Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (US Gold 1985?: Paragon)

In the first of his outings on the ST, Indiana is in arcade form, rather than the adventure game format of later releases. It's a simplistic affair based on a arcade game (by Atari I think). It's got quite a nice arcade feel to it and the game sticks fairly closely to the original machine (apart from the runaway mine cart sequence, which, having played the arcade machine in question, seems nothing like I remember it. The opening screen is nice and there are some jolly, if repetitive chip tune representations of the main Indy themes. Fortunately these can be switched off. There's a two player mode, though this follows the time old tradition of turn based playing rather than player two being someone else (playing as Willy Scott or Short Round, would have been pretty entertaining). There are four famous scenes to play through from the movie. The first of these is a whip fueled romp through the mines collecting imprisoned Indian children and giving some Thuggee thugs, snakes and bats a darn good lashing. Survive this and you leap into a mine cart for a rather poor slow paced diagonally scrolling avoid 'em up. Get to the end of this and your in the Thuggee temple, where you must grab the Shunkara stone by crossing a fire pit. Finish this level and you start back in the mines to take on an increasingly difficult repeat of the first levels. Presumably you must do this three times to get all the shunkara stones. The evil bald dude (Mola Ram or something) from the film occasionally appears and lobs fireballs at you (not something I remember from the film but nevermind). The final level is set on the rope bridge, but I was much to rubbish to get there! Graphics wise it starts of ok, gets bad in the middle and is average at best for the temple level. It isn't a terrible game by any means and some people might very well enjoy it.

Zogging Hell Rating: 6/10

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