Jetpack Joyride: Endless runner on Steroids!

-

Welcome back to Retro2Now: Mobile Gaming. We dig into the roots of some iconic phone games every couple of weeks. It serves as the spot for glancing at the golden age of smartphone gaming. This marks our fifth piece in the series.Now we bust right through a wall and we grab that machine gun jetpack too.

That is right. We discuss the high octane coin collecting scientist dodging classic which goes by the name Jetpack Joyride.

If you owned a smartphone back in 2011, you played this game for sure. Halfbrick Studios developed it. They created Fruit Ninja as well. Jetpack Joyride grabbed the endless runner genre. They polished it up nice and bright and it became one of the most addictive replayable experiences on a touchscreen ever.



One Button, Endless Chaos

The premise stays simple in a beautiful way. You play as Barry Steakfries who works as a disgruntled salesman. He spots a top secret machine gun jetpack and figures his life needs a real change. He breaks into the lab, straps it on and starts the game.

The controls fit the idea of easy to learn but hard to master. You tap the screen or hold it and that fires the jetpack and makes you ascend. When you let go, gravity pulls you down to descend. And that's all you need to know.

With this basic setup, you aim to fly as far as possible and go through an endless randomly generated laboratory. The lab packs in obstacles everywhere, yellow zappers show up, guided missiles come at you and crisscrossing laser beams cross your path. All of them aim to stop your joyride quick.

More Than Just a Jetpack

The game earns its name from the joyride side of things and the special vehicle tokens, which appear randomly on the track. You grab one and it shifts Barry into a wild temporary power up vehicle which changes the whole gameplay.

Who can forget the destructive power of the Lil Stomper mech(our second favourite) and our favourite dragon Mr. Cuddles. Each vehicle came with its own controls and its own music too. They make you feel invincible(then you crash it anyway).


The Grind That Kept Us Grinding

Jetpack Joyride nailed the just one more run feeling and it pulled that off with two main systems.

Missions kept things going and you always and I mean always had three active ones. For example, high five 10 scientists, travel 2000 meters in the Bad Ass Hog and collect 500 coins in one run. You finish them and that levels you up. You earn bonus coins and even get a new title too. It starts at Beginner and it goes all the way to Barry.

The Stash acted as the in game shop and that is why we hoarded coins so much. The Stash held cosmetic upgrades which includes new outfits for Barry and absurd new jetpacks filled it too. My favourite stayed the Golden Piggy Pack jetpack. More key items included gadgets and utilities. Coin magnets helped out while a personal shield gave protection. They offered a slight edge for your next run.

I remembered how much I loved breaking my own high scores and how excited I got when I get Mr. Cuddle(aka our favourite dragon) as my upgraded vehicle.



The "Now": Why It Still Holds Up

Jetpack Joyride holds up well in the now. Some games from the 2010s feel old and dated but this one stays just as fun today. It launched over a decade ago and the charming pixel art style feels timeless. The theme song sticks in your head like an earworm and the core gameplay loop works mechanically perfect.

It stands as the perfect mobile game. You can pick it up for a quick two minute bus ride or you lose an hour trying to top your high score. It never aimed for a complex console feel and it fit its platform right. It built a game perfect for that setup.

Jetpack Joyride went beyond just a game. It turned into a real phenomenon which showed that mobile gaming came to stay.



(word count=687 words)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Neck-Snapping Joy of Hill Climb Racing

-
Image
  Welcome back to Retro2Now: Mobile Gaming.  We dig into the roots of some iconic phone games every couple of weeks and t his marks our sixth piece.  For this seventh blog entry it is time to get behind the wheel of one of the most deceptively simple games from the 2010s. That game was wildly addictive and it was called Hill Climb Racing. If you owned a smartphone back in 2012 then chances are good you spent hours messing around with a little red jeep. There was also a driver named Bill Newton and an endless road that was impossibly bumpy and you just kept going on that thing. The "Retro": Two Pedals, Infinite Chaos Fingersoft a Finnish studio developed Hill Climb Racing. It stood as the epitome of easy to learn but impossible to master. The whole premise stayed simple enough. You drove as far as possible on a 2D stage and the controls boiled down to just two pedals. One was Gas and the other was Brake. But those pedals did more than just move the vehicle. The Gas pedal t...
Read more

DakshinaChitra Heritage Museum: An almost perfect first trip

-
Image
People often think of industrial visits in terms of noisy machines and factory lines. That is not what happened on our first one, we ended up at a spot focused on saving culture instead of making stuff in huge amounts and that place is Dakshina Chitra Heritage Museum. It sits along the East Coast Road near Chennai. This museum does not keep history locked up in cases. We found out right away that it works as a living museum and you do not only look at the past there, you step straight into it. Our trip turned into a real journey back in time. We did not stop at staring at photos of ancient homes. We went inside them. In Tamil Nadu style, we explored the wide open yards of Chettinad houses. The wood carvings there were amazing, and so were the walls made with egg plaster. After that, we moved along a trail. Suddenly we were in a Kerala Syrian Christian home. Its dark wood stood out, along with the way it caught breezes from all sides. Kerala Christian house All eighteen of the old house...
Read more

The Angry Birds Revolution

-
Image
  Welcome to the first post in Retro2Now, Mobile Gaming . In this series, we wind the clock back to check out games that didn't just hang out on our phones. They kind of defined whole chunks of mobile fun back in the day. We'll dig into where they started, what made them blow up, and how their impact shows up now in this super advanced mobile world we got. For the kickoff, it makes sense to spotlight the game that got everyone flinging stuff. You know, the one that turned thumb swipes into this huge worldwide thing. Let's get into Angry Birds. Back to the world before that flock showed up, think about 2009, the Apple App Store was just a year old. It felt like this wild digital frontier full of chances. Mobile gaming mostly meant quick time-killers. We had stuff like Snake on those old Nokia phones and some basic puzzles too. But nothing really grabbed the big crowd on these new touchscreen gadgets. Smartphones were like rockets ready to blast off. They just needed the righ...
Read more