Game 3: Joust (1982)

While this may be titled "Game 3," this is actually the first review on the blog. We encountered severe apathy when attempting to play Dungeon and Moria, and perhaps this will change in the future. For now, we are starting off with Joust:

Hal Laboratory shows there used to be no shame in an arcade port.

Joust was originally released for the arcade in 1982, by Williams, and for this review we played the NES release due to technical issues with the original. From what I've read online, despite the 6 year gap in the releases, there are no serious gameplay differences, and we can always come back to the arcade version later when we get it working. I remember renting this game once when I was younger and enjoying it enough not to be mad at picking it, but not enjoying it enough to ever rent it again. Recently, I have had the opportunity to replay it in its arcade glory at Ground Kontrol and it is still painfully easy to die.

Easier said than done.

Joust is really hard. To our modern sensibilities, it feels impossible. We watched the attraction screen that explains the basics, and attempted to start playing. We were killed almost immediately after started, and noted there are no continues or "respawn invincibility," features which we took for granted until playing this. This game also features the contemporary "one-hit kill" style of gameplay. The goal of the game is straight forward: you are a Jouster, and you must kill the other Jousters. When you kill a Jouster, it will hatch an egg that will eventually turn into another Jouster if you do not collect it. There is also friendly fire, making cooperative play a perilous venture.

It starts out simple enough.

 The game starts, like other games of the era, deceptively simple. You (and your friend) are represented by a small blue jouster, and there are some green jousters who spawn and then haphazardly float around. If you defeat all of the jousters in a wave, you progress to the next one. Given that this is an arcade game from 1982, none of this is unexpected. Platforms are removed after certain waves, and the lava will be revealed, giving the player less and less "safe" areas to fly in. Additionally, every few levels, a new enemy will appear. These enemies are generally less idiotic, and more likely to fly towards you rather than get killed by the lava. There is also a "bonus" stage where the screen is filled with eggs that need to be collected before spawning enemy jousters. Because we are still able to kill each other during the bonus stage, we split up the level in terms of layers, to avoid the fatal joust.

Points!

One of the biggest challenges we faced in playing this game cooperatively was each other. The very nature of the game's physics and rules made playing cooperatively a detriment rather than an advantage. We continually killed each other without meaning to, and the quickness of death and lack of continue only adds misery to this plight. At one point we realized that we were having more fun killing each other than trying to get through the waves, and we happily explored that venue for a few lives.

The audio in the NES release is sparse and blippy. The title music is a nice fanfare, but the game is mostly quiet. While this is on par for a 1982 arcade release, it feels dated for a 1988 NES release. The same can be said for the graphics.

In the end, we played the game for about an hour before getting too frustrated and moving on. This puts us over our previously stated 30 minute minimum, but we were unable to achieve our secondary goal of seeing all of the enemies or level variations. As a side note, this is the first game we've played that has a bonus stage, Wikipedia informs me that Galaga included a bonus stage in the previous year