#102: Sküljagger: Revolt of the Westicans

SKULL!

This game has quite the title. It sounds like it means something, a sequel or a movie tie-in or something. But I've never heard of a Skuljagger or of a Westican. I have no clue what kind of game this is going to be. The opening music is pretty high quality though, so it has that going for it right off the hop.

Ahoy matey!

Ok, it turns out to be a platformer and I'm a pirate of some kind. There was a lead-in plot screen so you'd think I'd know what was going on... But I don't. I know Skuljagger is searching for a sword of some kind, but I don't know who Skuljagger is. Am I Skuljagger? I already have a sword. But maybe there's a cooler sword... I don't care if I'm Skuljagger or not, I want the cooler sword!

????????

I picked up some grapes and when I hit a button that presumably ate the grapes I turned into a giant purple ball. You can see my limbs trying to escape from my prison. But I seem to be invincible and kill anything I touch when in the ball... It's like a weird, slow starman.

There were some other fruits I could pick up, which actually seemed to be flavoured gum. Orange let me spit bombs. Cherry let me fly, I think. It let me blow a big bubble which made me float but it quickly popped. I don't know if it was just me blowing too hard into the bubble or if I hit something or what. I never found another cherry to test with.

The platformer movement actually worked out pretty smooth. The sound in game was a good quality. This game felt like a game designed to use the SNES hardware as opposed to some of the recent drek that was just a sloppy port of an old game.

I didn't beat the first level because the game actually seemed reasonably hard. I had the problem that I kept needing to make blind jumps and landing on enemies I couldn't see. Those are the sorts of things that are annoying when you're playing a game once but if I'd rented this as a kid I'm sure I could have learned where to jump and this would have been a good game to play.

Looking the game up on Wikipedia it sounds like the game came with an 80 page comic/manual! Which presumably explained that Skuljagger was the bad guy and I'm a Westican trying to revolt out from under his slavery. And it has a password system. This sounds great!

Rating: A