DoctorSpuds Reviews Things - Jawbreaker (Tigervision)

RSS Bot · November 27, 2018

Anybody who grew up in the 1990’s remembers Tiger Electronics, the creators of numerous LCD games of varying quality, and of the Game Com. Tiger had a video game division that went by the name of Tigervision who ported many different games from different publishers onto the 2600 and the more popular home computers of the time, they are also responsible for the game I’m reviewing today. Jawbreaker was originally programmed by Sierra On-Line, but the job of porting it to the 2600 fell to Tigervision and I must say that they did an amazing job of it. This is a Pac-Man clone, plain and simple, but the simple fact that they managed to make Pac-Man original again is frankly incredible. You are a pair of green chompers chopping your way around nine horizontal rows of dots, the titular jawbreakers, that take the place of ghosts, will emerge from either side of the screen and move horizontally through the rows, as is standard in any Pac-Man game it is your job to collect all the dots. You may be asking however “where’s the maze? How do you avoid the jawbreakers?” Well the answer to that is simple; there are openings in every wall –with the exception of the topmost and bottommost walls- that constantly move back and forth allowing you to slip through the wall to evade pursuing ‘breakers or even slip behind one (Unlike in Pac-Man these guys will turn around). Of course there is a power pellet that appears every once in a while that makes you briefly invincible as is standard in all of these Pac-Man type games. Once you clear the screen a cutscene plays of your chompers gettin’ cleaned with a giant toothbrush because remember kids’ dental hygiene is important. Overall this is a fast fun game with fluid controls and gives you a perfect ‘one more time’ feeling right at the bottom of your soul. Sadly, Since this IS a Tigervision game the prices aren’t going to be very fair, I was lucky enough to find one of these in the wild for 20$, but on Ebay you’re looking at 30$ for the cheapest copy(they do come up for sale fairly often so you’ll probably find a good deal eventually) which is far too much, somebody is actually asking 99.95$ + shipping for loose copy, that’s just silly. This game is on the cusp of the Collector’s Zone, if you can find one for twenty bucks or less then I’d encourage you to get it, but any more is too much.

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