Joust

The Good
When I first heard of Joust, I wondered what the term could mean. Well, according to the dictionary, Joust is a combat with lances between two mounted knights. And that's what the game is about. The basic idea is that you control a jouster who is riding an ostrich. You need to fly by repeatedly flapping your wings and colliding with knights who are riding buzzards to knock them out, but as long as you are slightly higher than them. If you fail to do this, you lose a life. Failing to flap your wings will result in you falling down on the nearest platform or in the burning lava.

If you manage to knock the buzzards out, you will receive some points. However, if you collide with their head instead, the buzzard drops an egg, which you should pick up before a knight hatches out of them and goes off riding a buzzard. On later waves, there are two more dangers: the deadly pterodactyl who cannot be beaten unless you hit its weak spot, and the hand that comes out of the lava and tries to grab a hold of you.

so that's the object of the game. The NES version of Joust remains faithful to the original coin-op game: same sound, same graphics, and same gameplay. The only difference between the two versions is that all of the characters in the game, including the jouster, are big that you won't be confused at which character that you are actually controlling.

Unlike other earlier games from the 80s, you cannot shoot the buzzard-mounted knights above, below, or ahead of you. Instead, you have to press the "flap" button to fly up and collide with these knights to destroy them. But whether you are successful really depends on the height and speed of you ostrich, and gaining speed allows you to fly higher, and the chance of killing a buzzard is higher. If you go too slow, you will not fly as high and it is likely that you could die.

The Bad
Nothing.

The Bottom Line
If you have the really old version of Joust, made for PC Booter, then you're out of luck. The game will run too fast since this is a timer-related game. If you want to play this game, then play the game on other consoles like the NES. If you have read my reviews of the games that were made by Williams, you would have noticed that these games were for the C64, made by Atarisoft. This company has made some great conversions of Williams' coin-op games, but they forget to port Joust over. Tsk, tsk.

Rating: ***

The Good
It is a rare port that makes you go back and double-check the original to see what is different, and Joust is one of those ports. Shadowsoft so nailed the Lynx port of Joust that at the time (1992) I actually found myself finding a local Joust to compare them. The graphics are a perfect interpretation of the originals. The gameplay is spot-on. The sound is 100% faithful to the arcade coin-op (it is probably digitized from the arcade coin-op).

Everything just feels like the original.

The Bad
Nothing. A cliche, I know, but there really isn't anything to dislike about the game whatsoever.

The Bottom Line
A classic game for any oldskool gamer, Lynx owners have it especially lucky that one of the best ports is for their system.

The Good
To be honest I never played the game in the arcades, but I did play virtually every version ever available for every other platform :-)

Regardless, the original PC version is pretty good. Decent graphics, decent controls and the same basic gameplay make this game just plain addictive - a helluva time burner in a time where the best you could do was Digger and Alley Cat. I used to sped hours at a time playing these three games, and they were FUN.

The Bad
Sound (or lack thereof) is, well, lacking. Also the addictiveness wears off rather shortly.

The Bottom Line
A conversion from one of the classic Atari arcade games. A classic, nothing more, nothing less.