160th played so far
Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 1983
Developer: Tim and Chris Stamper
Publisher: Ultimate Play The Game
Following Galaxian and Space Harrier, we finish the shoot ’em up weekend with this game. I know it took over a week for it to go up, but we don’t generally get to play much during the week, so we have to play ahead… I blame school children that don’t automatically understand science.
Three fairly different games too. Galaxian followed the fairly basic Space Invaders format, while Space Harrier is more of a manic shooter of the type we also saw in DoDonpanchi. Jetpac (no k), in the mean time, is a side scrolling type of shooter, looking more like a platformer, except that thanks to the titular jetpack, you have more free movement.
Our Thoughts
The premise of this game is fairly simple – you need to collect rocket parts so you can build your ride home and collect fuel to power that same rocket. Once you do so, you take off to the next level, which is harder and leaves you collecting more fuel and, every few levels, a new rocket.
You use your jetpack to fly around and get to these parts, which is the easier bit. Harder is that there are aliens – initially what seem to be poisonous clouds, but that changes in later levels – moving around trying to kill you. As you die in one hit, that’s not a good thing. In many ways this games level contruction reminds me a lot of Pang without the nifty grappling hook.
This is tough. Enemies can be difficult to hit (as you fire with a laser, it’s easy for an alien to sneak under it while it’s on its way to you) and the parts you need tend to materialize in areas where you’re easily hit with enemies – a fuel tank at the edge of the screen is enough to kill you twice because of a suddenly appearing enemy.
Still, it controls well once you’re used to it. The game can feel a bit sluggish, but it seems to fit with the response times you’d expect.
Graphically, there’s little to say – functional, as you’re used to from the time. The game is colourful, with red, green, blue and purple enemies flying around, but there’s no major effects to take note of here, it’s simply functional.
Final Thoughts
Whilst I do not usually condone the shooting of cute fluffy things (I mean I can’t even eat a hollow duck-shaped lump of white chocolate without wanting to cry) this game managed to get me over this.
Just as with many games of this era it is hard. For good reason, they wanted your quarters. Nowadays this game can be found in decent shape on the internet if you ever fancy a tussle.