Jumpman: Won! (plus Jumpman #1)

 

 

I did it! I've beaten Jumpman's final and toughest skyscraper. I can't say I completed it quite fairly - I used five save states here in accordance with my rule on one save per half hour of earnest play - but with all of Jumpman's nasty tricks and occasionally broken platforming mechanics, I can't say its challenge was totally fair either.

 

The advanced tier spans levels 19 through 30, and I noted that my save states were on levels 21, 22, 23, 24, and 26. I refused to save unless I had just beaten a level without losing any lives, expecting I'd need as many as I could stockpile, and I was right. Only levels 20, 25, and 26 were easy enough to beat on a single life immediately following a perfect run of the previous one. Once I had reached 26 with a full set of lives, plus one bonus life from scoring points, I was able to finish the remaining five on that set, concluding with an ultimate "Grand Puzzle" which I survived on my last life, but didn't exactly solve.

Prior to this posting, there were no complete playthroughs of Jumpman in its original Atari incarnation, only of the Commodore 64 port. And so, I decided to record a playthrough of the full 30 floor Grand Loop, using save states freely, and with no attempt to conceal them.

 

 

 

Here's commentary on each of the advanced levels, which are all over the place difficulty-wise. For each level, I've also counted the number of tries it took me to complete it during this grand loop run. Note that during the grand loop run, I had already beaten all of the levels at least once before, and levels 19-26 several times each, so this count does not reflect all the failures sustained figuring out each level for the first time.

 

 

 

Level 19's gimmick is a moving ladder. Nothing terribly tricky here - stray bullets make your life a bit more dangerous, and to be honest you're much safer on the ladder than you are near the edges of the screen.

Tries: 1

Level 20 is a cruel puzzle where the terrain shifts and reshapes as you pick up the bombs. Getting them in the wrong order can easily render the level impossible, and the right order can only be learned through trial and error.

The ropes hanging from the center-right girder are a source of much peril too.

Tries: 2

 

 

 

Level 21 is a pretty standard affair of ropes, ladders, bullets, and disappearing girders. A lot of action near the edges of the screen makes the offscreen bullets especially dangerous, and ropes so close together mean trouble for Jumpman's collision detection.

Tries: 1

I hate level 22. You are dogged by freezing projectiles which can't be outran or outmaneuvered. Getting hit by one is practically inevitable, and the most common outcome is death by homing bullet. The second most common outcome is that you get re-frozen by another one, prolonging your paralysis, and then death by homing bullet. Sometimes you thaw in time to survive.

 

I attribute my eventual victory here to luck. The frost projectiles were very cooperative in taking avoidable trajectories. On my thirty first attempt.

Tries: 31

Level 23 is fun. As soon as you collect a bomb, an evil Jumpman starts following, and shadows every move you make until he catches up and kills you. The next two bombs spawn more evil Jumpmen, until a line of three follow in pursuit. Bombs also tend to destroy your way up, though Jumpman's hoist ability is not to be forgotten or underestimated.

 

Once again, this is not a level you can expect to beat on your first attempt, but once you understand what's going on here there are several solutions. Ultimately you need to traverse the whole level without backtracking too much. One trick is to spend the first several seconds pacing back and forth to buy time before touching the first bomb, but don't do this too long or they'll spawn right behind you. The Atari only has so much RAM available to keep track of your moves, after all. Another solution is to go for the top bombs first and work your way downward, but you'll need to plan carefully so that you don't touch anyone going up on your way down.

Arggh! So many ropes! So many bullets! So many chances to slip and die! During my first advanced run, level 24 gave me even more trouble than 22 did. And yet somehow, during my grand loop run, I beat it on my second attempt. I doubt I could repeat this miracle if I tried, and I don't intend to.

Tries: 2

Level 25 has a fog of war concealing everything, so tread lightly. There are at least three possible layouts here, and all of them will force you to make a few leaps of faith, but once you know the layouts, this one isn't too bad. At least there aren't any moving elements here.

Tries: 1

Level 26 is another combat zone, but this time it's a cinch. Evil Jumpmen patrol the ladders haphazardly and shoot at you. You can shoot back too, but it's better if you don't, because they'll just respawn right where the bomb is, and you don't want that.

Tries: 1

Ultimate fun time with killer robots in level 27! They're aggressive. They're unpredictable. And they're faster than you. For extra fun, try jumping over an approaching robot, only to have it halt or reverse its direction as it passes under you and kills you on landing!

By some miracle, I managed to beat this without losing a life, which wasn't really necessary at this late stage of the game. It took quite a few tries, and some very fortunate cooperation on the part of the robots during the successful attempt.

Tries: 9

 

 

 

Level 28 alternates between making the bombs invisible and making the level invisible each time you collect a bomb. It's not too difficult as long as you follow this rule: before collecting any bomb, have a plan to collect the next one.

From here on, the try counts will be higher. Being so close to the end of the game, I didn't need to keep replaying these levels again and again as I did the earlier ones, and therefore was less familiar with them during my grand loop run.

 

Tries: 6

Level 29 has a downward elevator, and a design that encourages you to collect bombs at the bottom first and work your way upward. Bombs on the bottom floor can only be reached by the elevator. Aggressive bullets and very little maneuvering room make for a difficult stage.

Tries: 7

Finally, one last grand puzzle! By now you probably don't care about scoring the jackpot and just want to finish the game, as I did when I reached this for the first time, in which case beating the level isn't hard at all. But with a save state to fall back on, I tried to see if I could discover Jumpman's final mystery.

Playing it normally, you may notice that the rectangle moving around the stage, which normally kills you, changes color at a point. Touch it when it does - and you must be standing in a very specific part of the stage to survive what happens next, and you're teleported to the real final stage.

 

 

And this last stage is the ultimate in trial and error. As if it didn't take enough trial and error to figure out how to reach this secret zone, being in the wrong spot while teleported will kill you, and death here means the end of the game. And if that wasn't bad enough, only four of the bombs here can be taken safely. The rest just destroy the girder below you, killing Jumpman and ending the game. Trial and error is the only way to deduce which ones to take, and each error, be it teleporting into the stage wrong, collecting one of the wrong bombs, or getting hit by a bullet means ending the game and re-completing the whole advanced tier of stages again if you want to try again (and aren't using save states).

Tries: 12

GAB rating: Above average. It pains me to deny Jumpman entry to the ivory deck. A far cry from the sluggish, monochrome BASIC Dunjonquests from the Freeman/Connelley era of Epyx, Jumpman is fast, colorful, challenging, endlessly inventive, and controls responsively and almost perfectly. But almost isn't good enough in a game so unforgiving.

I didn't mind the merciless deathtraps, the trial and error gameplay, the cheap deaths from stray bullets, or even the occasional unreasonably difficult level. That's what extra lives are for, and Jumpman is generous enough with them that you could overcome all that through determination and skill - at first the lives mean seven chances to figure out each level, and as you gradually master each of them, they come to mean seven allowances for slip-ups and otherwise unpreventable deaths.

 

But the tipping point came from death by control hiccups, by far the most common one being of those damned ropes that Jumpman keeps slipping from. I feel my level by level commentary critically understates just how bad it is - with so many deaths caused by collision detection problems on ropes and ladders, I spent far too much time having to restart and replay previously beaten levels, which quickly got unenjoyable. I think that without these control problems and everything else being the same, I could have finished intermediate in half the time it took, and possibly even beaten the advanced tier fairly (that final secret room notwithstanding).

For what it's worth, I played the cartridge-based sequel Jumpman Junior for a bit, and found that it did not have the rope problems of its predecessor.

I also played the more popular Commodore 64 port briefly, playing the advanced levels as far as I could, and found these differences:

• Loading takes nearly two minutes, compared to the 20 seconds needed on Atari.
• The title screen animation is completely different.
• Sprites are multi-colored.
• Animated level transitions are missing, and replaced instead with a brief loading screen showing the level's name.
• The moving ladder in level 19 is shorter and has a wild zig-zagging pattern.
• Bullets sometimes fly diagonally at you from the corners.
• Level 20 has some tweaks to make it a bit fairer, such as girders that disappear in front of you rather than underneath you.
  
• Jumpman's hoisting hitbox is a bit tighter, which renders some level solutions nonviable.
• When getting frozen in level 22, you thaw out MUCH faster. I beat it on my first try.
  
• There can be up to seven evil Jumpmen following you in level 23.
• Level 25 does not have a fog of war, and instead simply makes everything invisible until you touch it, making things much more difficult.
• The cool game over animation where the level collapses around you is missing.
  

 

 

 

 

Perhaps the biggest thing, though, is that like Jumpman Junior, the rope issues are mostly fixed. It's still possible to fall from them by touching the joystick too soon, but those deaths felt like my fault rather than a fault of the engine. Would I have rated Jumpman better if I had played the Commodore 64 version instead? I suspect I would, but can't say for certain. I generally play the most original incarnation available, and in Jumpman's case, that was the Atari version, whose rope collision detection soured me just enough that I can't quite say I enjoyed my time here.

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There's also a beta version called Jumpman #1, which I tried. It's obviously an unfinished game - there's a high score board that you can't ever put your own score on, the visuals and controls are unpolished, Jumpman's falling intolerance is somehow even worse, and his wild pratfall isn't programmed yet; he just falls to the bottom of the screen and turns into a stone cross.

 

But the set of levels, of which there are six, are for the most part quite different from anything you see in the final product.

 

 

Level 1 feels like an early version of Jumpman's introductory stage. Getting bombs in the wrong order will destroy the ladders and leave you stranded in the upper half, which wasn't a possibility in the final version.

 

 

 

Level 2 has no obvious analog to the final product. Here, bombs will destroy ladder segments and even girders, making it necessary to find a sequence that allows collecting them all.

Level 3 is where things start to get hilariously unfair. Bombs will radically alter the layout of the stage, and it's very easy to make things impossible. An early version of the freezing projectile appears here as well, but instead of freezing you it just slows you down, and only while you're inside its hitbox.

Level 4 bears some resemblance to Jumpman's penultimate stage with the descending elevator, but the final product has been heavily modified if it is indeed based on this. As with other stages, the bombs can really screw you up. Jumpman's shortened fall tolerance hurts you a lot here too.

Level 5 is obviously the basis of that intermediate stage with the exploding jumps, which are seen here too. Once again, the stage is more unforgiving than the final product (which itself was one of the least forgiving stages in the final game) thanks to even more bomb effects on the landscape.

Finally, level 6 is a combat stage, and seems like it may be a very early concept of what would become the dragon level.

 

I haven't seen any footage on Youtube of a complete playthrough, so I made one. Save states were used liberally here.

Game 211: Jumpman

You got I Wanna Be the Guy'd, dude.

 

 

This was what a friend said as I demoed Jumpman for the Atari 400, and got brained by a falling girder within the first few seconds of starting intermediate difficulty. A pretty apt comparison, actually, even if the later fangame is much more fully realized of what TV Tropes calls Platform Hell. It's got unfairly difficult deathtraps. It's got emergent slapstick comedy. It's got constantly changing rules. It's got almost unrelenting difficulty. It's got homages to classic arcade games like Donkey Kong and Space Invaders. In one level, Jumpman even pulls a very IWBTG-like move of having Donkey Kong barrels rolling around the stage and occasionally rolling up the ladders.

Being released in 1983 well before Super Mario Bros. and its followers codified the (often unfairly) difficult 8-bit platformer, Jumpman nevertheless parodies, deconstructs, abuses, and subverts conventions of the nascent genre in astonishingly creative ways, featuring 30 levels and a new gimmick in most of them.

 

 

Although Jumpman obviously invites comparisons to Donkey Kong - the title itself a reference to Mario's initial moniker in its NA regional release - it even more strongly recalls Miner 2049er, almost to the point where I am certain this was a major influence. When I reviewed that game for the 1982 phase, I noted its greater emphasis on platforming, puzzles, gimmicks, gadgets, and its ten levels, greatly expanded from Donkey Kong's four. Jumpman has all this but even more so.

 

 

Rather than having an end goal to reach, Jumpman places bombs everywhere for you to collect before moving onto the next, often changing the landscape or triggering events as you gather them, sometimes in ways that can strand you or render the level state nonviable if collected in the wrong order. There's both a big puzzle element and a harsh trial and error one as you gradually discover and perfect the solution to each level.

Thankfully, Jumpman doesn't expect you to beat all 30 levels in a sitting. They are divided into three tiers of difficulty, each of which may be tackled and completed independently. The first eight constitute beginner, the next ten intermediate, and the final twelve advanced. For the truly masochistic, a "grand loop" mode does indeed challenge you to finish the entire game on a single set of lives.

I was able to beat beginner and intermediate modes fairly, although intermediate tested my resolve. Jumpman gives you a seemingly generous seven lives, with the potential to earn a few extras by scoring points, but they don't last long. With each new level that I reached for the first time, I effectively had up to seven chances to figure it out, minus one for each screw-up or unlucky pratfall suffered along the way in the previously conquered ones. I had to restart to the level with the falling girders dozens of times. And yet with each replay, I got better at the levels I had beaten, was able to beat once baffling stages more and more consistently, and kept getting further and further into the campaign until eventually I finished level 18.

Level 1 serves its purpose as an introductory stage with all of the basic mechanics that will be seen throughout the game.

The innocuous looking girder on the bottom floor illustrates two of Jumpman's idiosyncrasies.

The first is that platforms can be climbed. This is crucial to quite a few levels, as simply touching a girder, even in mid-air, will cause Jumpman to hoist himself up, and mastering this will allow you to reach platforms that seem out of his reach.

The second is that Jumpman has no tolerance for ledge drops at all. He can survive a reasonable fall when jumping, but the lemming march will kill at an altitude of more than a pixel. It's distressingly easy to die by accident this way, either by forgetting about this limitation, or by slipping off an edge after a narrow jump or maneuver.

This first level also introduces the recurring hazard of stray bullets, which are slow and infrequent here, but become a real nuisance later on. Among Jumpman's most unfair deaths are when bullets strike you from offscreen with barely any warning - you can hear the bang, but have no time to react or perhaps nowhere safe to move to quickly enough.

 

Level 2 has killer robots, who mercifully stay put until you collect a bomb. Each one collected causes them to move to a new location and stay there until the next is retrieved. Nothing terribly difficult as long as you stay out of their way - they will not pursue you deliberately. Yet.

Level 3 has randomly falling bombs (do not collect these), but more importantly, collecting the normal bombs will remove segments of the level. For the first time, completing the level can be made easier or more difficult depending on the order you collect them in, and the optimal sequence is unknowable without playing through it multiple times beforehand.

 

The rope here is climbed downward rather than upward, and the distinction can be told from the pixels that extend past the top of the girder it hangs from.

Level 4 is fairly easy and features a unique form of stray bullet which won't kill you instantly, but instead compels you to jump in a random direction which may or may not become a fatal leap.

Level 5 has a roost of vampire bats who will begin to awaken once you start collecting bombs, and flit around the level in your general direction. They aren't fast, but evading them forever is impossible and jumping over them is difficult. Their AI, which is slightly more intelligent than the stray bullets, can be manipulated to make your life easier.

The top bomb here opens a pit directly below it, making for a nasty deathtrap should you attempt to grab it by jumping directly up from the girder below it.

 

Level 6 has Space Invaders, and replaces your jump with a gun which may be fired in eight directions. You don't need to jump, thankfully, and this stage is very easy. I beat it multiple times without even realizing that you could shoot.

Level 7 is dubbed "Grand Puzzle." Here, you don't need to collect all of the bombs to finish, but will score 500 points for each of the four bombs on the top two girders. How do you reach them? It's a puzzle. And you probably won't solve it on your first attempt.

 

Level 8 concludes the beginner tier, and features an incomplete level which populates itself with additional girders, ladders, ropes, and bombs as you collect what's already there. Here there are both upward and downward ropes, the former of which are a frequent cause of grief throughout the game, as dodgy collision detection concerning them can make Jumpman lose his grip and fall to his death.

I didn't need to master this particular level, as when you beat it, its set of levels is complete. Hence I could power through it once with a stock of remaining lives and had little reason to replay it.

Cleared the easiest skyscraper.

It took me a few tries to clear Beginner, but I managed without much overall difficulty. Intermediate is another story.

As mentioned, the intermediate tier begins with malevolent scaffolding that falls on you, and you can't reasonably predict where, or react quickly enough when it does. To make matters worse, the debris on the ground from the falling girders presents a tripping hazard of a sort, as "dropping" from an elevation more than a pixel is deadly, and there are stray bullets too. With enough replays - and you'll be replaying this level a LOT if you play through the intermediate tier fairly - you'll eventually memorize the falling patterns and find a safe path through the level.

 

Level 10 just gets even more evil. The gimmick here is that jumping causes an explosion beneath Jumpman's feet, but that's almost inconsequential compared to the fact that collecting bombs in the wrong order can make the stage nearly unwinnable by placing new girders in your way. In this screenshot, the lower-right bomb is covered by one which wasn't there previously, which can now only be removed by tediously blasting it with your jumping explosions, a task made dangerous by the stray bullets.

Again, with replays, you'll find an optimal bomb-collecting sequence which avoids problems like that. That said, this is one of many levels from now on where Jumpman has an annoying tendency to get "stuck" on ladders, grabbing them without being right in their center and unable to climb them or do anything but jump away, possibly to his death, or get hit by a stray bullet.

Level 11 has bombs that randomly move away as you approach, and also stray bullets. There's a potential for an extremely annoying experience, but this is to be honest one of the easiest levels in this tier.

 

Level 12 has three robots patrolling the area who move somewhat randomly but trend toward pursuing your location. It's difficult to just jump over one, and with bad luck and/or bad planning they may box you into a nigh-inescapable situation. Unpredictable behavior may also cause you to jump right into a robot instead of over it. They can't cross gaps, fortunately. I've replayed this one quite a few times, and usually lost a life or two, but on occasion everything would go perfectly, the robots would stay out of my way, and I'd clear the level without a hitch.

 

Level 13 features falling hailstones which bounce left or right randomly as they land on platforms and ladders. Climbing the ladders on the sides isn't much of a problem when you realize that once a hailstone bounces to its side, it will stay in its downward trajectory until it hits the bottom, making the ladders fairly safe except near the top. Negotiating the central area is dicier - you'll just have to play with Gaussian distribution to figure out where you're most likely to be safe, and even if you play the odds right there's no guarantee of survival.

 

Level 14 gave me so much trouble, for so long. The joystick button now, instead of jumping, hurls javelins, which is a cool change of pace. There's only one bomb, one linear winding path downward to reach it, and dragons, which run the path in the opposite direction, must be slain with perfectly thrown javelins. Throw one too late, though, and it will sail right over the dragon's head, and now you're wyrm food because the dragons move just as fast as you and you can't possibly retreat far enough to make the requisite distance.

Even when I got the timing down, I ran into a problem on the platform second from the bottom - the dragons just respawn so quickly that there's barely enough time to reach and descend the last ladder, and when you do, no way to reach the bomb!

I noticed that after killing several dragons, the terrain started to level a bit. Was this a sign that the dragons are finite, and perhaps that once the girders are totally flat, they'll stop spawning? Nope, it wasn't. They keep coming.

I stumbled on the solution by accident. You can jump here after all. Just hold up and hit the fire button to jump straight up. With correct timing, you'll jump over a charging dragon, and can proceed onward to the bomb.

Level 15 is another "Grand Puzzle," and here, to score maximum points, you must figure out how to pilfer each of the valuable treasures without being killed by the trap walls. Once again, the solution is deduced from careful observation and trial and error The level can also be finished by ignoring the treasures and collecting bombs, but that's no fun.

Moving platforms and stray bullets await you in level 16. This one's a bit of a breather, but you can still be killed by unlucky bullets while climbing ladders. Or by forgetting that Jumpman can't fall, or realizing too late that he doesn't move with the platforms automatically.

 

Level 17 has three dragons that hone in on your direction right from the start. The manual claims that every stage can be beaten without dying once, but I can't see how that's possible here, even with save states. Climb up the ladder and they ascend and kill you. Don't climb up the ladder and they swoop right at you and kill you. The dragons can't descend at all, except for wrapping around from the top of the screen to the bottom. Thankfully, there are only two levels left in the intermediate tier, and I was able to eventually reach this with enough lives left to power through it and the last one.

 

 

Finally, level 18 brings on the barrels and lots of ropes. Jumpman's troubled relationship with rope collision detection is among the greatest hazard here. The barrels and bullets are unpredictable, but so is whether or not Jumpman climbs up the ropes he touches, or slips from them and dies. As with levels 8 and 17, beating this one was mainly a matter of reaching it with enough lives to spare.

As of this post, I've beaten more than half of the twelve advanced levels, but not entirely without the use of save states. My next post will cover them and summarize my thoughts on this game.