Years ago, when I was but a wee Feez, my parents bought me a Packard Bell desktop PC, sporting a whopping 128 MB of RAM and a data-crushing 90MHZ processor. It would be almost another year before I discovered the joys of Apogee Games, and almost two years before I played Wolfenstein 3-D. Until those joyous occurrences, I was hard pressed to find actual entertainment on this little mystery box, and was relegated to using the system for bullshit purposes such as “school” and “work”. This was, of course, until I logged onto a local BBS, cruised to the files section, and discovered Jumpman.
Jumpman is a simple game, first published in 1983, with a stationary screen on which you move your character around to collect rings (that were, supposedly, bombs you were disarming) in glorious EGA resolution. At the start, Jumpman’s only obstacles were the levels themselves, with ladders, ropes, and platforms the only thing standing in between him and those sweet, sweet rings. Soon after, falling bombs and attacking dots are introduced, and later levels graduated to full-fledged puzzle-fests with switches, bombs, and robots in between you and your goal. The game itself was incredibly simple, but there was a lot of depth to it in that even after you finished, there was a challenge of finding a faster way, a smarter way, a flat out better way to finish the level.
And so it was with great happiness that, even after 26 years, I loaded up ‘Splosion Man to find that some concepts still just work.
‘Splosion Man starts the player with just about as much story as Jumpman does: You don’t know why you’re there, or why your avatar is made of living fire; you just know that you’re at Point A, and you need to get to Point B. In between those points, there is cake. That, in a nutshell, is the plot of ‘Splosion Man. But we’re not in it for plot; we’re in it for blowing shit up, which the game does in spades.
The controls of the game remain Jumpman-simple, with the D-pad controlling direction, and “four other buttons”. I use that in quotes because, while there are technically four other buttons mapped to game functions, they’re all mapped to the same function: make ‘Splosion Man blow up. While exploding has replaced Jumpman’s… jumping (with the former being allowed three times in one “jump” to take your character to greater heights), blowing up is also your entire method of interacting with the environment. You can blow up next to robots to destroy them, blow up next to barrels to get more height out of your explosion, and blow up next to scientists to…turn them into meat?
Get used to things trying to crush you. Or stab you, shock you, blow you up with missiles…
The platforming, puzzle and timing aspects of the game immediately struck a chord with me. While the production values have obviously grown by leaps and bounds, the gameplay brought back the same feeling of playing the original Jumpman on my old PC. I never, during either game, felt any “this is bullshit” frustration when my character fell to his death, or died at the hands of a trap. I didn’t feel that the game had cheated me in some way, or that the level was designed so poorly that I felt that there was no way to win. I had died, simply, because I wasn’t good enough. My timing was wrong. My strategy was wrong. This, strangely enough, was a feeling that I hadn’t felt in a platformer in quite some time. Once I had finished the game, the other Jumpman trope hit me, as soon as I noticed that Twisted Pixel had put in “Par Times” and hidden cakes into every level of the game. Not only did I have hidden items to find, but I also had incentives to improve my strategy! This infinitely extended the replay value of the game, and with little effort also added a whole new aspect of play to it.
On top of the gameplay, one of the best things about ‘Splosion Man is the game’s sense of humor. The titular character himself behaves exactly how you would expect someone in his predicament to; he moves and acts like a six-year-old on a caffeine bender. As you run along straight paths without jumping, he will repeatedly chant, “bored bored bored bored bored!”, waiting for you to give him something more interesting to do. Scientists, on the other hand, act smug and holier-than-thou until actually approached by our hero, at which point they panic and run away, sometimes to their own deaths, just to avoid getting blown up. Boss characters also have a similar sense of humor, shouting catchphrases and screaming plaintively when you do damage to them. All of the humor is summed up in the game’s ending, and while I won’t spoil anything, I will say it is the most absurdly amusing game ending this side of Portal, and it looks like far more effort went into it than you’d expect from an XBLA title.
Long story short, with almost 50 levels, par times and hidden items for each, a wicked sense of humor and some great platforming, it’d be hard not to recommend ‘Splosion Man. Add to that the fact that the game is XBLA-priced, and it becomes impossible not to tell you to go buy this game right now, especially if you have any love for platforming games in you. Me, I’ll be trying to beat some of these par times. There’s got to be something I’m doing wrong….
