With a fast calculation I came up with that I’ve probably spent hundreds of hours in front of platform games developed for the Nintendo Entertainment Systems. Who can forget the golden days of the 80s with games like Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong?

I’ve always felt that it is important to keep the heritage of these games alive; most of the games have a tremendous value and usually end up on some collector’s bookshelf. To keep the spirit of the old plat formers among the masses we have to make sure that games inspired by the 80s still makes it to the consumers.

Cave Jumper is one of those new platform games with a retro look. What you instantly notice when starting the game is how similar it is to Super Mario Bros; even the main-character looks like Luigi.

In Cave Jumper you are exploring caves with your two trusty tools the pickaxe and the flashlight. The pickaxe is used to throw against your enemies. There are a number of pick axes available with different power and characteristics. The flashlight is obviously for finding your way in darkness. As in real life the flashlight requires batteries so you can’t have it on all the time, only in portions or until you find some new batteries laying around. You can also collect dynamite to uncover secret areas or blast your way forward.

Cave Jumper features over 100 levels according to the developers. All of them are set underground in caves, but have different looks. There are for example normal brown caves, or icy white caves. Even though attempts have been made to vary the levels with different colors they are still underground and in darkness. After a while you grow a bit tired of it and want to see some sky.

Graphically the game doesn’t measure up that good. It’s impossible to run the game in full screen because it gets very grainy. You are forced to play the game in a windowed mode, which eliminates some the retro feeling.

The music in Cave Jumper is actually quite catchy. A lot of the tunes have been inspired by retro games but the soundtrack never looses its charm. It would have fun with some more tracks though.

I for one think that it is good that these kinds of games hit the market, they are needed. Also it has a number of features that the developers figured out themselves, for example the flashlight and the pickaxe. Cave Jumper is a very neat game; it’s addictive and fun to play.

Requirements:
Pentium II 400 MHz
Tested on:
Pentium 4 2.4 GHz, 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon Graphics Card