[Coda]

Another day, another review. This one I played in the arcade and I've had these thoughts rolling around for a long time.

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Game: Journey
Developer: Bally Midway
Platform: Arcade
Year: 1983

This is such a weird concept for a game. The band Journey had its instruments stolen by aliens, and each member of the band has to traverse a different level to get it back so they can put on their interplanetary concert.

Even weirder is the game itself. Each level is completely different. It's like six different games smashed together into one. Each one has completely different play controls and objectives. About the only thing consistent across them is that you shouldn't touch the rainbow-flashing objects. In one, you're bouncing off of drums flying around, and once you've bounced on all of them they turn into a spaceship that you have to use to shoot down the stuff trying to keep you from escaping. In one, you've got to dodge between spinning death beams from a top-down view to get to the bottom of the screen. In another, you've got to jump over death beams on conveyor belts Donkey Kong style. In one, you put on a jetpack and navigate through a cave full of spikes to pick up your instrument and then fly back out. In one you jump between pillars that rise and fall to reunite with your instrument, and then you blast your way out again.

You can do those five stages in any order, and then the band goes and performs their concert. This is actually the sixth level, which I didn't even realize when I played it -- you have control over the bouncer at this point and you have to block the fans from rushing the stage and stealing the instruments. It's just a high score bonus round; you can't win, and once the instruments are stolen, the game starts over at a higher difficulty level, ad infinitum.

Adding to the weirdness is that the player sprites have digitized black-and-white photos of the band members for heads. There's also a lot of weird imagery scattered around the game based on their album covers.

The music is lo-fi 8-bit chiptune renditions of some of the band's songs. Apparently the arcade cabinet is also supposed to have a tape reel inside that plays a loop of another song during the attract mode, but this wasn't present in the machine I played. Since this game is over 30 years old by now I imagine that the tape wore out ages ago. But still, background music during gameplay was pretty new in 1983, and it's pretty good. (I mean, it helps that I like Journey, but still.) (Edit: Turns out it was supposed to play during the final level, not during the attract mode. This was a nice concept, it would have made the performance sequence feel even more rewarding, as that would have been a far higher level of audio fidelity than the game had exhibited before, so it would have been a big impressive finale.)

The play control is, as I mentioned, different for every level. Some are better than others. The jetpack stage has the best play control, the spinning beam level works fine, and the jumping mechanics in the platformer stages are inconsistent with each other. Nothing is downright BAD (though definitely not what modern players would expect), but the inconsistency can be offputting.

All in all, it's a quirky, bizarre little compilation of mini-games. Taken in that light, I give it a big recommendation. It's a lot of fun, at least for a while.