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Jan 29th, 2007 at 02:43:42 - Toe Jam & Earl 2: Panic on Funkotron (GEN) |
Further play of this game has led me to think that maybe the levels leave a bit to be desired, in terms of design. There are moments when the player is expected to stand on top of a floating bubble and ride it to certain platforms that are unreachable by any other methods. The part that I found problematic was that one such bubble near the end of the second level failed to regenerate. Seeing that the destination of said bubble was the only territory I had not explored on this map, it seems clear that this reclusive bubble would have been the key to capturing the last two earthlings needed to pass on to the next level.
I noticed a relationship in the game's reward structure that was somewhat helpful. The amount of points rewarded for capturing a given Earthling is 100 times the amount of jars needed to catch it. For example, the little blonde girl who taunts the player with "Nya-na-na-na-nyeah-nyeah!" needs to be hit with 2 jars to be captured, and the player is awarded 200 points. More points are awarded for the capture of the big guy with the jackhammer, who has the ability to temporarily incapacitate the player's avatar. This makes for a pretty clear, fair point system.
I'm really a big fan of the interface for choosing special moves like Funk Scan or Panic Button. Usually, incidents where I've had to make use of these functions are pretty heated, which means it's nice that hitting "start" to bring up the menu to choose them also pauses the game and lets you take a breather before getting back into the fray. However, this does detract from the challenging aspect of the game, because it temporarily removes time as a factor in the player's decision-making process.
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Jan 29th, 2007 at 02:26:46 - Toe Jam & Earl 2: Panic on Funkotron (GEN) |
I remember playing this game at a friend's house back in grade school, and I thought it was all kinds of rad. I thought that the gameplay was pretty simple, being a side-scroller, which is pretty typical of the era. Of course, the simplicity of the gameplay belies the complexity of the game as a whole. For example, this game has plenty of minigames, such as Jam-out, in which the player presses the A, B and C buttons in the order and rhythm demonstrated on the screen. This provided a nice break from the usual (sometimes a little monotonous) action of chasing Earthlings around the planet Funkotron and capturing them in jars.
One of the elements I love about this game is that it has a very distinctive personality. The characters demonstrate a (very caricatured) sense of early-90s urban style (such as the character Toejam and his Flava-Flav style) and the artistic style of the sprites and sceneries are very cartoony and weird. The downside of this is that the colors are a little obnoxious and the busy scenery is distracting.
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macuna has been with GameLog for 17 years, 9 months, and 27 days |
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