Doofus

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Through the 12 levels you have to shoot your way past bizarre-looking creatures, jump over ponds, avoid gaps, and generally do platformy things until you get to the end. Nothing really original here, except that this game introduces another character in the form of your trusty (but clumsy) little dog name Doofus, whom you must protect from the game-dwelling beasties. Doofus will copy your actions a few seconds behind. Lives are far too easy to lose because even the dog can do it for you! Should you or Doofus come in to contact with any of the strange creatures that roam the land, a life will be lost. Fortunately, shooting nasties gives the opportunity to collect coins, which can be used at certain sports in the level in the form of shops, to buy power-ups. The land is also littered with collectible goodies, some which award bonus points and others that bestow you with weird powers, some of them bad for you health (e.g. reversing the controls!), some others good (ability to blow everything up or make Doofus invisible).
Doofus is not an original, and in fact, although its nice lookings and sound, it makes more problems to the players. The difficulty level of the game is pretty tame, with most of the deaths being caused by you running into situations too quickly, leading your dog into some trap before you've really had a chance to see what is going on.
Doofus was a cute idea back then, that ultimately lacked any lasting appeal. I would expect the PC (DOS) conversion, released a year later the original, to have a few extra candies for the gameplay.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The DOS conversion holds quite nice graphics, offering redesigned levels and sprites compared to the (Amiga) original tile. The graphics are colorful, using the full color-depth of the VGA graphics modes, supporting also parallax background scrolling (as in the original). Also note that, the graphics here are not messy-looking, as happened with its original, while sprites sport sufficient frames per animation. Apparently (as with the original) the creatures on each level are exactly the same as those on the previous one, some fly, some bounce and the others walk back and forth.
Soundwise, the game supports Soundblaster hardware, offering sound effects well matched to the game's atmosphere, offering a few high quality samples, while the soundtrack (although cute) is far from thrilling musical experience, and not the sort of music you leave playing loud while taking a bath.