At first glance, you might dismiss Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure. "Oh, a little Nintendo game for Windows 95. How quaint."
Nothing could be further from the truth. The simple fact of the matter is, platform games are a popular genre for home systems. Good ones routinely sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Compare this with the PC market, where 100,000 copies is considered a big hit, and you can see that a game like Pitfall shouldn't be taken lightly. Particularly when it's the first action game (as far as I am aware) to earn the coveted Windows 95 logo.
Pitfall should appeal to the very people Microsoft hopes to attract to Windows 95: those who are daunted by command-line interfaces, DMA and IRQs. By this standard, Pitfall is a great success. It is easy to install - simply put the disc into the drive. Almost as easy as using a SNES (only almost, since I never had to log into my SNES). The game automatically registers itself, then pops up a dialog box giving you the option to play, look at the help file, or register.
Click play, and within moments, you will be amazed at the results. The game comes up in a 320x224 window, and starts running in "attract" mode. At this size, the game runs smoothly, without dropping frames, on a medium-range machine with 8 MB of RAM and a good video card. But wait, there's more! You can also resize the window (or double it to 640x448 in the game's properties dialog) - it will automatically scale to whatever size you set it to. You also have the option to run in two different full-screen modes, a feature which caused me some difficulty, although it has worked smoothly on the other machines I've played it on.
The only other glitch I ran into was with the sound. You have the choice of playing either the music tracks or ambient sounds from the CD. After I tired of the music, I switched to the ambient sounds, and was disappointed to note that the game would occasionally freeze for a second while it grabbed certain sounds off the disc. It would then "catch up" suddenly, "teleporting" me to where I would have ended up - all-too-often in a pit or drowning in a pool of water. As such, I'd recommend NOT using the CD ambient sounds if this problem occurs while you are playing.
But I know you're saying to yourself, "enough with the dry, technical details - what's the game about? How does it play? Is it any fun?" Well, it IS fun - just as much fun as a well-designed platform game can be. You are probably aware that THIS Pitfall is the sequel to an Atari 2600 game Activision published in the early 1980s. In that original, you played Pitfall Harry, an intrepid explorer who, like Alan Quartermain, hacked his way through the jungle searching for its hidden resources - gold and silver ingots - while dodging its dangers - quicksand pits that would grow suddenly and swallow him, crocodiles, snakes, scorpions ... and logs, which were apparently rolled at him from the bushes by pissed-off Pygmies. If you never got to savor this classic, don't fret, as the game has been included in its entirety on this CD. It's a secret level, which you can warp to from the Copan Temple level.
In The Mayan Adventure, you control Harry Jr., son of the original explorer, who's got a dilemma: it seems his Dad's been captured by some kind of monster - a Mayan Warrior Spirit. Naturally, given his heritage, Junior takes off in search of his father. Armed only with his trusty sling, he must thrash his way through fourteen levels (plus four secret bonus levels), ranging from open jungle to temples to mines to lost cities and more. Along the way, he can pick up extra sling stones (bags of rocks, to you and me), magic "exploding" stones that kill everything on the screen, and boomerangs, which are powerful enough to kill most foes with a single shot, can hit some hard-to-reach opponents, and will return if they miss.
The artwork in this game is fantastic. It is drawn in 256 colors, and makes good use of the entire palette. (Although I discovered the hard way that if you have a good video card, the game will run without appreciable slowdown in high-color mode.) The backgrounds are lush and extremely diverse, but similar enough stylistically that once you get used to them, you can easily tell whether or not you can stand on something. The features of the landscape with which you can interact are diverse and extremely comic - consider, for example, bungee flowers and Mayan wall carvings which stick out their tongues, which you can bounce on. Half the fun in this game is learning how strange new things work, which is as it should be.
The animation bears mentioning. The quality of the animation is good - not quite on a par with Flashback's rotoscoping, but close. However, Harry is a fully-detailed sprite who stands about 1/4 screen height, so watching him run around is marvelous. He also ducks, crawls, jumps, bungees (with about seven different styles), swings on vines, climbs, swings hand over hand from ceiling hooks, and slides down zip lines (but doesn't swim, alas). He also has an amazingly cool and almost useless move which I call the Ninja Wall Flip. Push up and toward a wall, then jump at it, and Harry will leap up, kick off the wall, do a back flip and land on his feet.
All in all, I enjoyed Pitfall a lot. It bodes well for those of us who've been saying all along that the PC OUGHT to be the ultimate gaming platform. If you have a PC and you haven't bought a Playstation or Saturn yet, don't. If future Windows 95 versions of hot platform games are even half as good as this one, there won't be any need to.
