Reviews

Possibly the worst game ever created, shocking collision detection, dire.

This has to be one of the most irritatingly awful games ever written. There are some nice graphics that look as though they might belong to an interesting platformer with a small number of varied levels.

However, by virtue of finicky controls, awful collision detection, and a just generally unfair sense of play, it kills you off for the slightest deviation from the correct path.

Thor should be ashamed of themselves for unleashing this on an undeserving games market, although at least distribution of the game and its two unnecessary sequels is mercifully denied.

1984 Thor Computer (UK)
by Chris and Steve Kerry

The playability is awful, no doubt about it. It takes endless hours of practice to know exactly where you can step on. But when you know where to land your feet, the game moves along. So if you like challenges this could be just perfect for you, but be prepared to be very patient! The graphics are quite nice and cute, full of colour. If the programmer was more careful this could turn out quite different.

Horrendous platform game inspired by the eponymous tale, in which you control Jack trying to rob the Giant of his gold.

Badly drawn sprites move along a handful of poorly designed screens with garish colors. The whole experience does not retain any of the precision and finesse which is the backbone of a solid game of this genre.

There's almost to be glad that this piece of garbage is not available anymore due to copyright reasons.

I'm so bad at this game, I'm probably barely qualified to review it!

Collision detection is indeed awful and makes the game seem terminally unfair.

The path up the beanstalk seems to be so unforgiving in that if you deviate a pixel off it, you fall to your death. Problem is that the actual safe path is only loosely correlated with the beanstalk graphic on the screen. As a result, you may find that you begin to remember the real invisible path after you have fallen to your death about twenty times. And does it take a long time to fall? It wouldn't be so bad if losing a life didn't take an eternity.

I score this a two though, in recognition that it does have some pleasing graphics and potentially it could have been quite a good game, were it not for the poor implementation.

Also, the XOR sprite drawing mode seems to work well when climbing up the beanstalk, well if we can't have masked sprites that is.

But the fact that you can even die on the ground, just by walking towards the distant mountains - unforgivable. :)

Not totally rubbish though it is well far from good with its poor gameplay. This could have be a good quality game if only for that. A lot of time is needed for this game though you are not going to spend a lot of time on this anyway. A pity as the pretty graphics deserve much more attention.