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author: admin
generator: pandoc
title: 'ToeJam & Earl'
viewport: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes'
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admin
2012-01-22T14:28:27+00:00
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This is a game about a couple of aliens who are trying to reassemble
their spaceship so that they can return to their home planet, Funkotron.
As you're likely to read elsewhere, the game mechanics owe a large part
of their heritage to *Rogue*, a game for the personal computer from
1980, but, for important reasons, TJ&E escaped following those those
roots too closely, and did not become anything like *Diablo*, or--and
this might be stretching the limits of the dungeon-crawling
genre--*Baldur's Gate*.
It has been complained that TJ&E is 'just a game about walking around';
this is supremely ignorant. The player, whether playing with another (as
'intended') or by themselves, *will* do a lot of walking around, but
this does not limit the game. What drives TJ&E is the idea that you're
exploring something, getting deeper and deeper into the world with which
you're interacting &c. *This* is what makes this a really, really good
game.
All the levels you play through are randomly generated, and all of the
items littered throughout the game have to be *used* in order to
function discovered: everything gets rotated, mixed around, when you
start again. The items themselves are genuinely helpful to game-play,
and are authentically imaginative. In fact the very freedom the player
has to roam around and explore the level, checking the map, figuring
things out, is what *makes* this game. Most commentary on TJ&E reserves
all the praise for its music--and the music is brilliant, Herbie
Hancock-esque funk that loops perfectly--but the sandbox dimension to
the game is what keeps me coming back.
I can go on about the levels' terrain, the various enemies, the game's
difficulty curve, but you need to go and play this game.
ToeJam & Earl is available on the Sega Mega Drive (both the console and
cartridge can be bought fairly cheaply online), and the Wii Virtual
Console, for 800 Wii Points.
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