Thursday, April 11, 2024

A to Z Challenge: Joust

 Like I mentioned before, a lot of the early video games (and even some today) were pretty silly.  One of the silliest was Joust.

The concept was entirely weird:  you're a knight who pilots an ostrich-type bird.  On the screen are different levels that have teleporters on them to spawn enemy knights on birds.  You have to fly up and hit them from above; hit them from lower and you'll die.  If they die, they release an egg that you have to collect before it hatches to basically respawn the enemy.   And there's lava at the bottom that'll kill you if you fall into it.  The first couple of levels the bottom is solid but then the bottom starts shrinking to reveal the lava.  Oh, and sometimes a pterodactyl will fly around to try to kill you.

That all makes sense, right?  Yeah, not at all.  There's a quickie Robot Chicken sketch that just shows the gameplay and someone basically says, "WTF?"

Ummmm...what?!

But like a lot of these weird old games, it can be pretty fun.  We had this for the Atari...one of them.  I think there was both a 2600 and 7800 version.  Or maybe we just had the 2600 version that we played on the 7800?  Anyway, I'm not sure how far I got into it, but one of those where it was never that far.

I think there was probably an NES version or at least there is on my knockoff Gameboy thing.  

1 comment:

Alex J. Cavanaugh said...

I remember playing the arcade version but never got very far. It was a weird mix of elements though. Why would anyone joust on an ostrich?

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