Infogrames
Your little brother is snatched by a bird and is whisked off to an unknown location. You, being the crazy and cool cricket that you are, take it upon yourself to save him. Only by making your way through increasingly difficult obstacles will you finally reach the nuclear power plant where Maggie the Magpie (the captor) awaits you.
Zapper, our hero, can use his antenna to zap baddies. A hasty press of the B button will make him do a large jump to clear gaps. Essentially the gameplay revolves around collecting blue Magpie eggs and orbs in each level. Only by collecting these items will Zapper be allowed to traverse onward to the next level.
Features
- The GameBoy Advance counterpart of the console version
- Some digitized sound effects
Jason Nuyens: This game was pretty bad even from the very first intro screens. A very poorly narrated story sequence set me up for a very poorly constructed game. The story itself is very shallow and doesnt give you any motivation to save your little buddy. Once you jump into the game, you almost completely forget what your objective is because of the disjointed gameplay. To save your brother, you have to find orbs and eggs. Somewhat silly that you have to be a treasure hunter when you should be only out on quest to find your brother.
The moment you begin playing you realize how bad the controls are. The most notable flaw is how you are forced to turn on the spot using L and R. Every time you use the digital pad, Zapper will jump one cell in the direction you pressed. You can only imagine how painful it gets when you are standing on a lone platform surrounded by water, and need to face the opposite direction. Most games would have you just press the direction want to face. Zapper will force you to manually turn yourself ninety degrees at a time using the GBA shoulder buttons. This is not just a chore, its a design flaw in every regard. Being forced to hop quickly across many dangerous platforms while having to remember to robotically turn is a task I cannot endure any longer. I could take it for a couple hours, but really, its the kind of flaw that will keep gnawing at you until you finally cave and snap the cartridge in anger. And if you dont snap the cartridge in anger, you may learn to love the pain. Its a weird kind of addiction that you will either snap in anger or learn to love. I personally couldnt stand it.
The bulk of the game has you avoiding drone-like enemies, and hopping across endless amounts of platforms. The games difficulty is very unforgiving (partially due to controls which we already touched on) in every way. If you touch some harmless looking rabbit, you will instantly die. Also, because of the absolute nature of navigating around, even an accidental twitch in the wrong direction could have you falling to your doom. In fact, it resembles Frogger in more ways than one. Having to hop around from one position to another is something that the classic made famous. However, unlike Frogger, Zapper seems to lose the formula by making you turn constantly. Zapper is also given a zap attack that has virtually no use. The only thing it seems to be effective on are normal crates that are lying about. Thats about it. Killing enemies and even destroying other crates requires you to use charge-up fireflies. Why they would even refer to this zap move as an ability is beyond me. Game design definitely needed major tweaks here.
Graphically, this title is slightly below par. The animations can be jerky and are almost entirely void of any fluidity. The tile set for the worlds are decent, if not a bit bland. One thing this game lacks is any sense of depth in the world. Its really hard to know what is supposed to be a cliff or really tall platform. I have seen worse graphics on the GameBoy Advance, but I have also seen more polished titles.
On a positive note, Zapper actually has some interesting audio. The music is fairly robust with some decent quality samples. However, it is entirely saddening that the melodies cannot match the technical quality of the music setup. The sound effects are a mixed bag. On the one side, I was happy with some of the digitized cartoony sounds, but on the other hand I was disappointed with how generic they all were. Sometimes the sound effects just didnt seem very inventive or fitting. Zapper is an average show for audio in a GBA game and definitely nothing to get overly excited for.
All in all, Zapper is a game that will leave you begging for more the moment after you first turn it on. And when I say begging for more, I mean you will be wishing the game offered more value in every respect. This game could have benefited from an overhauled gameplay scheme and increased graphical polish.
Jason Nuyens