Hi there!

Here comes one of the dozen comic license games from Infogrames:

Infogrames did tons of games based on French comics in their early days, like Isnogud, Passengers on the Wind, Quest for the Time Bird, Lee Enfield. Most of which were horrible (the games, not the comics!). Still, it was only a matter of time until they would do a Tintin game.

This is the only one of them I dared touching, since I liked the comics in my childhood (which are called "Tim & Struppi" in Germany). Of course Infogrames blew it as well.

As someone rightfully commented on lemon64 for the game, a more appropriate name for it would be "Tintin tries to get to the moon, at which point we've ran out of game ideas". Indeed, the game is just about the actual flight, which is broken up into 2 different action scenes that alternate 5 times.

The first one is dead simple, it has the player navigating the ship through an asteroid field while collecting red and yellow bubbles.

The second part plays on a 6 screen side-view within the rocket (which surprisingly has a different layout in each level ), where Tintin is running around extinguishing fires, defusing bombs and knocking out a saboteur.

Now, the main challenge of the game was finding a crack where someone better than the Infogrames programming team managed to fix both the game AND the end-sequence. One game breaking bug that I didn't see fixed in any of the cracks is like the one from Impossible Mission for the 7800: The game occasionally places a bomb to defuse on a ledge without a ladder to reach it...

Well, circumventing this bug with savestates I beat four or five different cracks of the game until the disk from "Success" finally displayed the end screen:

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another Infogrames game in the form of "North & South", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel