Fiendish Freddy's Big Top o' Fun (Commodore Amiga, Mindscape, 1989)

All pictures taken from lemonamiga, under Fair Use

Interesting concept, but the needed precition and dificulty makes this one hard to enjoy. The swan dive is pretty easy, but the juggling is abysmal because it takes you forever to find out how the controls work, and that's before having to count in having to throw a target in a position where you can then catch two falling at the same time, plus dealing with throwing the babies into the carriage to get extra points, plus having to throw the bomb away the instant you catch it as throwing it up and juggling it will make it kill you on impact etc.

You can have fun in this game, for example once I got the hang of the trapeeze I breezed through it quickly, and enjoyed it. But the fact of the matter is the game recquires you to perfectly hit things at the exact time, but gives you no usefull visual aids to help you acomplish this.

For example, the knife throwing stage, you have no idea what part of your "target knife"'s sprite actually indicates where the knife will hit, nor does anything about it change when it's positioned correctly over a balloon. Then there's the problem of needing to estimate the exact time it takes the balloos to get from point A where you need to fire to point B where the knife should hit, as they are unevenly placed and so this varies.

The tightrope is actually managable, being comparable to a similar event in "Incredible crisis". But the cannonball event is the worst, having two selectable variables, plus the amount of gunpowder to worry about. And even if you do fairly well on all events and so so on the juggling, you'll still get the bad ending, and miss getting the good one by about 800 dollars.

Seriously, some numeral visualisation to go along with your adjustments would make this far less frustrating.