Broderbund killing it again with another quality game. I loved Spare Change when I was a kid. Loved. It. Set in an arcade or amusement park type place, two robots run around stealing tokens from all the machines and putting them in a piggy bank. Your job, as the arcade owner/good samaritan/random guy who doesn’t know what’s going on, is to save and bank the tokens (in those white cubes on the left of the screen). But in order to do this you need to stall the robots from their thieving spree, so you must use some of the tokens to insert in the various amusement machines in the place to distract them. The robots thankfully aren’t very smart and immediately flock to the source of the distraction that you choose (in screens 2 and 3 you can see them dancing around like idiots in front of the jukebox), giving you a few seconds to pinch some tokens. If you run out, the cash register provides money for more (and the safe provides money for the register). The more tokens you save, the more money you have next level.
Level 1 begins with just the jukebox to distract them. I quickly memorized the 3 short songs it plays at an early age, because as soon as they end the robots briefly fumble about, as if they’re realizing, “Oh right, we were robbing this place blind, weren’t we” and then scramble off to continue doing so. Level 1 also features a phone but it’s useless; level 2 is when a second phone appears that you can use to get them to yap to each other briefly. A popcorn machine with some very realistic popping noise and action appears in level 3 (and I got pretty good at this game in order to get there because I really liked the popcorn machine).
10 tokens in the bank opens the door to the intermission between levels, the mysterious “Zerk Show,” which initially sounds like something restricted to 18 and older but it is really just a short slapstick routine involving the two robots for your mild amusement.
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