Status Reset_Tears May 14, 2022
Mappy Land, much like Pac Land a couple years before it, feels like a pretty influential 2D sidescroller game that was probably impressive for its time. This one plays similar to Mappy, but has a ton more gimmicks. Each level has special in-level items to interact with as well as special items you can pick up and use, and you'll …
Mappy Land, much like Pac Land a couple years before it, feels like a pretty influential 2D sidescroller game that was probably impressive for its time. This one plays similar to Mappy, but has a ton more gimmicks. Each level has special in-level items to interact with as well as special items you can pick up and use, and you'll want to learn how to use all of them properly in order to avoid or knock out the cats chasing you. You need to collect all the items scattered about, then reach the end of the stage. It's a surprisingly convoluted game, with some items working for some enemies, and other items working for others. Some levels have you needing to enter new areas (took a while for me to figure that out, since it's definitely not explained in-game), and some involve moving trampolines and vines and whatnot -- but the controls are so bad for this that my hat's off to anyone who can actually manage to get through all of that without save states. My other main complaint is that the graphics are pretty messy-looking in this one -- it was hard to tell what was foreground or background at times ("oh, that's a wall, shit").
All in all this iteration of Mappy just isn't as fun as regular Mappy. But it is an interesting one to check out, to see how devs like Namco first started experimenting with the young platformer genre that would largely define video games for the next decade-ish.