Mighty Bomb Jack

Mighty Bombjack suffers from the cash-cow syndrome, just like Barbarian II: Dungeon of Drax and Archon II: Adept.

Where the original is fast-tempo, upbeat, colorful and full of energy (it even has an eighties cover of a great, seventies synthpop song! Pure enerrrrgy!), this is slow, grey, dull, downbeat, childish and depressing. No energy whatsoever.

The graphics are very depressing - they have lots of BLACK OUTLINES, BLACK SHADING and just lots of black everywhere. When there IS color, it's never lively - it's always either grey, dark blue + black or dark brown + black. Colorful game, eh? Not.

The musics are childish beyond belief. How can they mess it up this bad? The C64 and the SID are capable of SUCH wonderful miracles, as we have heard from Hubbard, Galway, Daglish, and even the more gimmicky, less original-music people like Tel and Ouwehand. These musics have no energy whatsoever, but this childish plinky-plonky crap that makes the ARCADE version of Bomb Jack look like a Mozart masterpiece by comparison! (And that's saying a lot)

The 'powerup' used to be a fast-paced event, where you had to CHASE the flashing P, and if you caught it, the music changed, the screen was full of animation, and so on. It was an EVENT, satisfying as anything could be, and really glorious to witness!

Here, when you take it, it's like someone pumps you full of valium, almost nothing happens. And does the "P" even flash? I don't even know. In "Bomb Jack", I certainly know.

On the surface, it looks like a decent, little game - but the magic of the original just isn't there anymore. Gone is the energetic, inspiring, pumping synthpop music (that I later found out was a Jarre cover). Gone are the atmospheric, mystical, beautiful, individual background sceneries. Gone are the eye-appealing overall graphics, the beauty of the bombs and the believable quirkiness of the sprites.

Instead, we have this 'larger, but more boring screens'-effect that was so typical of sequels. Why do the gamemakers think they have to change things so much for the sequels, that those things become extremely boring?

The arcade version of the original Bomb Jack is all right, but the C64 version is where the concept really shines, mostly because of the better and less childish music (just listen to the awfully kindergarten-type plink-plonk music of the arcade, it's not only annoying, it's embarrassing to listen to - anyone who wants to defend that, probably listens to "Toddlers' Best Hits" daily), but also because of the better screen ratio (I always hated that 'sideways' look in games - it fits vertical space-shooters, but not games of this type), better atmosphere, and more imagination-provoking graphics (better resolution doesn't equal better graphics, necessarily). The gameplay is pretty much 'equally good', but the annoying sound effects of the arcade also bring the experience down).

But this cash-cow-sequel is the typical sequel of a successful, inspired, beautiful, wonderful, esoterically exciting original, where the creators poured their finest self into making a game -- it's a calculated, cold, soulless, paint-by-numbers platformer that's trying to make people buy the game because of the NAME, instead of just BEING A GOOD GAME, like the original. Who cared that the name was "Bomb Jack"? All we cared about was that the game itself was brilliant, as it was.

When they make a game 'larger', they often lose the beauty of the 'individual screen' graphics - this happened with Barbarian II: Dungeon of Drax, and it happened with Mighty Bombjack, and it probably happened with lots of other games, as well. Individual and beautiful becomes ugly, dull and generic. That's the way of the cash-cow - they don't care about being good games that ooze energy, beauty, inspiration, and the finest self of the creators - they only care that people buy them.

But maybe I am being too hard on this game - after all, the eighties was already over, and you can't manufacture the magical energy of the eighties in the year 1990 anymore. You either make the game in the eighties, or you don't have the magic - it's that simple.

Though surely they could have had more magic than THIS. People didn't play the original because of the bombs, the gameplay per se, or the Jack - they didn't play it because of the name, the character or the cape - they played it, because it was a glorious, wonderful, magical, shining gem, where the makers had poured their finest self into it, and this could be experienced as immersive, uplifting atmosphere, beautiful, shining graphics, pumping, uptempo music (with lots of soul and energy), and interesting, colorful sprites, plus of course great, solid gameplay without a flaw. Just hard enough to be challenging, but easy enough to know that if you didn't succeed, if was completely your own fault. And all that came together as an incredible, euphoric experience.

This game, however, has none of that. It suffers from the Barbarian II: Dungeon of Drax dullness, or the Archon II monotony - larger is not better, and 'adding more' does not equal a better experience. These games exemplify the reason why sequels should never be made - Superman II, The Empire Strikes Back, Rocky IV, First Blood II (Rambo), and a few others serve as a great exception to this rule - but if you notice, they have all been created in the eighties. Once the eighties was over, it was really stupid to defy this rule - but they did it anyway. And the result is a facepalm-inducing awfulness. They shouldn't have, those greedy bastards, who care only about money, not about how good the games are.

If they did, they have named this something else, and just focused on making the best game possible. Instead, they focused on riding on the success and the name of a good, successful game, hoping to bring in more bucks. This game deserved to fail just as much as the original deserved to be a success.

Notice also, how they changed the name "Bomb Jack" into "Bombjack", as if that's his NAME somehow, instead of just a nickname, like the original game suggests. It used to be like "Bomb Jack - a Jack of bombs", but now it's like the name of the character -- "Bombjack" - no longer a description, but a label, a stigma, a name, regardless of what and who he really is. Just to sell the game a bit more. Marketing madness at its finest.

Now, I think I will go play a couple of rounds of the original C64 Bomb Jack that brought me so much joy throughout my life. Ahh, nothing beats the original, and here, it couldn't be more true.

Music:
The spot FX are okay but the music is pretty sucky and tuneless.

Graphics:
Smooth 50hz scrolling and nice sprites. Backgrounds could be better.

Control:
The short press for jump, long press for bomb is crap. I find myself using bombs when I don't want to. Also the jump is a fixed distance (huge) which gets annoying very quickly.

Gameplay:
Fun to collect stuff and explore the maze like areas. It's quite repetitive though, and it would be nice to be able to kill enemies by jumping on them. Okay.

6/10

Lot of variety, a very strong gameplay and fantastic sprite animations and definitions, backgrounds are a bit grainy but it doesn't matter..

Thanks for the nice comments. It was fun to write, and was one of the last games I converted. I can recall all I had was a long video which showed how the entire game was played, the graphics, and binary dumps of the arcade ROMs. There was no documentation, though I think there was a rough map. You had to go through and guess where the room layouts were. I think even at the end there was part of the data structures I never understood!

Hey, its Bombjack, and Bombjack means the world to me. 10/10

This game is VERY funny if played with a map... Try to draw a map of the course, so you'll never get lost and find important places!

Once you get used to the mildly annoying jump/glide system, quite an enjoyable little platformer.