Previous Next

Jasper! is an arcade adventure with 22 screens in which you have to get past animal and vegetable obstacles using a variety of objects. Your character is gracefully animated with a pot-belly and curling tale which wobbles as he walks along.

There are a number of things which you can pick up and use: ropes, weedkiller sprays, potions, brollies, a key and a flag. These can be picked up so that they appear in a box at the top of the screen.

You can carry no more than five at once and use them only one at a time, by pressing the number of the box in which it is shown.

The obstacles that bar your way home consist of realistically animated rabbits, wasps, big cats, bears, snakes and scorpions. There are also deadly weeds, and a fall from a tree or a vine is fatal.

Jasper can jump over obstacles or duck under them and even swing on ropes to cross some hazards. While doing this the rope counts as an item picked up, so don't try and grab any ropes while you're carrying five things.

Your journey will take a long time and you will need sustenance in the form of purple apples and yellow bananas to keep you going. To begin with, running out of energy is the least of your worries: you're too busy dodging the killer bunny.

However, as you get the hang of the screens you can settle down to try and work out the problems that face you. There is no one way of doing things and tasks can be completed in different orders as long as you have planned out your route carefully. I haven't told you how to use the objects but most of them are fairly obvious, while clues to the others are on the cassette inlay.

Completing 22 screens is a real job, although once you have grasped the basic principles it is less a matter of discovery than of honing your skills to finish the challenge.

Jasper seemed to me more like a kangaroo than a mouse. Whatever he is doesn't make much difference to the quality of this game, which is pretty high.

It's also pretty difficult, and I have to confess that I didn't get too far, despite the rather long time I played. As arcade adventures go, it's not one of the biggest, but it's certainly one of the more entertaining.

At the moment, rodents appear to be taking over the Spectrum software market - Monty Mole, Danger Mouse and now Jasper. In common with his two illustrious predecessors, he is graphically wonderful, a large, beautifully animated and eminently lovable rat-like creature.

Indeed, all the graphics are superlative; smooth, colourful and as detailed as you could wish for.

So what of the game, can it possibly be up to these high standards? Suffice to say that it's a complex mixture of arcade and adventure, requiring careful planning and some though, easy to get into and fun to play but offering an enormously varied long-term challenge.

So, finally Micromega have got on the graphic adventure bandwagon with that programming genius, Derek Brewster doing the honours. However, Jasper! will take you months. It'll take a lot of time, a lot of concentration and a lot of skill before you complete this masterpiece. Well done Micromega, another classic.