Cross-post from Digital Press's Monday Morning MAME Club!
Edit:
dis game is: JUMP COASTER
thx 2 bsidwell for confirming that I do not remotely influence anybody's life as it took until today (April 14) for anybody to notice the game's name was not mentioned!)
If Rob doesn't start posting more, there will be more of these, I assure you! (Evil laughter and pointing of dagger at Irene's throat! Oh noes!)
25,700 here; I can't believe this game is rewarding me for ignoring the girl.
The game managed to catch my attention for a few minutes, however. Collision doesn't seem entirely predictable all the time, but the bad guys' movement is predictable enough that you can navigate the stages.
The first stage is fairly easy. Wait at the bottom for the slow bozo bro. to reach your location so that you have one less to worry about near the top, or immediately head to the right and move up - it's surprisingly easy to turn on a dime and jump over the bros. because you move quicker by far. Your main challenge is to make sure they don't crowd the ladders you need to take.
The second one, eh, it's more of the same. I curse the designers for thinking it's fun to put the word "coaster" in the game and just make them one of the major sources of evil in the game, plus, the apes in them don't even seem to be doing anything with it. The rotation effect is neat and even a bit advanced for this time period, but it's just wasted on these weird things with an enigmatic look frozen on their faces. I dunno...I'm failing to convince myself it's creepy; it's just a plain stupid waste of a potentially interesting game mechanic. How do you make dodging roller coasters not fun?
An observation about the coasters: Depending where you get on ladders, you may get hit by a coaster or miss it. The designers obviously designed this in, since in most any video game - even many 3D ones - you stick to ladders in a specific way and traverse a set path, because that's what ladders are for. When you climb a ladder, do you stick all your weight on one side of the ladder in hopes somebody will open a door and knock you off? What kind of sadistic person would create a thing like that? I have an answer: Kaneko's people were out of ideas for what to do with roller coasters so they threw in this curveball. Guys, if you're not going to stick to the limitations of the maze and ladders genre, make a free-roaming game. It could easily be just as good, if not better, I'm sure. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has something to learn 'um about ladders, and while I've never been a great fan of games that use multiple layers without much apparent depth and hide the player, it'd arguably be a better gameplay mechanic. Alternatively, they could've just withheld the temptation to put this evil thing in altogether: all you have to do is be aware of it and it'll never bother you (on that board at least) again.
I'm sure that with enough time I could get through stage 3. The "gauntlet of doom and tears" going right to left after you reach the second level of the stage involves moving along on the rope as the bozo bro. lands from a jump, and dismounting the rope whenever the ape comes along - I don't think he's allowed to drop bananas when you're directly under him, although I haven't played long enough to be sure. They'd probably take you out immediately, that or you're meant to be running along so they pass just behind you.
MUCH WHINING & STUFF TO FOLLOW
The bozo bros. that come out and harass you look vaguely like extras from A Clockwork Orange, a movie I haven't seen. I guess that means I shouldn't try to force the comparison, other than to say that I thought clockwork oranges and jump coasters should be fun. They could be. I was sorely disappointed.
It's funny - I had the impression that during their later years Kaneko were still aping other games, still without much originality, but at least by then they were working competently in a few niches - raised along with the competency of the industry as a whole.
I really don't miss the days when people thought (mistakenly) that successful arcade design consisted solely of aping Pac-Man's most apparent symptoms (the design of the stages and gameplay is more like Donkey Kong, though; evidence of this game's schizophrenia): borderline-atonal jingles (try falling off the top rung of the stage - augh), blasts of noise every time you so much as jiggle the joystick (the apists at Kaneko not having been clued in that in Pac-Man it's an audio cue that you're picking up pellets), and enough neon color to blind a chameleon...on acid (of course it has to be on acid).
Then, since nobody can top Pac-Man's design, toss in a funny animal or clown or some other dumb thing. I'd go all out NAVGTR style here and say "why not a flying mashup of a haircomb and a trombone in a musical F1 waterfall racing game? With cancer?" if I didn't have any sense of shame. Oh yeah, they ripped off Donkey - I mean King Kong, too, just so we could have a simian dropping junk our way. They didn't even try to come up with something new, like Nichibutsu did with the mice of Frisky Tom. If only we had the little Universal clown, the ensemble of lazy characters would be complete.
I did mention Donkey Kong earlier, and that's something else nagging me about the game: What's the dang goal of the game? So much for the much-vaunted "Japanese" "zen garden approach" to games design; they just threw in extra stuff that is actually completely useless because it wouldn't look like Donkey Kong if they didn't. I can't really tell what the garish thing begging for help along the top of the screen is - but I don't need to care, either, as the game demonstrates in one of the worst examples of behavior training (and possible subversions of the hero ethic) I've seen in a game. They started to come up with a reason to give the player an epic quest, but decided to replace it with pure greed anyway! I knew it, nobody who wears that freaky bandit outfit is likely to be thinking of others. (I'm not going to say he's got no interest in saving the girl because...phew, that was a close one!)
Now, I'm going to forget all of this and imagine that Jump Coaster is a game about climbing the scaffolding of a roller coaster to save the girl, and it was great and everybody was happy, forever and ever. Also, I kicked the bozo bros. in the face when they tried to grab my ankles as I shimmied a rope, because that's what they deserve.
This story is happy end!
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