Game Review: Jet Pac (BBC Micro, Ricochet)

While Ultimate Play The Game were best known for their isometric 3D games for the ZX Spectrum, they first made their mark with 2D action games. One of the more iconic – and one that’s still fondly remembered today – is Jet Pac, Mastertronic secured the rights to re-release it on their Ricochet range so how does this BBC Micro port hold up to the Spectrum original?

Options-A-Plenty

Firing up Jet Pac for the first time gives the player an overload of choices before you get started – certainly more than any other version of the game. After being given the core play instructions for keyboard control you’re taken to a second screen that not only gives you the choice between keyboard/joystick control and number of players but also lets you turn the sound on or off. With the influx of BBC Micros throughout schools at the time this was released, I’m sure this was a welcome option for anyone trying to sneak in a quick game in IT lessons…!

Jet Pac – First Impressions

Having played the Vic 20 and ZX Spectrum versions of this extensively I was eager to see how well it had been ported over. I’ll be honest, I was never much of a fan of Ultimate’s isometric titles so Jet Pac was the highlight of their 8 bit range for me and the one I have the fondest memories of. It’s a simple concept and puts you in control of a lone astronaut stranded on an unknown planet armed with nothing more that a jetpack and a laser for protection.

Your ship is scattered in pieces (obviously assuming you’re the pilot it might be time for a career change) so you’ve got to gather the pieces, by flying up to them and dropping them in order to build the ship back up. Once complete, collect all the fuel that drops down and do the same with them. Once the ship is fully refuelled, return to it and fly off again to the next destination.

Easier Said Than Done

All of that would be fairly straightforward, but each area is swarming with alien creatures blocking your path. While these are all relatively passive and don’t attack you directly, collision with any of them will cost you a life, you’ll drop whatever you’re carrying and you’ll be returned back to the bottom of the screen next to your ship.

If negotiating all of the creatures wasn’t difficult enough, you’ve got your own inertia to contend with so you’ve got to master the controls, concentrate on blasting a clear path to and from your ship and having lightning-quick reactions at all times.

Aliens Everywhere!

Pretty much everything is here from the Spectrum original with one minor difference… there are a lot more alien creatures than before to dodge or destroy. In itself this would make the BBC version of Jet Pac more challenging but add the somewhat unforgiving inertia which seems to just add frustration to the game rather that a novel gameplay mechanic and you’ll find yourself losing lives in rapid succession.

What should be a fun arcade platform shooter quickly becomes an annoyance instead. In fact, I was very close to giving up on this after just a few plays, yet I could spend hours on the Vic 20 and Spectrum versions. That is until I discovered something completely by accident…

Going Slo-Mo

As well as flying around in Jet Pac, you’re equipped with a laser for defence and this actually turns out to be the saviour of the game. Not just in terms of your protection, but the gameplay itself. As with the other versions, holding down fire lets out a continuous laser stream instead of pressing it repeatedly for single shots. But I discovered that this had the added side effect of slowing down the majority of the creatures on screen.

I would assume that the amount of laser fire put additional pressure on the BBC having too many objects moving on screen at the same time. The end result is that priority was given to your astronaut so you coulf still move freely at a fairly rapid pace and had a much better chance of avoiding everything on screen. While it wasn’t a perfect solution, it lifted the game up from being almost unplayable, to being a fun shooter.

Graphics and Sound

Obvious comparisons are going to be made with the other versions when it comes to the graphics and sound. While everything moves quickly and smoothly enough, I wasn’t particularly keen on the overall look of the BBC port of Jet Pac. Rather than keeping to the simple single-colour sprites of the Spectrum and Vic 20 versions, extra colour has been added but it gives everything a rather garish look to them. While I can appreciate what the developers were trying to do in enhancing the game, sometimes it’s better to just leave things as they are.

Sound is limited to quite basic sound effects in game and an incredibly irritating “tune” that loops at the end/start of each game. It’s quite safe to say that the Vic 20 beats all of the other versions hands down here but at least it’s a (small) improvement on the clicks and blips of the Spectrum version.

Overall

While this is a competent conversion of one of my all-time favourite games on the ZX Spectrum, it’s far from perfect. If it wasn’t for the slow-down bug, this would be practically unplayable but as long as you make use of that it’s still a fun game, but not the classic it deserves to be.

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