Background
- Developer: Alpha Denshi (under contract for Hoei/Coreland)
- Publisher: Sega (Japan), Rock-ola (North America)
- Debut: June 1981
- Platform: Arcade
- Home Ports: Arcadia 2001, PC-98
(Author's note: Because I'm the most organized person ever, I played Donkey Kong before Jump Bug. The latter hit arcades approximately four months before DK. Jump Bug should be game #3; Donkey Kong is game #4.)
Shmup-Jumper
I enjoy cooking. Well, okay, that's not entirely true. I enjoy eating the food that other people cook. One of my favorite homemade concoctions my mom made while I was growing up—and that I still request when Mom and I get together to celebrate my birthday—is a medley of eggs, toast, and milk. We call it Egg Cheese Stuff, because we are nothing if not great at naming things. It's got the consistency of cream of wheat, and it's delicious. I'd eat Egg Cheese Stuff every day if I could. (And I could, but my doctor would frown on that life choice.)
Egg Cheese Stuff opened my eyes to the idea of taking two disparate things and pairing them together. Jump Bug holds the honor of being the Egg Cheese Stuff of platformers, if you'll forgive the somewhat clumsy—but delicious—analogy, by squashing together elements of shooters and platform games.
To understand what makes Jump Bug unique, we need to run through a brief history of the shoot-em-up, or "shmup." Before early 1981, shmups tended to be clones of Space Invaders. Players controlled a ship and fought waves of aliens against the starry backdrop of space. Your ship appeared to be hurtling through space; in reality, the stars were redrawn over and over, creating the illusion of movement. The backdrop had no bearing on gameplay. Everything vital to winning or losing existed in the foreground: the aliens you were supposed to be shooting, Space Invaders' mountain-like barriers that absorbed laser blasts until they were reduced to rubble, power-ups that modified your attacks or defense, and, of course, your little spaceship.
In March of ‘81, venerable coin-op engineer Eugene Jarvis and his design partner Larry DeMar shook up the already-kinda-stale shmup formula with Defender, a shoot-em-up set on an alien planet. There were enemy ships to shoot down, natch, but Defender set itself apart by making that optional. Your primary objective was to protect astronauts by rescue, transport, and deposit astronauts to safety. Defender also boasted a technical first for the genre by scrolling the screen left or right. No longer were players constrained to single-screen star fields. Defender let them move left or right at a whim, or come to a standstill.
Defender's terrain was simple, drawn from lines and not filled in. Even so, it offered a setting more visually appealing than white pixels against a black backdrop, and a narrative hook rather than the simple but effective “shoot all the things.” One month earlier, Konami had released a groundbreaking shmup of its own.
Before blockbuster franchises such as Castlevania and Metal Gear, Konami established itself as a maker of frenetic shooters. Scramble was among its first, and its best. Instead of dropping you somewhere in space, Scramble featured discrete environments such as mountains and buildings. The game's terrain was filled in to give it a solid appearance, but instead of giving players control over movement, Scramble harnessed auto-scrolling to smoothly scroll in a set direction. It presented a case where limiting players’ options worked in their favor. With no need to consider which direction to go, players were able to concentrate on, say, the timing of dropping bombs to hit targets on the ground, and steering their ship to stay out of harm’s way.
Defender and Scramble are noteworthy for, among other reasons, featuring smooth scrolling years before Super Mario Bros., which, one could argue, made the feature a must-have in virtually every game that followed. Later in 1981, developer Alpha Denshi applied smooth scrolling in Jump Bug—part shmup, part platformer, all a total blast to play.
Drive and Jump
Jump Bug is weird in the best way. It's a shmup, but you pilot a springy Volkswagen Bug-like car instead of a spaceship. Instead of traveling through space, you navigate earth-like cities populated with hotels and casinos, caverns made from brick, mountainous terrain dotted with volcanoes, oceans teeming with hostile lifeforms. Every environment is distinctive and appealing, painted in bursts of color that demarcate each from the others.
The Bug you control is my favorite part of Jump Bug. It bounces every time you hit a surface; I couldn't help picturing it as a VW Bug outfitted with hydraulics, like a mash-up—ah, a theme!—of Volkswagen's classic vehicle and a souped-up lowrider.
Colorful environments and your bouncy Bug form the heart of Jump Bug. Every surface you see is a platform. You jump automatically when you touch a safe surface—meaning any pixels not inhabited by aliens or hazardous terrain such as the lava spurting up from a volcano—but holding up on the joystick catapults you even higher.
Before we go further, the method of performing a jump is my only major complaint about Bug Jump. As a card-carrying member of the NES generation, jumping by any other input other than pressing a button (preferably A, because any other button invites anarchy, and civilization is already holding on by a thread) feels off to me. Admittedly, pushing up on the joystick works okay here because it’s a joystick instead of a d-pad. Rolling my thumb from left or right on a pad to the up position has always felt awkward to me, and it’s too easy to do by accident, which can throw off your rhythm at best or cost you a life at worst.
Without any input from the player, the car will bounce just high enough to pose a problem: you may clip an alien, or miss one of the many jewels or bags of money that net you points. Pulling down on the stick moderates your bounce to more of a hop, and that's important. You can’t move forward as the screen auto-scrolls in assorted directions, but that’s a good thing; all you have to do is think about when to boost your jump by pulling up, when to curb it by pulling down, and when to leave your car alone by leaving the stick in its neutral position.
As in Scramble, limiting players’ options is a boon rather than a drawback. First, giving players a curated set of inputs and tying them to specific in-game actions makes Jump Bug accessible—much more so than Space Panic, which was deceptively difficult to play. Second, what you do, and when and where you do it, depends on your ability to read the playfield and factor in what’s right in front of you, and what’s coming up. The choices you make affect your score as well as your odds of survival. Being forced to juggle any other balls would be one decision too many.
There's a huge variety of terrain to navigate in Jump Bug, making this the most diverse platformer I’ve played yet. From cities to caverns and oceans, environments never change, so you can work on creating your preferred path through a level every time you play: along the ground, where bags of money tend to be found in larger quantities but where more aliens tend to roam; over high ground such as rooftops, where you'll find fewer but more valuable money bags; over clouds, many of which are worth bonus points, letting you bounce on them over and over until the auto-scroll forces you to pick where to move next.
I cannot overstate how fun jumping is in this game. There are stretches relatively free of hazards, inviting you to ping-pong between bonus-cloud platforms to rack up lots of points, or stick to the ground with an eye for what's coming up ahead. Hazards come in a wide variety such as volcanoes, aliens planted on the ground or falling from the sky or flying across the screen or weaving in and out of terrain. Each is a variable designed to challenge your ability to make quick adjustments to your position relative to theirs, accounting for the fact that you cannot slow your forward momentum. The game's one and only button shoots a fireball-like projectile that kills enemies in a single hit, and there are rows of aliens on the ground that can be wiped out with a single shot of your cannon, tearing through them like a rock through wet sheets of paper. One shot, one row of dead aliens. It's as satisfying to behold as it is simple and elegant to perform.
Every action in Jump Bug is fun, but how they come together to challenge your knowledge of what's coming next and your handling of the Bug’s bounciness is what makes the game addictive. Each time I played, I told myself I was going to determine a rhythm and path through each area, and stick to it. Each time I played, I ended up doing something different for no other reason than I felt compelled to indulge my curiosity and test my handling over the car.
Like my favorite breakfast, Jump Bug is an amalgam of things. Each works well on its own, but blended, they form a symphony that I'm going to be playing for a long time. I tried to think about shmup-platformers but couldn't name any I'd played. I probably have, you understand—platformers have been mixed with every type of game at this point—but none jumped out at me. After playing Jump Bug, I hope I encounter a lot more, and I hope they're even half as great.
Score
Graphics: 3/5. Colorful and varied, the areas of Jump Bug will keep you on your toes no matter how many times you bounce through them.
Gameplay: 5/5. Hopping on clouds, lining up elements such as the rate of your descent with the position of a bouncy alien worth lots of points, while avoiding Jokers and eyeing bonus-point clouds—it all comes together so well, and would be almost perfect if not for having to pull up on the joystick to jump.
Sound: 1/5. Beeps and bloops occasionally arranged into what passes for tunes.
Overall: 4/5. I'm only four games deep into my mission to play every platformer, but this is the first one I've played that was both new to me, and that I played as much for my enjoyment as to learn about its place in the genre's history.
Ranking
I'm on the crest of playing a round handful of platformers, so this seems the perfect time to roll out my overall rankings to determine how the games I've played stack up against one another. As a reminder, this is purely subjective, based entirely on my own experiences with the games. I also can't promise I'll expand this ranking to include every platformer ever made. It may be simpler, and fairer, to rank platformers within the same "generation" of releases. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Without further ado, here are my rankings as of this entry. Click a game's title to read its review.
1. Donkey Kong
2. Jump Bug
3. Space Panic
No comments:
Post a Comment