Playing Jack the Nipper 2 (C64)

Entry posted by Cybergoth April 15, 2009

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Hi there!

Oh no! The horror! The horror! Jack the Nipper is back!

Well, even though I remember playing it for quite some time, I never really liked Jacks first game. In fact, I ended up totally ignoring the sequel because of it. So now I'm taking a chance to see wether I was missing something...

Well, like most of Gremlins games at the time (e.g. Auf Wiedersehen Monty), this game contains a large map made of 50-60 scrolling screens worth of adventurous gameplay with an emphasis on jumping and running.

In this large jungle scenery Jack can also throw stones or use blowpipes, but these are only for the casual spots requiring some self-defense.

Background graphics, sprite animations and music/sfx are all pretty good, especially considering that the whole game is a single load.

The main mission is doing 10 naughty deeds. After playing 2-3 rounds I realized that there's no way I'll ever figure out any of these riddles on my own. They all work like "pick an item on this screen and use it somehow on a screen at the other end of the map". Since I already failed in plain identifying the things I picked up, I choose to use a list describing what to do along with a map

Just performing the required actions with all this help still is a hard enough task: Tonight I only managed to execute the first three things of the list :ponder:

Greetings,

Manuel

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Cybergoth 300

Posted April 16, 2009

I hate this game. Not in a love/hate kind of way, just plain hate. I hate it so much that I refuse playing it even one more second.

While I'm at it, I hate pixel perfect jumps as well.

And I hate maps that make backtracking next to impossible through their layout, combined with gameplay requiring tons of it.

How this was even considered "playable" back in the day is beyond me.

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another similar Gremlin game in the form of "NorthStar", but first it'll continue with something easier.