Woeful, Warrior: The Sad Story of Joust 2

You know that scene in the movie Ghost where Patrick Swayze's treacherous friend gets sliced in half by a jagged window? He doesn't realize that he's already dead, but Swayze, who already took that trip to the other side, knows what's coming, and shakes his head mournfully as the man he once respected is surprised and dragged to hell by badly animated demons. That's how Joust 2 makes me feel. Minus the erotic pottery class with Demi Moore, of course.

I've been vocal in the past about my preference of Joust to Nintendo's clone Balloon Fight. Some will argue that Balloon Fight is the more intuitive game, since it's got balloons that just beg to be popped, rather than the impossibility of aerial battles between flightless birds. However, Joust is a faster game, and it's definitely got the edge in style. It's got sinister knights astride vultures, screaming pterodactyls, and rocky platforms magically suspended in mid-air, high above a bubbling pool of lava that a troll is using as his personal jacuzzi. Joust arrests the eyes and captivates the soul, in the same way a heavy metal album cover would while flipping through discs in a record store. By comparison, Balloon Fight is textbook Nintendo... a fluffy marshmallow of a game that sacrificed its teeth for mass appeal. I've made this visual metaphor before, but it bears repeating. 

Hefty, Hefty, Hefty! Wimpy, wimpy, wimpy!

So it pains me to say that if I were given the choice between Balloon Fight or Joust's sequel, I would have to pick Nintendo's child-safe, up with people and hooray for everything substitute. The irony is that I hate Joust 2 for exactly the same reasons that I love the first Joust. It's got the same warped blend of medieval fantasy and surrealism as the original, with slightly improved graphics and a wider variety of situations and freaky creatures to fight. Problem is, you won't find much game under all that creativity.

Why. Just... why?
(image from Internet Archive)

Let's first address Joust 2's biggest failure, the critical error that drags it to hell in spite of its good intentions. Both the original Joust and Nintendo's clone Balloon Fight used a horizontal monitor, giving the player plenty of room to dodge incoming attacks. Whether it was a hungry buzzard from the left or a well-fed balloonist from the right, you had room to anticipate the enemy and react. In a thumb of the nose at common sense, Joust 2 opts for a "tate" monitor that restricts horizontal movement while wasting pixels on the top of the screen.

I'm not against vertically oriented monitors! They have their place... but only in games suited to them. Without tate, Crazy Climber's skyscrapers wouldn't seem as perilously high, Donkey Kong wouldn't be able to keep Pauline just out of Mario's reach, and Pac-Man couldn't keep tabs on the four monsters constantly on his trail. Tate is also extremely important in shoot 'em ups like Dodonpachi, where bullets rain down from the top of the screen and you need that couple of extra seconds to dart around them. 

You didn't need that extra third of a
screen, did you?
(image from the Pac-Man Wikia)

All of these games were ported to home systems, and lost something in translation due to their use of horizontally oriented television sets. The screen would be pillarboxed to compensate, or the playfield would have to be compressed, leaving the game feeling compromised, or scrolling would have to be introduced, leaving the player with an uncomfortable and occasionally dangerous blind spot.

It's the price you pay when you take a game out of its natural aspect ratio... but it's a price Joust 2 didn't have to pay, since it was running on dedicated hardware. The developers could just as easily have went with a horizontal monitor... hell, they could have just designed Joust 2 as a conversion kit, and used the same monitor as the original. That didn't happen, though, and the lost horizontal resolution exacerbates all of the game's other problems.

No kidding it's game over! You
give me that little room to move,
and you waste it on a block font
title and a gaudy statue?
(image from Vizzed)

Put simply, Joust 2 is all style and no substance, all apple and no core, all reckless ambition with no discipline to keep it in check. There's too much stuff in the game, and not nearly enough room to hold it all. Along with the classic buzzards and pterodactyls, you're accosted by a new cast of enemies that seem designed to annoy rather than challenge and excite. The eggs from defeated buzzards that spill into open lava pits re-emerge as more aggressive mutants. The eggs that land on solid ground eventually hatch into knights, which were harmless in the first game but are armed with lances in the sequel. These threats are joined by bolts of lightning, button operated robot knights, and swarms of crystal bats... and you'll have no room to dodge any of them. 

(Since people familiar with this game will be expecting me to mention this, you can transform into a heartier pegasus, but it's too fat to fly without frantic button hammering, and about as useful in an aerial battle as Pinkie Pie. See, she's one of the My Little Pony characters who doesn't have wings or magic powers, and she's crazy and unpredictable on top of that. Look, lots of grown men have seen the new My Little Pony. My point is that the pegasus is worthless. Shut up.)

Evidently the designers thought it would be a grand idea to cut the horizontal resolution in half while doubling the number of onscreen enemies. Maybe they thought the added chaos would make Joust 2 more intense, but it just leaves the player feeling helpless, while jamming handfuls of quarters into both the machine and the nearest swear jar. If the first Joust was emblematic of pre-crash arcade games, where the objectives were simple and you could play for hours on one credit if you had the mad skillz, Joust 2 is a reflection of arcade games released after the NES, demanding a steady flow of coins for your entertainment. 

Joust 2 is no match for the visual splendor and
the magical sound shower of Sega's OutRun.
(image from HITC)

Unfortunately, Joust 2 finds itself in an awkward gap between the two generations... the impossibility of surviving on one token makes it a lousy sequel to Joust, but it just doesn't have the visual luster or the mindless fun to make players want to keep dropping in more. Its graphics just aren't on the same level as Final Fight, or Golden Axe, or the similarly surreal but much flashier Space Harrier. Hell, Joust 2 can't even compete with OutRun, which was released in the same year but is a far more effective peep show for mid 80s pixel porn.

Poor, poor Joust. I had so much respect for you, but you lost your way... only to discover that you didn't have the strength to follow in the footsteps of more advanced arcade games. Now the only way we can keep in touch is through a Ouiji board.