Dazzler is an obscure early arcade game – first released in 1982 – from UK-based Century Electronics. In it you play as “OH” (Our Hero) and must deliver bananas to a “monkey” (really an ape) inside a maze, and avoid chasing vultures.

The bananas are hidden behind doors at the top and bottom of the maze. Entering a door will give you a banana, and then the ape will appear, so you need to make your way to him to give him the banana. You then repeat the process until all the doors are gone.

Our Hero can drop snakes to temporarily tussle with – and delay – the chasing vultures, and can also pick up a 500 point bonus by collecting smiling faces that appear intermittently.

As a gamble, one of the doors has a vulture behind it, which you need to avoid if at all possible. The jingle that plays when you enter the door with the vulture is different to the ones with bananas, and if you hear it it is possible to react quickly enough to run away before it gets you, but it’s not easy.

After the maze screen there’s also a second type of screen which is an unashamed Donkey Kong rip-off, albeit not a very good one. In it you must jump and climb your way up to the ape’s cage at the top of the screen while avoiding vulture “eggs” (they look like cupcakes, but are more likely to be turds) being dropped from above.

Underneath the high score display in the top right-hand corner of the screen are some numbers in boxes. These indicate the level you’re on, and there are nine of them – eight regular maze levels, each with a different layout, and a final one called the Snake Pit.

Dazzler is a bizarre and infuriating game, with a jolly tune that will ruin your brain after ten minutes of play. The maze levels are ridiculously hard, and the platform levels ridiculously easy. And while this game is something of an interesting curiosity from the past, it’s not a very good one either. Dazzler does have some half-decent synthesised speech, but it’s not a game that will attract people to play it for very long.

More: Dazzler on YouTube