The game I played most this week: Boney Boy

Tarzan?: Boney Boy

I’ve a feeling, that these days, a game like Boney Boy might offend the politically correct or hyper-sensitive. After all, it’s a game featuring a cartoonish savage named “Boney Boy,” who has a bone in his hair and wanders through a hostile jungle, swinging from ropes and jumping over monsters. And the “bone” isn’t just decorative. No sir. When Boney Boy jumps, you can make it spin to help extend the jumps and make him glide through the air. And the game’s description states that Boney Boy has a “tiny brain and a big heart.”  Ack!  I can almost see the hate mail pouring into Mobisation’s inbox even now.

Were this game released on the PC, I’d bet it would cause some sort of backlash. But since our little Pocket PC/Smartphone community is still pretty small, we probably won’t have to worry about that too much. That’s a good thing, too, because Boney Boy has a lot going for it as a full-featured platform scroller. In fact, it’s probably the best platform scroller I’ve seen since the fantastic Rayman Ultimate from a few years ago. 

The story involves a battle between your character, Boney Boy, and his evil twin, Nobone. Nobone is causing all sorts of trouble, including enchanting all the jungle animals. Your job is to navigate the game’s tricky levels and confront your evil twin. Platform games tend to have matter-of-fact plots: the real story is about jumping around, running, collecting items, killing bad guys, and interacting with the game’s dynamic environment. This is where Boney Boy really shines. Boney Boy’s graphics are easy to look at, and the 3D scrolling backgrounds are fantastic.

While the game isn’t in VGA, it almost doesn’t matter: there’s so much happening on the screen, with all the animation (collectable items and enemies are always moving, and even your character twitches a little when he’s standing still) that the game feels alive. The exceptionally smooth scrolling and the many places you can go in each level (lots of platforms, ropes to swing from, and animals that will help you jump higher) that it’s easy to just get lost in the energy of the game. Most Pocket PC platform scrollers have levels that are largely static, and as a result, they don’t really engage the player as much as they could. Boney Boy gets it right by reeling you in and getting you to care about what’s happening in the game.

Combat In Space: Space Prospector

Space Prospector is Byte@Hand’s first attempt at making a space combat game. It follows the same vein of such games as Sinistar and the old Internet game SubSpace. If you never played either of those two, you would fly your ship through 2D space, shooting enemies and collecting items. The ship itself moves constantly, so lining up shots to take out enemies and dodging bullets can sometimes be a challenge.

Space Prospector has some good things going for it: fast animation, a variety of weapons to choose from, and a terrific radar overlay that shows your position relative to all your enemies. However, the game’s graphics look like they were pulled directly from the 1980s. (The in-game menu is represented by a floppy disk, which doesn’t help things much.)  I realize that a game like this is based on a 1980s idea, but the graphics look a little cheap and don’t really match Sinistar or any other space game I remember from that era.

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Allen Gall's The Week in Games  Copyright © 2007 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.