Jim Power (PC Engine CD)
Posted: April 4th, 2019, 12:54 pm
[Played on the Ootake emulator]
Based on my own Twitter thread:
You see, there was that video rental store on my neighbourhood, with an amazing gaming set featuring a giant TV set and a huge controller. Generally Amiga and Neo Geo games were on. There was an Amiga game the store owner's son played often: he controlled some kind of camp counselor with his baseball cap and his sunglasses, blasting beasts on a world of bright greens and oranges. It mesmerized me.
It wasn't until many years later that I actually tried this game by French developer Loriciels. It was the unfinished Mega Drive port (It was ported to Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, Super Nintendo and PC Engine CD as well.
The PC, MD and SNES ports feature a redesigned Jim, much in the vein of Buck Rogers, and several stages in anaglyph 3D (they even included dedicated googles). The SNES version is infamous for its use and abuse of parallax and Mode 7. Man, one gets dizzy with this port!
My fav port is the PCE one. Its backgrounds are kind of ugly: they lack detail and colour. Morover, the fake anime intro is preposterous, but it's a fairly faithful translation of the Amiga version and it controls way better (which doesn't mean it controls well), featuring an actual jump button. It features Chris Hüllsbeck's awesome BGM in CD quality.
However, it's not a game for everybody. Like many Eurocrap titles of the era, one must be used to this kind of games: one-hit deaths featuring our famous mortal water drops, enemies appearing suddenly, creating a trial-and-error gameplay, unfair collision detection, especially in the platforming areas...
And yet, with all these shortcomings, I love it: these are the games I grew with back in the times where I had a Spectrum +2.
Based on my own Twitter thread:
You see, there was that video rental store on my neighbourhood, with an amazing gaming set featuring a giant TV set and a huge controller. Generally Amiga and Neo Geo games were on. There was an Amiga game the store owner's son played often: he controlled some kind of camp counselor with his baseball cap and his sunglasses, blasting beasts on a world of bright greens and oranges. It mesmerized me.
It wasn't until many years later that I actually tried this game by French developer Loriciels. It was the unfinished Mega Drive port (It was ported to Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, Super Nintendo and PC Engine CD as well.
The PC, MD and SNES ports feature a redesigned Jim, much in the vein of Buck Rogers, and several stages in anaglyph 3D (they even included dedicated googles). The SNES version is infamous for its use and abuse of parallax and Mode 7. Man, one gets dizzy with this port!
My fav port is the PCE one. Its backgrounds are kind of ugly: they lack detail and colour. Morover, the fake anime intro is preposterous, but it's a fairly faithful translation of the Amiga version and it controls way better (which doesn't mean it controls well), featuring an actual jump button. It features Chris Hüllsbeck's awesome BGM in CD quality.
However, it's not a game for everybody. Like many Eurocrap titles of the era, one must be used to this kind of games: one-hit deaths featuring our famous mortal water drops, enemies appearing suddenly, creating a trial-and-error gameplay, unfair collision detection, especially in the platforming areas...
And yet, with all these shortcomings, I love it: these are the games I grew with back in the times where I had a Spectrum +2.