Bump ‘n’ Jump

April 14th, 2007

On the surface Bump ‘n’ Jump is your standard driving game. You take your car down the road and try to get to the end of the level with the eventual goal of rescuing your kidnapped girlfriend. You have the ability to bump other cars off the road that might be in your way, scoring precious points. The road you’re on inexplicably goes through rivers and other obstacles, but you’re fine. As you may have been able to glean from the title, your car has the ability to jump.

You primarily use your jump to avoid the suddenly-ending road, but you can also squish opposing cars for extra Bonus Points. However, you have to keep an eye on what you’re doing. If you are too busy squishing cars to pay attention to the obstacles, there’s a good chance that you’ll jump directly into the river/ocean/other obstacle.

The game has discrete levels, but I was not able to determine if it actually ever had an end. As interesting of a concept as this game had, I couldn’t play more than about five levels at a time before I got tired of it and moved on.

Posted in Arcade, Commodore 64 | No Comments »

Toy Bizarre

April 13th, 2007

Before he was involved in mega-hit arcade games Smash TV and NBA Jam, Mark Turmell created an oddly engaging game for the old Commodore 64 called Toy Bizarre.

I kind of wish I had the manual for this game, I might then know what in the world was going on. The game, it would seem, takes place in a toy factory after hours. The toys have come to life somehow and it’s your job to control the flow of new toys into the arena by shutting off the valves located at the edges of the screen, and to disable and collect the rogue toys, presumably for packaging and shipping. The screen is full of complementary platforms. When you jump on one of the raised platforms, it will lower and its complementary platform will raise, incapacitating whatever’s on it, allowing you to collect it. If you happen to be on a lowered platform when something hits its complementary platform, then you = dead. Or more accurately, you = flying off the top of the screen.

Your progress is hindered by a mechanical female with a giant key in her back. To keep the game moving, when you turn off the valves, she turns them back on. She’ll also meander about the level trying to jump on the complimentary platforms to incapacitate you. You can temporarily dispatch her by turning the tables and hopping on the complimentary

The game is simple to understand, fun to play, and completely bizarre. In other words, my kind of game.

Posted in Commodore 64 | No Comments »

Starpost

April 12th, 2007

I suppose that video games and space themes go together so well because for a long time they were both somewhat futuristic. This might be because it was easy to make weird things in video games and attribute them to aliens or some kind of mysterious Future Technology.

One of the results of this pairing is a game called Starpost. Starpost is an exceedingly simple game. you control an outpost out among the stars. Who owns the outpost and for what purpose? I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter, though.

What does matter is that evil aliens are out to destroy your precious Starpost by crashing their ships into it, the curs. Your Starpost looks like four dice stacked on top of each other in a column. Its only defense is shooting a laser from either the left or right side of each section. You choose which laser will fire by pushing down the joystick: right will make the selector move clockwise, and left will make it move counterclockwise. Pushing the fire button makes the beam deadly. Your goal is to last for the duration of the time limit by destroying the rogue ships before they can crash into your post and disable the laser on that side (too many get destroyed and you lose).

Sounds hard, and it is for a while, until I hit upon an almost fool-proof strategy. If you hold down one of the directions on your joystick (doesn’t really matter which one) so that the targeting reticle rotates around the base, and only fire when it crosses over an enemy ship. Once I adopted this strategy, I was able to play long enough that I am now permanently bored with this game.

Posted in Commodore 64 | No Comments »

Donkey Kong Jr. Math

April 11th, 2007

It seems like an obvious pairing: all of the fun of controlling a baby gorilla to counteract the tedium of doing math. Throw in some multiplayer action and what do you have? A game that’s weird, and not all that fun.

Donkey Kong Jr. Math has two basic modes: one mode where you compete with a second player using various numbers and operators to arrive at a target number, and another where you have to solve the math problem presented to you and supply the correct answer.

It’s every bit as fun as it sounds.

There’s not a whole lot more to say about this game than that. It’s not really worth seeking out and playing unless you’re just learning math. And even then, flash cards would be a better investment of time and money.

Posted in NES | No Comments »

Jazz Jackrabbit: Episodes 2, 3, and 4

April 10th, 2007

Imagine if you will that Sonic the Hedgehog is Green instead of Blue, is a rabbit instead of a hedgehog, is heavily armed instead of unarmed, and fights an giant turtle with his turtle army of turtles across a series of planets instead of a vaguely egg-shaped scientist and his army of animals turned into robots across one planet. You might then have a general idea of what Jazz Jackrabbit is all about. Or you might be confused. Terribly, terribly confused.

Jazz Jackrabbit is a green jackrabbit that carries around a bazooka and runs around real fast, shooting turtles… In space. The game describes itself as the rivalry between the tortoise and the hare taken to its futuristic extreme.

Episode 1 of the Jazz Jackrabbit saga (known to me as the Shareware Episode) was installed on just about every computer that I came across in the early 1990s. The goal, as was the goal with all shareware, was to give out discs with a small part of a game which you would take home and install. You’d then play the game and like it enough that you’d eventually call the manufacturer and demand the rest of the game (or in this case, episodes) at a reasonable price.

I still have yet to actually meet someone who’s actually bought the full version from trying the shareware trial.

Imagine my surprise many years later when I walk into my local K-Mart and find that they have a disc that not only has Jack Jackrabbit on it, but that it has episodes 2, 3, and 4 on it exclusively. I presume that they dispensed with putting episode 1 on it due to the ubiquity of the shareware. I was only partially shocked to learn that episodes 2, 3, and 4 were almost identical to the shareware episodes with the exception that they took place on different ‘planets’. What that means is that the background of the levels looked a little different.

Jazz Jackrabbit is a reasonably good time-waster, but if you’ve played the shareware edition, and there’s really no reason that you shouldn’t have, then you’ve seen all that this game has to offer.

Posted in DOS | No Comments »

Mystic Towers

April 9th, 2007

Once upon a time the company now known as 3D Realms (formerly Apogee) put out piles of computer games, with hallmarks of being fun, engaging, and put together well. They also somehow managed to put out Mystic Towers.

I’m sure that to someone somewhere Mystic Towers is not a terrible game. I, unfortunately, am not one of those people. The game goes something like this: You take control of Baron Baldric, a wizard who also happens to be an old man (this is important). You are tasked with saving the land by venturing into a series of Mystic Towers, solving their secrets, and making the world safe for another day.

The towers are teeming with monsters, and the Baron, who is an accomplished wizard, has a handful of magic spells to take out the vermin. These towers are also, thankfully, well stocked with food, water, and additional magic spells. The Baron, it happens, needs to make sure he stays fed and hydrated. He doesn’t use the restroom, but he is an old man so he does break wind occasionally (and by occasionally, I mean all the time) with a smirk on his face which takes care of the food, but I don’t know where the water goes. Perhaps he sweats constantly into his large green robe, I don’t really know.

I was never able to endure much past the first tower, the ‘easy tower’ if you will. Easy, in this case, meaning a tower that took about two hours to complete, with one life while carefully balancing food and water intake and killing indigenous creatures. It was too much work for too little reward.

Posted in DOS | 1 Comment »

Roland’s Ratrace

April 8th, 2007

Before I played this game, I had no idea who Roland Rat was. After I played the game, I still didn’t really know. I always assumed that he was some character created specifically for this game. Many years later I would discover, via the wonders of the Internet, that Roland Rat is a British puppet that happens to be somewhat of a television celebrity in his own country.

I almost never got to play his game, since it exhibits a quite unusual quirk: to play the game, you must disconnect the Commodore 1541 disc drive from your system, otherwise the game would hang immediately after you start. For months, I thought it was broken.

On the occasion that I finally figured out how to make this thing go, I was greeted with some of the catchiest music to come out of the SID chip, and one of the most unusual games I’ve ever played.

Roland navigates the sewers armed with nothing but his patented Glue-Pac, and must track down and assemble the pieces of a door for reasons not readily apparent (we got this game second hand, so we didn’t have a manual). You are pursued by ambulatory pairs of boots and the occasional train, and according to the Internet both of which can be temporarily immobilized with a shot from your Glue-Pac. I only ever tried to stop the boots, I thought trying to stop a train with a spot of glue was silly.

If you can manage to bring all of the pieces of the door to the… door’s archway, and manage to eat the blue glowing fruits to keep your health up (getting hit by a train hurts). You will have completed this game.

I couldn’t manage more than about half of it.

Posted in Commodore 64 | No Comments »

Hustle

April 7th, 2007

Anyone that’s had a crappy cell-phone in the late 1990s is familiar with the old Snake game. The game where you control an ever-lengthening line (a.k.a. the ’snake’) with the ultimate goals of: eating all the food (which makes you longer) and not crashing into yourself or the edges of the screen. Hustle is, essentially, this very game.

Hustle puts you in charge of a snake-like thing that meanders around the screen. Your goal is to get the highest score possible by colliding with the boxes that randomly appear on the screen. These boxes will have a point value on them, granting you the amount of points shown. The points might be positive, negative, or the triple question mark, which you won’t know the actual value of until you collect it.

Sounds pretty boring, right? Granted, single-player isn’t all that fun. That’s why we have multiplayer. In multiplayer mode, the game is exactly the same, except that you go head-to-head with another person controlling another snake-like thing in a competition to get the highest score while simultaneously not crashing into the yourself, the edges of the screen, or the other player. It actually made for some decent competition, as there was skill, strategy, and a little bit of luck involved.

You just have to look past the public-domain songs that they chose for the music. Either that or turn the television down.

Posted in TI-99/4A | 1 Comment »

Great Qin Warriors

April 6th, 2007

Great Qin Warriors is a game that is so ludicrously bad that, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear was a giant practical joke put on by the developer, Epie Games, because a game cannot be this bad by accident.

The story is convoluted, and I know that I wasn’t able to fully wrap my head around it from the intro movie, but here’s what I think I learned: In the Mysterious Future humanity has built this crazy-powerful super weapon, which has inexplicably created a second earth that’s the opposite of the real earth, i.e. the new earth is evil. So, obviously, war breaks out between the two earths and their armies of giant battle robots. In the ensuing battle, a hole is ripped in time and sends the robots back in time to feudal China where a giant land-war is taking place. Robots from each side of the conflict join opposing sides of the war, and are christened the Great Qin Warriors. At least that’s how I remember it. I don’t feel the need to watch it again.

After the completely bizarre intro, we’re thrust into the game proper. I was only able to force myself to play the first stage. This stage consisted of a gigantic square-shaped open snow field with a building plunked in the middle, which I think was a Chinese temple (the back of the box proudly proclaimed something to the effect that this game was the finest digital representation of Chinese culture and buildings yet created). Scattered around the level are evil people in evil giant robots and evil gun turrets on the (I assume) neutral temple. Both the evil robots and the evil gun turrets have the ability to shoot and hit you from a distance so great that you can’t even see them to fire back. Your goal, although not explicitly stated in any place that I could find, seemed to be to destroy everything hostile on the map without letting your giant robot get destroyed.

This shouldn’t be so hard of a goal, but the level is absolutely enormous. If the robots were people-sized, then the level would be the approximate size of a 4×4 grid of football fields, except not quite as flat and without the lines drawn on the ground.

Another problem is that the levels are incredibly sparsely populated. The absolutely enormous level should be teeming with enemies, with plenty of foliage to hide behind to provide a sense of immersion. What the level actually has is about a dozen enemies hidden in the corners furthest away from you. You can’t see them, but they can sure see, shoot, and kill you.

Also, hidden somewhere within the level is something that looks like a portal that provides a minuscule influx of new evil robots. I was not able to destroy the portal directly, but I was able blow up all of the evil robots that came out of it, thereby destroying it.

The level took me nearly an hour, and the bulk of that time was finding the lone robot in the corner of the map that I didn’t fully decimate. I had damaged the thing, but it was stuck in the corner waiting for me to come back and finish the job instead of chasing me for any length of time. Then I uninstalled the game and decided to never play it again.

There is no part of this game that is fun or makes sense. Even at $1 it was seriously overpriced.

Posted in PC | No Comments »

Yar’s Revenge

April 5th, 2007

It amazes me that at one time video games had not only nearly completely inscrutable plots, but that the developers developed an entire mythos to explain what the game’s story. A backstory that, in all likelihood, had more text than the actual game’s programming. One such game is Yar’s Revenge.

I’m not going into into the depths of the Yar’s Revenge universe, but suffice it to say that you pilot a ship that’s shaped like some kind of wasp-thing. Your goal is to destroy the Evil Alien Ship on the right side of the screen. Your little pea-shooter won’t actually destroy anything but the blocky force-field surrounding the Evil Ship, so you have to use your Super Weapon. You charge the super weapon for one shot by either touching the Evil Ship, presumably charging the weapon and destroying the ship with its own evilness, or by eating a portion of the force field, thereby charging the weapon and destroying the ship with the power of your ship’s digestive tract. give the ship the ability to become an indestructible Swirl of Death and hurl itself at you, an indestructible ship shaped roughly like a hyphen that relentlessly pursues you, and a ’safe zone’ about in the middle of the screen and you have something resembling a game.

Posted in Atari 2600 | No Comments »

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