Joust is truly one of the “Arcade Classics” of the early 80s. As you walked up to it in an Arcade, it had a sci-fi/fantasy concept of flying knights jousting enemies, along with co-op gameplay. It was a very original concept for the time and as I remember was always one of the most popular games in the Arcade.
The game controls are a two way joystick and a single button to flap the wings of your mount. The joystick controls your direction left-right and the flap button controls your vertical direction and speed on screen.
Gameplay consists of your knight “spawning” onto one of four platforms to start the game. As each level begins, enemy knights spawn from the platforms to do battle. To defeat your enemies, you must joust them at a higher altitude. If you are lower, you will be killed. After defeating the enemy knights, they will be turned into eggs. You must collect the eggs before they hatch and are picked up by a Buzzard.
Player one is a yellow knight flying a blue ostrich while player two is a blue knight flying on a gray stork. The enemies knights are red-Bounders, silver-Hunters and dark blue-Shadow Lords that all fly on green buzzards. A pterodactyl will appear that can only be defeated by striking it in its open mouth when the players take too much time to clear a level. There is also a hand that will grab a player from the lava at the bottom of the screen if you get too close to the it. As the levels get higher, you will have more enemies to defeat that fly faster and are more aggressive. There are bonuses on certain levels for “Team Play”, not killing the other player and also “Gladiator” for killing the other player.
Overall it’s a great game, one of my all time favorites. The controls take a bit to master but they are unique. It can be hard to get to the higher levels as there is no continue option. I learned a bit more about the game while writing this, never knew the enemy knights different classes and never realized that player 2 was riding a different mount. I feel the game plays well today and remains a lot of fun for two players when working together, even though the graphics are a bit dated.
Thoughts by Mr Creosote (04 00 2013) – Atari 2600
Grab your lance, mount your flying ostrich and… joust! Detailed graphics, great animations and a decent simulation of inertia – that was Joust in the arcades. On the Atari 2600, it is… not quite that. More of a reminder how far that system still was from providing an actual arcade experience at home than a fun game on its own right. Gone are the detailed player and enemy sprites; they have been replaced by flat, single-coloured blobs, all of which look exactly identical (in the original, the enemies would be riding buzzards) – and the ‘unbeatable?’ pterodactyl is virtually unrecognisable as such an animal at all. Appropriately, simple two-state animations are used. Might be bearable if at least the gameplay had remained intact.
That’s as colourful as it gets
The basic idea of flapping one’s wings with a button to rise or descent while moving horizontally to engage enemies and the joust being decided by the relative height of the opponents is obvious still there. Though where the original applied a flapping and collision model which was, for arcade standards, believable and manageable, this one’s physics are more akin to pinball mechanics: don’t be surprised if instead of just lightly bouncing off a platform you hit, you will be richocheted across the whole screen in a random direction and within the blink of an eye! The feeling of having absolutely no control being reinforced by the fact that a single touch of the flapping button will make your steed shoot upwards by about a third of the screen, whereas in the arcade version, it hardly did anything, allowing for much more fine-grained control over the player’s sprite.
Even weirder, more outlandish physics are applied to the eggs which appear when an enemy has been eliminated. Gameplay-wise, their purpose is that new, stronger enemies will hatch from them if the player does not manage to catch them in time. You might think it would make sense if these eggs would fall… downwards. Instead, they will fly off into a random direction, changing their direction when they bounce into a wall, until they will suddenly turn into a new enemy.
Graphics aside, this simply makes the game become close to unplayable. Even with practice, controlling one’s own mount is more a matter of luck than of skill. The two-player mode is also not really playable anymore because of that: trying to play cooperatively will include all too much accidental (deadly) bumping into each other and trying to play competitively… well, let’s say rolling dice is only marginally less exciting. Players would have to wait until a couple of years later, when a decent home conversion finally appeared on the much more powerful Atari ST.
Stub Comment by Mr Creosote (04 00 2013) – Atari ST
This is a very faithful conversion of the 1982 arcade machine which provides pretty much the original experience.
