Thursday 24 March 2011

The Jetsons: Invasion of the Planet Pirates (SNES)

To be honest, I don't think this will be that bad. I already hate the music, but I've played enough of these cartoon games now to expect competent graphics and gameplay.


Ugh, I hate it when cartoon dogs talk like that. Okay, George Jetson has been recruited by a super hero and given a mission to save the Earth from an evil supervillian, I guess.

It's a platformer, no big shock. The background looks pretty nasty, but the pixel art is good and it's animated very well.

I'd give it bonus points for not having any trees, but Mario, Sonic and Donkey Kong have all had trees in their first levels so what kind of message would I be sending there, huh? 'Be less like the best platformers ever made'?

Anyway, you're equipped with a Pneumo Osmatic Precipitator which gives you the ability to suck up enemies. And then fire them into walls so they explode into free stuff!

Or you can pick up blocks with the Pneumo Osmatic Precipitator and fire them into enemies for double free stuff! Mostly it's just score items, like food and diamonds, but sometimes there's something good inside. You gotta crack 'em open to find out.

These things are tricky little bastards. When you find an enemy holding a box and try to suck them up with the Pneumo Osmatic Precipitator, you only grab the box. Then you have a split second to decide what you're going to do about that before the enemy comes and knocks away one of your precious hit points.

Another cool use of the Pneumo Osmatic Precipitator is to grab on to walls and ceilings. There's a button that makes you jump while using it at the same time, which is handy for scaling walls and confusing you. Pressing the wrong button can easily get you killed by one of the many convenient bottomless pits.

Transport tubes, they totally ripped off Futurama!

Got my head stuck in another wall. Well I can't walk, and I can't seem to crawl...

Oh, duh! The solution to everything in this game is 'use the Pneumo Osmatic Precipitator'. I should have thought of that before I got my head stuck in the wall.

This boss fight was a pain in the ass. You have to dodge Donkey Kong a few times as he jumps over your head, then turn around, catch a falling box with the Pneumo Osmatic Precipitator, and fling it at him in time to dodge the box he's throwing at you. Or you can just spam the button and fire all the boxes at him as fast as possible. That sorted him out.

Game tip: When you beat the boss, don't leave the game running and turn around to do something else for a second. This cog spins anticlockwise and the only thing down that hole is the corpses of several former George Jetsons.

See those grey things on the right? Those move up and down and block your path and in any other game you'd have to dodge them. But in this you just use the Pneumo Osmatic Precipitator and rip them out of the machinery. This is all too easy...

Well this is a bit of a pickle. Seems that these yellow floors fall apart as you walk on them. And that's a bottomless pit.

Ledges are great. You can't move when you're attached to a wall, only jump upwards off them. Jumping into this will knock you downwards... into the bottomless pit.

Oh wait, this isn't a 'yay, I'm racing through the level now' type of ramp, it's a 'oh shit, I'm racing to certain death' type of ramp. After restarting all the way back at the cog, running across the yellow floor, climbing the wall with the ledge etc. (again) I tried jumping over and grabbing on with the Pneumo Osmatic Precipitator, as that is the solution to all problems in this, but nope fell to my death again. Back to the start.

Then I accidentally let the cog kill another couple of my dudes.

But then I came back, and found you were just supposed to jump on these cogs. They may look like they'll crush you, but they don't.

At this point though I was almost out of dudes, so I quickly died at the next section. And then George Jetson was turned into a box of spockets.


The game is pretty much how you'd expect, decent enough but nothing I'd recommend to anyone. Next game.

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