I never liked Bump N Jump that much but that's probably because I was never very good at it. My favorite retro top-down racer is Spy Hunter.
Can't wait to see what other Data East games you liked.
Data East Arcade Classics - Bump 'n' Jump
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 On 03/23/2014 at 03:25 PM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
A game I actually liked in this Data East collection was Bump ‘n’ Jump (called Burnin’ Rubber as it was named in Japan). As I played it, I kept thinking it was like a 8-bit Burnout. Criterion made a similar game with Burnout CRASH which has the same top-down view, but it was only crash junctions and no racing. Anyway, in Bump ‘n’ Jump, you have a top-down view of a vertically scrolling track and you race along with many A.I. cars and try and wreck them by bumping or jumping on them. Different cars have different susceptibilities to being bumped so you have to pick your moments carefully. Lots of times you’ll bump a car and the bounce-back will throw you off the road. Some A.I. cars are bigger than others or have greater resistance to being bumped. You also have to jump obstacles and avoid getting bumped yourself. The game gets harder as the tracks contract and there’s less room to maneuver. I found the game really fun and couldn’t stop playing it. This game is surprisingly similar to Spy Hunter the more I think about it. Bally Midway published Bump ‘n’ Jump in 1982 and they must've took Data East’s idea and expanded upon it for Spy Hunter, which Bally Midway developed in-house a year later.
There are ports for this game on NES, Atari and Intellivision, but it looks like this Data East Collection is the only place you can get the full arcade version (other than MAME on PC). The high score for this game is over 3 million. Mine is 13K. I’ll have to do better next time.
The NES version here at the end of the video is clearly the best port.
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