Welcome to From the Garage, TGR’s weekly feature spotlighting Xbox Live Community Games and independent development. Given the enormous amount of content that is hitting the marketplace, we’ll keep you clear of the garbage and point you in the direction of treasure. This week, we feature Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp.
Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp, despite it’s awfully odd title, is easily one of the finest Xbox Live Community Games I’ve played to date. An old NES or SNES platformer is all it attempts to be, and in that regard it succeeds tremendously. The game consists of 65 different 2D platform levels. You’ll collect coffee cups (which, after collecting enough, will give you an extra life), jump on bad guys’ heads and traverse increasingly dastardly puzzle and platforming elements.
It does sound awfully familar to anyone who has ever played a 2D platformer, and I’d be lying if I said it did much new. However, the game constantly surprised me with its competence. I was constantly surprised at the situations I was being put in — one level has you jumping headfirst into a gap that constantly moves you from the bottom to the top of the screen. In this level, you had to kill all of the bad guys that were falling from the top of the screen to the bottom with you, so you had to slow your character down and get behind them before you could drop in for the kill. Another level might leave you scratching your head as you try to figure out how to get back up to a higher platform — the solution is simple and genius, but requires you to think about how the world works and how you can use that to accomplish your task.
To really bring home the NES/SNES platformer feel, the game features an extremely retro graphic style. It’s crisp, simplistic and fits well. Even better, the soundtrack seems like it is straight out of the late 80s or early 90s — and that’s a complement. The songs are catchy and bring you back to the times when you were a kid growing up on Super Mario Brothers.
If you couldn’t already tell, I enjoyed the hell out of Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp. At only 200 Microsoft Points ($2.50) it is an absolute stea l– you owe it to yourself to buy this game.
Verdict: Buy It
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