Jack the Nipper Reviews

Surely nobody reads the reviews, so I'll just say I'm gay

I'm not going to comment on the game itself (as I'm sure if you're looking at this page you're already familiar with it), but I am going to review the presentation of the game. Firstly, [b]IT RUNS FINE ON STEAM DECK [/b]. Tick! The emulation is spot on. Both the Speccy and Amstrad versions play exactly as they did on original hardware, except now you don't have to wait for the games to load from tape, and there's zero chance of a dreaded "R Tape loading error, 0:1"! There are also cloud game save state options. Tick. Controls can be easily remapped, when using keyboard or joypad. Tick. Display options include a bi-linear filter option, and various scaling options. No scanlines though, I'm afraid. No options to choose borders, either. You're stuck with a dark black border... ...and get used to black, because that's all you see in the menus. Plain white text on plain black background. No boxart, no historital information about the game, no story, no artwork, no developer interviews, no advert or poster or cassette scans... Nothing. But. Black. I know this is a pocket money price release, but I implore the developers to put a bit more effort into the presentation in future releases. People who buy these games probably do so because they loved them in the past, and want to fully re-immerse themselves in nostalgia by looking at the artwork, reading the manual etc. Feels like a missed opportunity to not have these features. Speaking of missing, the C64 version of the game is absent from this package, despite all 3 major versions being available in the Steam version of Jack the Nipper 2. I don't know if there's a licensing reason for this, but it feels like a miss-step, especially as I loved the SID music in the C64 version, and the chunky visuals looked different to the CPC/Spectrum editions. At the end of the day, though? This game costs less than a pint and the game's as good as it ever was. I just wish the publisher will put a bit more polish on their next releases.

What a great game to release again, seems like Pixel Games UK finally found the formula to re-release the 8-bit classics, get the emulators and put the roms in, now that the framework exists I am looking forward to a lot of the real old classics. 1.59 is a very fair price point for the games and I encourage everybody to buy this game and expirience gaming in the 80s for themselves. About the game, this is a real gem of oldgames, probably the first real action-adventure. A mixture of inventory puzzles and jump and run, with the focus on the puzzles. The save function and the keyboard controls are a godsend (though keyboard controls were there in 86 as well), it has both the amstrad and the spectrum version and the emulation is fantastic (caprice for the amstrad, best emulator there is). I realy enjoyed finishing this game for the first time, only took me 35 years to do so :-). When you know what to do the game takes between 30-60 minutes. If you need to find out what to do this game will take 100+ hours :-). Classing gaming at its best. Thanks Pixel Games UK, with this release you made up the botched Impossible Mission, I will buy more from you in the future.