For a real long time I never knew that Joust was an arcade game. I just figured that it was some game made specifically for the Atari 2600, since it seemed to fit in with them all so well. Well, that, and the fact that my local arcades never got in very many of what you might call classics.
But not only was Joust an arcade game, but it had a sequel. A sequel that’s a whole lot the same with a few minor differences.
You still have your mount and still have to fly around a mysterious landscape with mysterious floating rocks and have to mysteriously stomp on your mysterious opponents to mysteriously encase them in eggs that you have to then collect. That’s pretty much the same as the old game, but where this game differs is: your mount can transform and the battlefield scrolls upward as you progress.
Transforming your mount is really the main difference in this version. At any time you can transform your lithe flying ostrich into a lumbering clumsy flying Pegasus. The main difference is that the Pegasus is far less nimble but falls like a rock, injecting a little bit of strategy into the game. The other big difference, the scrolling screen, only comes into play when you proceed far enough, then the screen scrolls a little bit and reconfigures itself to make things a little tougher, but it’s nothing groundbreaking.
I actually probably wouldn’t have even played this game or even knew of its existence if I didn’t have some weird obsession with playing old arcade games and decided to pick up the odd collection on occasion. Of course, I didn’t get this particular collection for this game, I got it for a couple of the others. But that doesn’t mean that this game, filler as it is, wasn’t good. It was OK, and I’m a more well-rounded player for playing it… but given the choice, I’d prefer to play something else.