Bomb Jack
Jump, collect a bomb, dodge an enemy and repeat — and before you know it, it's midnight and you're still hunting that last, flashing charge. Bomb Jack is among those arcade classics whose magic lies in utter simplicity, and its version for the Amstrad CPC brought this entertaining principle into the living rooms of 8-bit enthusiasts.
The game is a pure single-screen platformer: you control the flying hero Jack, who must collect all the bombs scattered across the level while dodging enemies. The key to higher scores is collecting the lit bombs in the correct order — their flashing hints at a bonus sequence, and it's precisely this chase for maximum score that makes Bomb Jack an addictive affair.
The ingenious part is the double and multi-level jump, thanks to which Jack glides long distances through the air. The controls thus resemble guided flight more than classic jumping and give the game a distinctive feel that differs from the ordinary platformers of its time. Simplicity of input, but depth in optimizing your moves — that's exactly what made great arcade games great.
Bomb Jack joined the beloved coin-op titles of the eighties, and its home conversions traveled to a range of platforms. On the CPC it kept the essentials: instant comprehensibility, an addictive loop and the eternal drive to beat your own record. It's a game built on the „just one more try“ principle.
Today it's an ideal title when you want to experience the essence of the arcade era without complicated rules. You fire it up, play, compete against yourself for score — and that's precisely where the timelessness of this classic lies.
Why play it: For a pure, instantly gripping arcade platformer where the chase for score hasn't aged even after decades.
Game 9 of 26 for Amstrad CPC
The same title elsewhere (1)
The Tehkan arcade board handled smooth animation of Jack over colorful backdrops of famous landmarks with swarms of enemies and no slowdown, making the cabinet visually rich for its time. The Amstrad CPC port, released by Elite Systems, ranked among the more convincing home conversions of arcade games in the mid-1980s — the CPC's decent color palette for an 8-bit computer kept backgrounds and characters recognizable, and gameplay kept the pace of jumping and collecting bombs. Even so, backdrop detail had to be simplified and the number of enemies moving at once reduced compared to the arcade so the game wouldn't bog down on weaker hardware. For the smoothest, most colorful experience, the arcade version remains the reference.
