Games 417-418: Jump Bug & Crush Roller

Alpha Denshi, a pretty minor developer whose best-known properties were made in partnership with SNK (and often assumed to belong to them) wouldn't be noteworthy to this blog except for that two of their early works appear to have informed the minor whale City Connection.

Their earliest known title, Dora-chan, is a stupid little game with imagery lifted from the Doraemon manga and without permission, and not really worth my time to cover beyond this acknowledgement.

"PLEASE ATTACK ME," states the attract mode.

Around 1981, they released a game that is sometimes listed as the world's first sidescrolling platformer.

 

Game 417: Jump Bug

 

I'm almost positive that Konami's Scramble influenced this, both being multistage autoscrolling action games that ran on Galaxian hardware. The difference being that Jump Bug puts you in control of a hopping car instead of a jet fighter, though this car still has front-firing guns.

Controlling the jumps takes some getting used to; instead of having a dedicated jump button, the bug automatically jumps whenever it touches ground, and you can control its altitude to some extent with the joystick; up gives it a mid-air boost (or slows its descent), and down speeds the descent.

Stages are enumerated in the attract mode

 

Jump Bug anticipates many aspects of the side-scrolling platform game formula, though I'm not sure it was directly influential. You've got your seven thematic stages seamlessly transitioning from one to the next, each with a unique (apart from the two volcano stages) sets of tiles, hazards, and gimmicks to bounce through. The opening city stage has you jumping across skyscrapers, collecting bags of cash and shooting down space invaders. This opens up to a plains stage with boulders on the ground and cloud platforms to assist in jumping over them, sometimes occupied (hey you, get off of my cloud!). Boulders give way to mountains and volcanoes to test your sense of timing - hop over the mouth at the right time or you'll learn a new meaning of burning rubber. The pyramid is perhaps the most unique stage of all, as the autoscrolling gives way to a 4-way scrolling maze of bats, treasures, and deathtraps, though the vertical screen orientation isn't the best suited mode for it. Then, after more volcanoes, a tricky undersea section with deadly homing jellyfish and nuclear submarines to contend with - this part gave me the most trouble. Finally, a trampoline bounces you to a sky road section full of clouds and various aerial hazard - land on a skyscraper at the end to loop back to stage 1 and do it all over again.

It didn't take me too many tries to make it through the first loop, but I didn't feel like attempting another.

GAB rating: Above average. Jump Bug is ugly, clunky, and weird, but also surreal and imaginative, and easy enough (once you get a grip on its controls) that its weirdness isn't offensive. Playing it through once was fun. Playing through once was also enough.

Game 418: Crush Roller

 

The link between Crush Roller and City Connection seems shaky to me, and the sole source on this is a review from a Japanese media site. Crush Roller (originally localized as Make Trax by Williams Electronics) closely follows the Pac-Man formula and replaces the goal of eating all of the dots in the maze with the nearly equivalent task of covering every inch of it with paint. City Connection came out several years later and also involves covering the entire level with paint but otherwise has little here in common.

But I played Crush Roller, you're reading about it as an ancestor apparent, and good grief, this is deceptively hard. First you take in its pastel colors, childishly simple visuals, and cheesy music. Then you notice that your only opposition are two pink fish swimming around the maze. Pac-Man had four ghosts, and these fish are stupid and erratic. And then, just as you round a corner, they split up, box you in from both sides, and kill you.

They may be stupid and erratic, but the erratic part makes them dangerous! And unlike Pac-Man's ghosts, they can and will reverse 180 degrees at intersections, so don't count on them not being able to - that got me killed frequently. The invulnerability pills of Pac-Man, which have no equivalent here, become sorely missed.

Your only weapon here is a pair of paint rollers which you can ride across their respective segments of the maze and crush these fish, but they'll respawn quickly, and the more you do this, the smarter they get about avoiding you. Pretty soon it gets nearly impossible, and the main value of riding the rollers is the brief speed boost it gets you, but even this is risky, as the long corridor it zips you down can easily become a deathtrap if one fish swims to the other side of it.

And to make things worse, a mouse will eventually start roaming the maze and "make trax" for you to clean up. You'll have to catch it - often an infuriating task - and paint over everywhere it's been before you finish the level.

On my best run I made it to level 3 and almost finished it, scoring just over 10,000 points, which is probably not that impressive, but lasting even this long felt more like luck than skill.

GAB rating: Average. I appreciate a challenge, but Crush Roller does little to excite or innovate, and its subtractive design just feels unfair. Play Ms. Pac-Man or Lady Bug instead.