DESCRIPTION

A release from the Retrotopia site operated by the makers of Intellivision, Steamroller for the ColecoVision is, essentially, a version of the minor arcade hit Make Trax (also known as Crush Roller for that system). Players guide a steamroller as it attempts to "paint" every part of a Pac-Man-like maze, despite the efforts of various mischievous adversaries who emerge every once in a while to mess up the paint job. (This premise actually made a little more sense in Make Trax, in which the player was literally a paintbrush.) The fiendish two-player version is a head-to-head extravaganza in which two players try to bump each other's steamrollers into incoming hazards — and it's that feature which makes Steamroller more than just a Make Trax clone.

Colorful and fast-moving, Steamroller proves that Make Trax could have been one of the Colecovision's best coin-op adaptations, right up there with Donkey Kong and Lady Bug, if Coleco had secured the license. As it was, Atari had the rights tied up to most of the arcade games released by Williams Electronics, so it seems doubtful that Coleco could have licensed the game. Steamroller was designed by Activision's Dave Rolfe, who had previously created the Intellivision operating system for Mattel Electronics. ~ Earl Green, All Game Guide