Monday 25 April 2011

Sometimes Nostalgia Is Best Left In The Pages Of A Magazine: Game 0006

 

I miss the days of pawing over column inches in Mean Machines and C&VG for the latest screenshots and snippets of info on coin ops you'd probably never see. Or if you were lucky see years later in a run down old backstreet arcade in Blackpool. DJ Boy, was one such game that seemed to evade my attention. To my C64 owning self, this 16-bit smorgasbord of colour, speed, fisticuffs and hip hop stylings seemed the thing dreams were made of, and so I eventually tracked down the Mega Drive conversion years later.

This thing is a real damp squib, porting only the bare essentials from the coin-op to make this acceptable as a game. The most glaring omission: lives. Yeah a side scrolling beat 'em up with one life. 5 rounds of rollerskate based punch 'em up action, with not so much as a single safety line, not even a continue. What were they thinking? But that's not the only problem, DJ Boy himself controls like he's skating over a bouncy castle spread with marmalade, and attacks with all the frustration of one of those dreams where your punches just won't connect. The speed of the coin-op original has been stripped as well, and the levels divided into more easily loadable data sets for the console. Breaking the already stilted flow of the game. There is some respite in the form of exchanging cash won in the game for more health, strength and speed, but often the power ups seem to make little difference. The music and sound effects don't even garner a mention and it all adds up to...well, very little.

Favourite Moment: Finally turning the game off and laughing to myself that at one time or another someone payed over £50.00 for this brand new.

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