Simple, yet very challenging, Mouser is one of those games which has interesting gameplay based on a simple concept. You play the role of a farmer who has to get rid of mice on his farm. The farm consists of nine maze-like rooms which you have to clean. The rooms may seem like mazes but actually consist of rotating walls. Only you (the farmer) may move the walls, and the goal is to capture each mouse within these walls so it can’t move anymore. This way the cat will be able to capture it, although you won't see that. Cats are just standing there doing nothing. Since mice are as big as you are and colliding with them will cost you a life, it seems that you need those big lazy cats sitting around. There is a point counter in the upper-left corner of the screen. When capturing a mouse, you will be awarded with the current number of points and the counter is restored to 2000. This also serves as a timer, meaning that you lose a life if it reaches zero.
There is one piece of cheese on every screen. If a mouse eats the cheese, new pieces will appear. But if a female mouse eats it, a new mouse will come back to life, so female mice should be your priority. At the start of the game, the position of mice, cats, cheese and walls is randomized. However, their position doesn’t change if you lose a life or exit the screen. So, if a mouse caught you near the exit, do not enter that room through that exit or you will pop onto the mouse again. Some rooms don’t have light and you can only see in a small radius around you, making those rooms much harder to clean. Also, you have to find and pick up the lamp or you won't be able to see the walls in darker rooms.
This is an extremely hard game to beat. After you get familiar with the rotation of walls and behavior of mice, you will start capturing much easier, but beating the entire game still may be too hard. This guarantees more challenge and longer playtime, but may also turn away many players. While this may be good (or bad, depending on the player’s taste), some things are surely drawbacks. The farmer may get stuck near the wall, so you need to move him away from it before you can move him again. Also, if you imprison a mouse in the square adjacent to the cat without the wall between the cat and mouse, it won’t count as the capture and also you will be unable to do anything about it, except to start a new game.
Considering the time when Mouser was published, it really came as an original and interesting game. You would expect much less from a game like this. There were other old games that also featured rotating walls on various machines (one has to remember a weird C64 game called Drelbs from 1984), but there weren’t any similar games for PC at the time. Surely worth a try and recommended for fans of arcade games.
This is the image of PCjr cartridge. You must use DOSBox to run it. Edit the file dosbox.conf and find the line that starts with "machine=" (it is usually "machine=vga") and change it to "machine=pcjr". Then start DOSBox, go to the Mouser folder and type "boot mouser.jrc"
Don't forget to change the line back to "machine=vga" once you are through with Mouser.
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