Computer Platform Games #9

Bomb Jack II (1987)
By: Elite Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Medium
Featured Version: ZX Spectrum First Day Score: 10,400
Also Available For: Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64

I was a big fan of Tehkan's classic bomb-collecting platformer, Bomb Jack, and as detailed in a previous post, I spent a great many happy afternoons playing the excellent CPC version at a friend's house on the way home from school. As you might imagine, I was therefore keen to acquire the game for my Speccy too, but I never saw it in the shops for some reason. I did see Bomb Jack II though, and soon bought it hoping it would be more or less the same as the game I had been enjoying so much. Sadly, I quickly learned that aside from using the same name and main character, it bore little resemblance to the original. Okay, it was also a single-screen platformer and there were still small platforms dotted around the screen and you still had to collect stuffs and there were still enemies to avoid. But it still didn't play much like the mighty Bomb Jack (no, not Mighty Bomb Jack). But was it enjoyable in its own right?

Game Gallery #9

It has once again been far too long since I did one of these gallery posts - something I must address henceforth - but they were mainly intended to showcase big name games of the past, in any case. Then why am I using this gallery post to showcase a Speccy homebrew game that, to my knowledge, not many people know about, you probably aren't asking. Well, because 1) I like it, and 2) it has pretty graphics for a Speccy game - a wonderful system, but one for which colours are not often seen in huge numbers. Check out the colours here, especially the borders of each level.

Mobile Games #11

Bloo Kid (2011)
By: Winterworks / Corona Labs Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Easy-Medium
Featured Version: Android Also Available For: iOS

I discovered this appealing-looking game quite a while ago now - a couple of years, probably - when I happened to see its sequel on sale in the Steam store. My OCD won't allow me to play that first though, so I had to track down the first game. Happily, I found it's a free (with ads) Android game, and of a type I enjoy a lot, namely a single-screen platformer. As appealing as that was though, it also set off an alarm. Games of this type are frequently a lot of fun but they also generally require quick and precise movements - would that be possible with a mobile game? I now own a Bluetooth game pad but it doesn't seem to work with this game, so I guess I had little choice but to find out how good (or bad) the touchscreen controls were. Let's hope it's the former!

Single Screen Platform Games #17

Lode Runner (1984)
By: Broderbund / Irem Genre: Platform / Puzzle Players: 1 Difficulty: Medium-Hard
Featured Version: Arcade First Day Score: ???,???
Also Available For: NES, Game Boy, SG-1000, PC Engine, PC, Apple Mac, Apple II, Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, Vic 20, Amstrad CPC, MSX, BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, Pravetz 82/82M
Download For: Wii Vitual Console, Xbox Lives Arcade, PlayStation Network, Android, iOS

I've been reviewing games here for a long time now, and a good few of them have been platform games as they're one of my favourite genres, perhaps my very favourite, but I don't think I've ever come across a game that was ported to more systems than this one. Just look at that list - I haven't even heard of one of them! Despite this, however, I never really encountered it in its day (I was still largely-dependent on my parents for new games back then, or even magazines to let me know about the games), but I still keep hearing its name after all this time so I figured it was finally time to give it a proper once-over. I had assumed the arcade version would've been the first, as it usually is, so I got stuck in to that version only to find out the game actually debuted on several American home micros first. Oops! Oh well, too late now!

Game Boy Games #4

Mr. Chin's Gourmet Paradise (1990)
By: Romstar Inc Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Medium
Featured Version: Nintendo Game Boy
Also Available For: Nothing

In the days of yore, I often found that games that had anything to do with food were pretty great. Perhaps not as great as a really hot curry or a meat feast pizza but pretty great. This particular example is, I believe, a little-known Game Boy release which casts the player as the titular Mr. Chin, apparently a Chinese gentleman who has "come all the way from China" in pursuit of his favourite treat - luscious gourmet peaches. Where he's come to is anybody's guess but, while this mysterious land may be rich in curvy peach goodness, getting his hands on them may not be quite as simple as all that. Most of them, it seems, are actually terrifying creatures known as Momos which are apparently a special branch of the fruit family, and they aren't quite ready to be turned into peaches. Luckily, our hungry Chinese friend does have one fairly effective way of doing this - zapping them with his 'Demoe Beam' - but even this can be a little tricky too.

Speccy Homebrew Games #2

Circuitry (2017)
By: John Blythe / Rucksack Games Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Medium
Featured Version: ZX Spectrum First Day Score: 368k

Splendid loading screens always make a game better...

When I first started this feature a few months back I thought I was pretty lucky to find a single-screen platformer to start it off - they are one of my favourite types of game after all - so imagine how happy I was to find another such example just recently! This one was made by John Blythe, a.k.a. Rucksack Games, using Jonathan Cauldwell's Arcade Game Designer and casts you as Nan'O'Bot, a tiny robotic AI which you must use to infiltrate the mainframe of Revanox, the R&D branch of military contractor SecuriCorp, and save as much of their data as possible from a rogue AI activated by a heinous hacker before Revanox cut their losses and pull the plug. This is done by hopping around twenty appropriately-themed single screen stages, each of which features two 'data packets' which come in the form of floppy discs (both 3.25" and 5.25" varieties) or cassettes. Hopefully these are just symbolic though - I'd hate to think of an R&D dept using such outdated storage media nowadays!

Single Screen Platform Games #16

Manic Miner (1983)
By: Bug-Byte Software Ltd Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Medium-Hard
Featured Version: ZX Spectrum First Day Score: 11,800
Also Available For: Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, C16, BBC Micro, Dragon 32, MSX, Oric 1, Memotech MTX, PMD 85, Sam Coupe, Amiga, Game Boy Advance

Okay, time for another Red Parsley embarrassing confession. I am of course highly familiar with Manic Miner, the towering masterpiece of Matthew Smith, and have played it before, but I've never really played it properly on its home turf. I think I even completed one of the other versions but the Speccy original has been sadly neglected by me. Thinking about it now I genuinely have no idea how I missed it in its day, what with the game's already legendary status and all that. Its release came before I joined the ranks of the home computerers but you would still think a game this popular would find its way to me anyway, even a few years later, but no. I don't recall seeing it on sale and I'm pretty sure I never saw magazines going on about it excitedly either. It really is quite strange looking back but the end result was that I, a self-professed Speccy fan, wasn't even aware of one of its most recognised, landmark titles until many years later.

Single Screen Platform Games #15

Baluba-Louk No Densetsu (1986)
By: Able Corp Genre: Platform Players: 1-2 Difficulty: Medium
Featured Version: Arcade First Day Score: ???,??? (one credit)
Also Available For: NES

Since starting this feature, all the way back near the time I started the blog itself no less, I've been surprised by just how many candidates are out there. There are still at least ten more I intend to cover eventually, so it's perhaps a bit odd that I've opted to take a look at this little-known mid-80's example next. The reason it's odd is because it's not strictly speaking a single-screen platformer at all! That is to say, its many stages are not confined only to the size of a single screen - each one is actually nearly two screens wide and scrolls accordingly - but they play very much like the typical single-screen plaformers I, and perhaps you, know and love, so it's still well worth covering here if you ask me.

Speccy Homebrew Games #1

Gloop Troops (2010)
By: Little Shop of Pixels Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Easy
Featured Version: ZX Spectrum First Day Score: 22,500
Also Available For: iOS

When I gave the wonderful mobile game I Am Level a good going over last year its Speccy-style graphics and presentation made me realise something. For most of the time I have been running Red Parsley, I've covered a few doujin games here and there as well as a number of indie/download titles for PC and PSN, but I don't think I've played a single homebrew game for the Spectrum in that time, much less reviewed one. This is odd since the continuing passion shown by these talented, dedicated gamers never fails to impress, and the Speccy is of course one of my favourite systems too. So it's about time I started taking a look of some of them, and the first one I've chosen is Gloop Troops which was released back in 2010 by Little Shop of Pixels (also known as Andrew Oakley and Simon Franco). I can't recall where I first saw it now but it clearly did something to catch my eye.

Single Screen Platform Games #14

Mario Bros (1983)
By: Nintendo Genre: Platform Players: 1-2 Difficulty: Medium
Featured Version: Arcade First Day Score: 58,740 (one credit)
Also Available For: NES, Apple II, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum
Download For: Wii Virtual Console

Despite being among the most well known video game characters of all time, some people are still unaware of Mario's earlier exploits. His first appearance was of course as the heroic Jumpman in Donkey Kong, I don't think there are many gamers who forget about that, but one game that does often seem to get overlooked is this one, the original Mario Bros. I first played it many years ago on my Spectrum and I seem to remember a fairly strong feeling of indifference at the time. Coming back to it now though, and the arcade original no less, might well elicit a different reaction. One thing I didn't know before is that the game is apparently set in New York's sewers. I suppose it makes sense now that I think about it but it's still unlike any sewer I've ever seen. Not that I've actually seen too many but you know what I mean. This sewer is apparently infested with many strange creatures and it's down to the heroic plumbing duo of Mario and Luigi to exterminate them.

Gaming Memories - Part 16

Looking back to my early days of gaming, I still find it very odd that I never had any friends who owned a Commodore 64. The mighty Spectrum may have been more popular here in the UK (just about) but there were still plenty of C64’s about, and I read about them all the time in Computer & Video Games magazine and the like, so it was quite strange. Perhaps making it even stranger is the fact that I did have several friends with the less-popular Amstrad CPC, and it was this system along with the Speccy that comprised most of my time with 8-bit home micros.

My good friend Luke had a much-treasured 464 at around the same time I had my Speccy +3 and I recall us using it often, but lodged in my memory most firmly of the the times I spent with the CPC was the example owned by one of my class-mates whose house was, conveniently enough, part-way between school and my house. It was often, therefore, that I would stop off at his house and engage in various game-related skylarkings before running home for dinner and homework. This was the same friend, incidentally, who introduced me, somewhat belatedly, to the Atari VCS. He didn't have too many games and the system was too old to by then to realistically find any new ones to buy, but we enjoyed it all the same. When we weren't hopping around on Frostbite, however, we were in a different room of his sizeable house.

Single Screen Platform Games #13

The Fairyland Story (1985)
By: Taito Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Medium
Featured Version: Arcade First Day Score: 58,800
Also Available For: MSX, X68000 (PlayStation 2 and PSP on compilations)

The most famous and beloved of all single-screen platformers may well be Bubble Bobble but, as I discovered a few years ago whilst fooling around with this very blog, it wasn't even Taito's first stab at the genre never mind the first ever example. Three years beforehand they gave us Chack'n Pop which was and remains quite a strange but oddly enjoyable game (once you get used to it!), and then again, the year before the legend itself arrived they graced us with Fairyland Story! Unlike Chack'n's peculiar adventure, however, this particular example has much more in common with Bubble Bobble and could therefore (possibly) even be considered its spiritual predecessor. Both games feature 100 single-screen stages, each consisting of an arrangement of platforms populated by several scary enemies which all need to be vanquished before you can move to the next stage. The only real differences are the characters and how they dispose of the heinous enemy creatures.

Single Screen Platform Games #12

Chuckie Egg (1983)
By: Nigel Alderton / A&F Software Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Medium
Featured Version: BBC Micro First Day Score: 173,320
Also Available For: ZX Spectrum, Dragon 32/64, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Acorn Electron, MSX, Tatung Einstein, Atari 8-bit, PC, Amiga

There have never really been too many single-screen platform games around but a good number of them were not only arcade games, but Japanese arcade games. One of the most notable exceptions is a game that's legendary here in the UK but less well known elsewhere. If you grew up in the 80's here it wasn't a question of if you had played Chuckie Egg but rather which version you'd had access to. Despite owning a Speccy, most of my time spent with the game was courtesy of my good friend Luke and his Dragon 32. Many pleasant weekends were spent charging around the luminous green stages (a trademark of many Dragon titles) and we loved the game, but all these years I've been hearing about how the BBC version is supposedly the best of the many available. Having recently 'explored' this classic system, finding proof of this claim seemed like an ideal way to start my reviews for the system.

Single Screen Platform Games #11

Wani Wani World a.k.a. Trouble World (1992)
By: Kaneko Genre: Platform Players: 1-2 Difficulty: Medium
Featured Version: Sega MegaDrive / Genesis First Day Score: 52,500 (one credit)
Also Available For: Nothing

I doubt many gamers would argue that the best and most influential example of the single-screen platformer was Bubble Bobble. Near enough everything about Taito's game was close to perfect but one of the many things that made it so appealing was the cute characters it featured. Being so popular was bound to attract imitators though, and that's exactly what this here Kaneko release appears to be at first glance - little more than a blatant clone. It, however, is not. Well, not specifically of Bubble Bobble anyway, for inspiration seems to have come from several sources. The main characters definitely look familiar - a small green dinosaur for player one and a similar pink example for player two, and their ultimate objective is predictable, but the stages that lay before them are notably different to those found in Bub and Bob's classic adventure.

Crap Games #6

Dark Castle (1991)
By: Three Sixty Pacific Inc Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Medium-Hard
Featured Version: Sega MegaDrive / Genesis
Also Available For: Amiga, Atari ST, PC, Macintosh, CDi, Commodore 64, MSX, Apple IIGS

Poor old Dark Castle, I nearly blocked it from my memory... Along with the previously-reviewed Ace of Aces, it remains the recipient of the lowest magazine review score I ever remember seeing in the usually-generous magazines I used to read - in this case little more than twenty percent! I've been understandably wary of the game ever since but in the best spirit of Red Parsley, it's time once again to be brave and find out if it really is... that bad. The premise is at least a reasonably promising, if rather unoriginal one - predictably, it's set in the titular fortress where the evil, tyrannical Black Knight resides. The courageous Prince Duncan, however, has had enough and decides to topple the cretinous knight from his throne. This, of course, entails successfully making his way through the castle which is fraught with dangers beyond count.

Random Game I've Never Heard Of #6

Ponpoko (1982)
By: Sigma Entertainment Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Medium
Featured Version: Arcade First Day Score: 24,820
Also Available For: Nothing

After recently struggling through the immensely difficult Choplifter again for the latest Arcade Shmup review here at Red Parsley, I was in dire need of something a little more relaxing to play so, what better time to search for and play another previously unheard of game?! These are often selected on the basis of an intriguing or eye-catching name and so was the case once again here. The main reason this particular title caught my eye is thanks to the splendid Studio Ghibli film, Pom Poko. Could this be a game based on it? That would be pretty cool but alas, as soon as I saw the '1982' on the title screen it became apparent that this was not the case. It does cast the player in the role of one of the creatures found in the film though - a tanuki or Japanese racoon dog, which are strange and mythical creatures of mysterious powers. Sounds intriguing so far...

Single Screen Platform Games #10

Zupapa! (2001)
By: Face / SNK Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Medium
Featured Version: SNK Neo Geo MVS First Day Score: 138,300
Also Available For: Nothing

As great as the Neo Geo was (and still is), it was never anything other than a hardcore gamer's system, and one for rich hardcore gamers at that! With that in mind, it's pretty damn impressive that it lasted as long as it did - over a decade in fact. After the world failed to end at the turn of the millennium, however, releases started drying up as SNK suffered financial problems. There were still a few releases though. These were mostly the fighting games that had made the system so famous over the years but a few other games sneaked through. One of these was Zupapa!, released around the same time SNK were being reborn as Playmore, and an unusual game by Neo Geo standards. It wouldn't have been a particularly unusual release on other formats of the day but it stood out a bit more on SNK's machine...

Single Screen Platform Games #9

Happy Monster (1994)
By: H. Müller Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Easy-Medium
Featured Version: Commodore Amiga First Day Score: 767,900
Also Available For: Nothing

Platform games as a genre have been around over thirty years now and this kind - where each stage is only one screen in size - was how the genre began before fancy stuff like scrolling was introduced. That's a lot of time to be trying to come up with new ideas. There is, after all, only so much you can do with one 2D screen filled with platforms. Impressively though, most of them manage to add at least something to the genre, or sub-genre as it now is. This effort by German fellow, Harold Müller, which appeared pretty late in the Amiga's life, does not. Apparently, this is typical of Mr. Müller whose games often feature, shall we say, 'borrowed' elements or ideas. Clearly, if true, that makes him either lazy or just lacking in creative abilities but does that mean his games aren't any good? I don't know yet so let's find out!

Single Screen Platform Games #8

Rod-Land (1990)
By: Jaleco Genre: Platform Players: 1-2 Difficulty: Easy-Medium
Featured Version: Arcade First Day Score: 111,800 (one credit - tower game)
Also Available For: NES, Game Boy, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum
Download For: iOS

Considering how much I like these cutesy single-screen platform games, it's nothing short of shocking that I hadn't played this one before until it popped into my head again a few weeks ago. In fact, aside from its slightly chortlesome name, I knew little of the game until that fateful day. All I knew is that it's cute and that it would fit in well with the theme of this series of reviews. Indeed, the former point is seemingly something the game revels in and is apparent from the moment it starts. Like most other games of this type, Rod-Land is set in a magical far-away place populated by all sorts of fantastical creatures. Among them are two fairies called Tam and Rit whose mother has just been kidnapped and taken to a giant tower by a being of terrifying evil. Since Rod-Land is apparently devoid of any kind of law-enforcement authority, it instead falls to the brave fairies to being her back safe and sound.

Single Screen Platform Games #7

Chack'n Pop (1983)
By: Taito Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Medium-Hard
Featured Version: Arcade First Day Score: 8,550
Also Available For: Sega SG-1000, Nintendo NES, Fujitsu FM-7, MSX, NEC PC-6001, Sharp X1
Download For: Wii Virtual Console

Any gamer who's not a moronic buffoon knows all about Taito's immensely fabulous Bubble Bobble. It was a game that took mid-80's arcades by storm and, unlike so many other games of the era, remains as popular today. It wasn't a particularly advanced game for its day but it was one of the first to demonstrate that design is more important than technical wizardry. It's also a game that's had a good few sequels over the subsequent years but, much to my surprise, I've recently discovered it has a semi-prequel as well which was released three years earlier. After spending the last few days playing it, there are clear signs of the game that would follow, but it doesn't play much like it. Both games are platformers consisting of multiple stages, each one screen in size, and they share a few character designs, but apart from that they're quite different games.