Baby Jo

Copyright : Loriciels | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Baby Jo is an adventerous little Baby that goes out to play one day and finds himself lost, now he must try to find his own way home, alone. With the dangers of the neighbourhood at each corner it?s not going to be an easy journey so you must guide him through 4 levels of arcade platform mayhem.

Graphics

A good game to compare Baby Jo: Going Home to is the Core classic "Chuck Rock 2: Son Of Chuck" in which you also played an adventerous little baby. When you look at both games closely you?ll notice some startling similarities between them both, the graphics are very familiar in style and it looks superb on the Amstrad CPC, colours are bright and well presented throughout the stages, they both have a large amount of various enemies that attack without warning and are very well hidden in the background of the level design along with some superb animation and fast paced gameplay. Now consider the time gaps between the two games and the difference in technology (8-bit vs 16-bit) and you?ll realise what a good looking game Baby Jo is for such an early machine as the Amstrad CPC.

Sound

While the graphics would put just about every ZX Spectrum owner to shame the sound on the other hand is 100% the opposite, there?s no title music and nothing in the way of sound during the game itself. You can stop turning your volume controls up on your speakers because we can confirm without a doubt that the version we reviewed here does not contain any sounds at all - a massive let down to a promising game.

Gameplay

The game is enjoyable, there is no doubt about that but it also has a few problems that needed to be fixed before the game hit the shelves. Gameplay is very fast and furious, in fact it looks like your basic MAME game running on a new spec machine with Frame Skip enabled! but the scrolling needed to be sorted first. When you reach the edge of the screen, gameplay stops, the screen pans to the left or right (depending on which way you run) and then the game starts up again. This quickly becomes annoying and soon puts you off completing the level you are playing, especially when killer flowers are trying to throw acid up your butt!
All in all Baby Jo looks like the mutts nuts but it?s not an award winning game due to the lack of sound and scrolling problems during gameplay.