Manufacturer:
Year: 1990
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In an unknown era, a noble warrior fell in battle with glory. He presented his lovely sweet
daughters with powerful weapons, the Rods of Sheesanomo, so they could keep defending their Fairy Village from evil. The
village elder also provided them with wonderful Rainbow Shoes, having the power to release magical ladders.
Little time passed when a winged monsta was sent by a cowish/human-shaped beast, and kidnapped the babies mother, and locked
her in the top of a tower. The first story begins here: Rit and Tam are the names of the children, and they're setting up in
a travel to rescue their beloved mom.
They'll have to travel across 31 areas, each composed of four colourful platforms connected by wooden ladders. Flowers grow
over platforms, and they're worth 50 to 800 points each. Each location is inhabited by odd characters who'll try to make our
journey longer and harder: by touching them, our fairies will die in a while, so take care!
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Babies have their powerful weapons though. Rods are used by pressing the fire button: an
energy charge will be released and shock enemies for a few instants. By keeping on pressing button they'll even be shaken
back and forth until they explode and release a special bonus weapon. Each hit is worth 100 points.
There's another action button, and it allows us to control the magical ladder, which appears from our Rainbow Shoes. It's
useful in order to reach hardly accessible places or to escape from painful situations.
There are two different ways to complete stages: the former by killing all opponents; the latter by collecting all letters
composing the word "EXTRA". In this case, all you have to do is collecting all flowers in a stage, entering the
bonus game, killing all red onion-shaped enemies and collecting letters. As the word is complete, a modern looking and sexy
Queen Fairy appears, presenting us with a life energy sphere that's wrth a bonus life, and wishing us good luck.
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If you've not been quick enough in killing all red enemies, the flowers enchantment will
vanish in a few seconds, and enemies will go back to their original shape. As you kill them normally, they'll release
special weapons which are actually useful. Bombs, dynamite pieces, air-earth missiles, bomb balloons, flame throwers and
much more. Those weapons can be used to smash more enemies in a row, making them release special fruits boxes worth 1000 to
5000 points.
And of course there can't be platformer without area bosses. They're huge, very well-drawn, sprites. They have animal shapes
in the first part of the game (crocodiles, a whale, an elephant) each sending us their own tiny children, coming against us
from any possible direction. It won't be easy to beat them, but if we'll do that we'll gain 10.000 bonus points.
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As you reach level 31, after climbing the whole tower, you'll finally meet the satanic beast
and fight him strongly in a really hard duel. At the end of this all, we'll have set Rit and Tam's mom free and the first
part of the story will come to an end!
In the second adventure, game scheme remains the same but we won't see any flowers growing over platforms: there are
diamonds! Also, nicely-looking aliens took the place of all those furry and cute animals... Bosses have the shape of war
machines (giant tanks, fighter robots etc).
This all begins five years the first story, when a mysterious pyramid fell from the sky to a place near the Fairy village.
Rit and Tam's father immediately ran to investigate the building, and no one had news about him since. The babies went in
seek for their papa, entered the pyramid and hit all aliens and their dedly machines...
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The pyramid reveals as actually being a factory whose aim was to build an infernal mobile
fortress named Moquino, built in order to conquer that world.
As you reach and beat the final boss (level 31) a strange brain-shaped being, who operated the entire fortress, flies down
and fights the two lovely children on the ground.
Evil is represented by a multicolour sphere, which bounces around the game screen and tries to squash the babies. We have to
hit it many times with the use of our rod as it approaches. As time passes by, more spheres will appear, making our goal
even harder... until the entire screen will be full of spheres! Then after hitting those spheres many many times, the entity
will surrender and fly away from the planet... and go to other worlds to conquer aah!
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Ratings
PRESENTATION: 84%
Very refined, showing nice text and pictures intermissions explaining the game plot.
GRAPHICS: 84%
Colourful and cheerful, rich of cute monsters and bosses. Backgrounds are not that great though.
SOUND: 73%
Game tunes are OK for this sort of game. Second game mode music is much better.
ORIGINALITY: 48%
It's almost a mistification of a lot of other games of this genre.
HOOKABILITY: 83%
Such simple gameplay and cheerful characters hook player immediately.
LASTABILITY: 77%
It lacks "something" to make it last for long time.
OVERALL: 75%
Cool, funny and well-designed platform... destinated not to last long though.
Rodland is nice, no doubt about
this, but it lacks something which would have made it an everlasting masterpiece as Bubble Bobble is. Maybe it's because of its
slow action or the excessive ease of earlier stages, but the final result is just average. Jaleco presents such game featuring
parts taken from many of the platformers available in the Eighties: wooden ladders, collectable bonuses, the EXTRA game (all taken
from Mr. Do!) everything is then enriched with nice presentation, cool and tender sprites, and a suitable soundtrack accompanying
the whole game.
Conclusion: it attempts and fails to show the best from old classics - a real pity because of its wide potential.
Well this was a nice surprise. I never heard
about this game and it turned out to be one of those Bubble Bobble clones - a very nice one though! You get a nicely drawn intro
at the beginning, though there's no explanation of the gameplay, but this is not a problem since gameplay is very simple. Graphics
are very good and colourful - if you cinsider the times when it was designed especially. Sound is very good too, and I like the
melodies. You start playing the game and just want to continue: enemies have a great variety and the small differences from Bubble
Bobble throw in some spice. I also like the area bosses: their graphics are nice too and they are quite challenging. For this
little baby, thumps up. Try it out!
Well, speaking in terms of pure
"style", game is very well designed: average graphics, funny sound tunes and good effects.
But it lacks originality... I believe platformers (and shooters too) are the most popular videogames genre, so any variation would
have been enough to make this game come out from the masses: this game is a clear example of this all: you won't find anything new
within the first twenty minutes of gaming, and game gets boring in a while.
Another fault is the excessive ease of the whole game: you play over and over, overcome stages and bosses without even sweating in
your hands. My advice: get Bubble Bobble!
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