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| Jetpac Refuelled (XBLA) by Jerry Whorebach 04/02/2007, 2:09am PDT | ||||
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| Jetpac Refuelled
I never owned a Spectrum. This could be because I'm not old enough, nerdy enough, European enough or all of the above. So if you can remember enjoying the much-lauded original release of Jetpac on "Uncle Clive's sleek black box" (gay :/), you are in some way worse than I am. Fortunately though, Rare included an emulation of their 1983 first attempt along with this new re-imagining, so I can rest easy knowing that I didn't miss much. But from tiny acorns spring mighty cocks. After twenty-odd years, plenty of sunlight and countless particle showers, Jetpac has matured into one of the five finest games on Live Arcade. Which, given its 400 point pricetag, makes it easily the third best value on the service (after the similarly-priced Geometry Wars and the free hard drive pack-in Hexic). I suppose I should tell you about the gameplay, though, so read on if you're still not sold. The player controls, from a traditional side-view, a little man in a spacesuit. He can be commanded to walk slowly left or right by pressing the corresponding direction on the joypad (or analog stick if you hate precision). Pulling the right trigger activates his rocket boosters for as long as the trigger's depressed, allowing him to jump great distances in any direction and even change direction in mid-air. Since this is a video game, a laser is available on the A button and a limited supply of screen-clearing bombs are assigned to the X button. Each level is a different planet, represented by a single screen with a variable assortment of floating platforms. Fuel modules - which the spaceman must pick up and deliver to his parked rocket ship - fall from the sky, as do four kinds of power-up: laser upgrade modules, extra bombs, and a couple different shapes of bonus points. Hostile aliens float back and forth across the playfield in specific patterns, waiting to kill the spaceman if he so much as touches them, with later levels featuring aliens capable of actively persuing the protagonist. And that's about it, or as much as I've come across so far. You get 128 levels for your five dollars and - thanks to most of the achievements being focused on the first 10 - I've seen only a fraction of those. It's great fun, the few minutes of music are catchy enough that I usually forget to mute my TV, and the graphics rival anything I've seen on Adult Swim (and I mean that in the nicest possible way). The game does have its problems. Collecting one laser upgrade gives you a double-shot, two a triple-shot that can also be aimed up or down, and three a slightly more powerful version of your useless original single-shot, with subsequent capsules producing predictable results. This means that on your second upgrade and every three upgrades thereafter you're an unstoppable killing machine, and the rest of the time you're cursing yourself for accidentally grabbing one too many power-ups. And the ultra-detailed 2D (or perfectly cel-shaded, I can't even tell) graphics you heard me praise two paragraphs back sometimes make it hard to distinguish your enemies from the backgrounds, especially when they're both moving and roughly the same colour. Oh, and the view pointlessly zooms out slightly when you engage your jets, meaning you can't see the very edges of the screen while standing still. Perhaps this was done to encourage players to stay on their jets, which is usually not a bad idea (except when you're trying to still the screen enough that you can pick out enemies from all the clutter). These might not even be issues for you if you're not playing on a 20" SDTV like I am. But not even Joust was perfect. And, unlike Joust, you've possibly never played this one before. Buy Jetpac Refuelled if you want to see more obscure remakes done right and sold cheap. Summary: XBLA is home to some of the best bargains in gaming, provided you don't count all the awesome freeware Mischief Maker links on a weekly basis. |
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Jetpac Refuelled (XBLA) by 04/02/2007, 2:09am PDT  Re: Jetpac Refuelled (XBLA) by 04/02/2007, 4:10pm PDT Oops. NT by 04/02/2007, 4:22pm PDT Do the graphics look like this, or are they upgraded? by 04/02/2007, 9:08pm PDT You must hold an even lower opinion of Adult Swim than I do. by 04/03/2007, 2:41am PDT Re: You must hold an even lower opinion of Adult Swim than I do. by 04/03/2007, 3:08am PDT Yes that's it, thanks. NT by 04/03/2007, 3:21am PDT Re: You must hold an even lower opinion of Adult Swim than I do. by 04/03/2007, 11:51am PDT THAT's Cel-Shaded? NT by 04/03/2007, 9:16am PDT Casual-game dev bashes competition, uses words instead of trashcan lid :( by 04/04/2007, 3:02am PDT Re: Casual-game dev bashes competition, uses words instead of trashcan lid :( by 04/04/2007, 3:54am PDT Maybe if we had a *real* VegasRobb... by 04/04/2007, 7:24am PDT |
