The game I played most this week: JetPac II

Action: JetPac II

Way back in my Commodore 64 days, there was this cartridge-based game (one of the first games I ever had) called Jupiter Lander.  The idea was to navigate your spacecraft down winding caverns and land safely, relying on gravity and thrusters to slow your descent and move left and right.  It was crude and got old fairly quickly, but the effect was fun while it lasted.

Apparently games like this have become popular again (where else) in the world of simple Web games, which has led to the creation of JetPac II from MadBeetle.  MadBeetle has produced a few other games as well, including a few simple puzzle creations and a slot car racing title.  While they haven't produced anything terribly fancy or sophisticated, their games are quite playable and usually have decent graphics and audio.

JetPac II is incredibly simple.  All you do is fly your character around a horizontally scrolling cave, dodging various types of barriers and and picking up gems.  The character's forward thrust is constant and not controlled by the player: all you can really do is apply downward thrust to move your character upward periodically to maneuver and overcome gravity.  If you hit anything other than a collectible object, you'll start spinning until the auto-correct mechanism kicks in. 

There's really not much more to it than that.   The game does have stages to complete instead of one endless level, and there's also an interesting selectable mode with the cave itself moves up and down freely during play.  Still, the game's only real goal is to see how long you can stay alive and rack up the highest score. 

 JetPac II has good (albeit very simple) graphics.  All objects in the cave, including your character, are very well conceived and stand out against the parallax scrolling background of the cave.  Your character, the "MadBeetle," is also very sharply drawn, even if it is rather odd-looking.  The trailing thrust effect (it first appears reddish orange and then fades to black) also looks very good.  And the sound, while a bit minimalist, seems to match the rest of the game in terms of quality. 

The game sells for $4.95, which I consider a reasonable price.  Depending on your tastes, the game's graphics might be enough to overlook the fact that all you do throughout the game is press a single button.  In fact, JetPac II is in may ways much cruder than Lunar Lander, which came out well over 20 years ago. 

The ideal platform for this game is the Smartphone, since those machines have limited input functionality, especially during longer game sessions.  On a Pocket PC, the game is still fun, but might leave you wondering why they didn't do more with the idea.

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