Those bugs bite back

By Russell Baillie

A Bug's Life ***
PlayStation
(Disney Interactive)

Soon, well probably right about now, will come a new stage in the lifespan of movies.

Now it goes cinema, video, pay-telly broadcast, then free-to-air, all with lengthening windows between the stages starting with a six-months lag between the end of the big-screen run and arrival on VHS.

But between or just after those first two stages will come another: "the Game."

Usually movie spin-offs as video-game titles take a while, because there is all that digitising to do. But when your source information is already digital - as it is was with the Disney computer-animated movie hit of last year, A Bug's Life - it's surely a simpler translation to game console.

Unfortunately, most movie licences have bad reputations in the gaming world.

The few good ones have been when the developers have put on their lateral thinking caps and done some thinking outside the square of the cinema screen.

Fortunately, that has happened with A Bug's Life which makes a useful, amusing and reasonably original 3D action puzzler.

No, the game screen animation isn't quite up to the film (clips of which feature throughout), but it's still colourful and vast from its entymological eye view.
It certainly sounds great - those movie effects sampled here, and its motion, capture something quite special, too.

When our hero Flik is chugging up or downhill you can certainly feel the slope.

And it has a gameplay that's a mix of silly fun (you throw berries at threatening bugs, but only certain strength berries knock out the likes of those evil grasshoppers) as well as offering some canny figuring about how to navigate the up'n'down, free-roaming terrain.

With a range of seeds you must construct ladders of toadstools and various plants to scale the banks and ditches.

The game plot loosely follows the movie's, with the hapless Flik on a solo mission to save his Ant Island colony from the marauding attentions of the grasshoppers. And as you progress you get to see an increasing number of clips from the actual movie - a visual treat in themselves.

However, you don't quite get the whole film should you finish the entire mission.

Should you fail spectacularly at least there's the perverse please of the mad, bad Hopper (the cricket king with Kevin Spacey's voice) yelling: "You think this is a game? Well ... you lost!"

It's almost worth committing critter hara kiri for.

It probably helps if you were a fan of the sit-in-the-dark non-interactive original.

And it's not quite in the class of, say, Crash Bandicoot or its nearest kiddy-friendly relation Spyro the Dragon.

But it's a movie-offshoot that game-wise hits the spot.

Pictured: A Bug's Life - the plot follows the hapless Flik on a solo mission.