For my end-of-the-year posts each year in history I pass, I put together a collage of bits of screenshots from the year’s #1 games. I just got 1989’s ready, and putting images from three of the games next to each other really brought home their similarities. A man from a movie, with his weapon, facing towards the right of the screen, the player tasked with helping him to fight his way through and succeed with might. Robocop, Batman, and Indy.
Indiana Jones is the odd one out of the three for sure, though. His isn’t an Ocean game, which allows for a bit more in the way of novelty, and he isn’t a suit-encased superhero. Or rather, he’s a different kind of suit-encased superhero. But it makes a lot of difference. Viewed right in greater close up, movements slow, he feels different. Human. Pulling himself up ropes, struggling for every small advantage he can get, there is an enjoyable physicality to his movement. The result is that the application of ‘80s video game difficulty to his world, the energy-sapping collisions with spikes and weakness to bullets, at least feels in keeping with the character rather than a ludicrously artificial imposition.
Speaking of ludicrously artificial impositions: Whip. Ammo.
Another common way of upping game difficulty, apart from increasing the range of things which can harm the player character, is to decrease how much they can use their powers. At This frequently took the form of requiring you to collect certain disposable items to make use of your weapons, most often in the logical enough form of gun ammunition. Indiana Jones’s iconic weapon is not a gun. But why let that be a barrier? Why not have him out there attacking bad guys with disposable whips? And so: his attack is a punch, until you find a cluster of whip ammo, at which point you can use the attack that number of times. As an example of video game logic blasting right through any kind of sense, it is fantastic.
Is that so bad, though? For all of developer Tiertex’s intrepid attempts to model various locations from the movie in monochrome, the game is better at broad strokes than any real fealty anyway. Even something that gets as close as to make sense by movie logic isn’t possible, so why not substitute game logic when it adds to the right atmosphere? That is to say, slow and difficult games aren’t something particularly easy to get on with, but when it feels like part of the point it certainly helps.
