circus Attractions a little bit more fondly. Despite what my preamble may have suggested, this is not the Commodore 64 version. I'm assuming it's the original PC version. Would have been nice to get a few different platforms represented the way Pixel Games has been doing, but presumably it was much easier to throw this in DOSBox and call it a day. What this actually means is that, compared to how I remember it, the graphics are a bit better defined while the SID soundtrack is replaced with a rather horrible beepy attempt at music. Controls are a bit weird as well - 0 on the numpad seems to be the fire button, if you're as baffled as I was. And this game really did play better on joystick than keyboard. Would I recommend this, despite my admission that I never liked it very much in the first place? Oh yes, absolutely. I can only assume that if you've read this far, you're very interested in owning Fiendish Freddy's Big Top o' Fun on Steam. It is, frankly, a little bit overpriced for what you're getting, but maybe Remote Play Together could give it some new life. I'd never have even considered asking any of my friends to play this back in the day. I really wish somebody would rerelease Flimbo's Quest so I don't have to get my nostalgia kicks from Fiendish Freddy's Big Top o' Fun.

Good old days. This game was spooky and weird when I was a kid and it's still the same today.