Comic Jumper:

The Adventures of Captain Smiley

by : aksobey

©2010 Kent Sobey

The story follows Captain Smiley, who you play as, and his attached sidekick, Star – who is literally just a star. Star is a loud mouth who is rather abrasive and doesn’t seem to like Captain Smiley very much.

You start with your own comic called ‘The adventures of Captain Smiley’ and it is quickly revealed that your arch nemesis is a seemingly ‘cool’ guy named ‘Brad’.

The first chapter revolves around combating Brad and his robotic henchwomen (and his ‘Bradcopter’ equipped with ‘Brad Missiles’).

After defeating Brad your comic is cancelled due to low readership and you are forced to take any work you can get. This leads your assistant, Gerta, to find you work in other comics to make enough money to re-launch your own comic.

• Capatin Smiley rides again

Your first job comes from a fantasy comic called ‘Nanoc the Obliviator‘. The drawing style changes and features much more subdued colouring and water colour backgrounds.

You face ‘The putt-master’ in this comic after the original hero of the comic has become overweight and is no longer interested in fighting but rather eating.

After Two issues of Nanoc you move onto a new comic called ‘Improbably paper Pals’ which is represented as a silver-age comic and again the drawing style changes. In this comic you have to help ‘Paper Lad’ stop ‘Mistress Ropes’.

The last style is a black and white magna style comic which you get to after defeating Mistress Ropes.

The comic is called ‘Cutie Cutie Kid Cupids’ and a rather reluctant Captain Smiley needs to rescue his once arch nemesis Brad.

After completing all of these missions Captain Smiley has made enough money to re-launch his own comic which becomes popular once again.

The Good:

The first thing that struck me is that the game is wickedly funny.

The humour is really what kept me engaged and I think without it the game would have battled. That being said, there are many other elements of the game that I enjoyed.

Graphically the game is great (keeping in mind that it’s an arcade game). I really liked the idea of the four completely different styles which not only change the way Captain Smiley and Star look but everything else too. It is a nice break from seeing the same things over and over which arcade games can do sometimes.

I loved the sidekick, Star. He is constantly making comments which will make you laugh and keep you entertained – and he seems to hate Captain which makes for very interesting banter since they are stuck together.

The auto aiming was also a very good feature because it did not make the game too easy but certainly gave me the edge I needed.

A nice simple upgrade system (which may not be new to games in general but is nice to see in an arcade game) gives you a little bit of customisation which makes you feel more involved in the game.

The Bad:

While I really did enjoy the game over all I must admit that I did get bored of it rather quickly and could not play very much of it at a time.

The game play is extremely repetitive despite the fact that the developers tried to mix it up as much as they could but putting you in a golf cart and changing from the normal side-scrolling action to third person shooter style aiming for brief periods.

The majority of the game, for me, felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again.

The developers did a great job of differentiating themselves from other side-scrollers but I still feel more could have been done to make it feel like I was playing something new. It just felt like I had done it all before, and 20 years ago too when I played ‘Contra’.

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I could not recharge my health which was extremely annoying. When I knew a difficult part was coming up and I was already low on health I would intentionally die so that I could try and get there again with more health so as to make it possible.

Maybe I am simply no good at arcade games but I found the game annoyingly difficult and rather badly balanced. It was by no means impossible but I did die a lot and with no way to regain your health if you make one small mistake it is very difficult to recover.

The Score:

I cannot unfortunately be as generous with my score as most of the reviews for this game have been. For me the elements of the game which annoyed me outweighed the parts that I really enjoyed.

My evaluation of Captain Smiley is that it deserves 6 out of 10 and the main reason for this is because of the fact that I got bored playing it. The only reason it gets above 5 is because they did a great job of making it funny and it looks great.

Everything else aside, the most important thing for a game (at least in my humble opinion) is to be fun and the ‘fun factor’ for this game was simply not there for me.

“6.5/10

©2010 Kent Sobey

xxxxxx

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