Jungle Hunt

Jungle Hunt is an arcade platformer originally from the Japanese company Taito, released for the Atari 5200 by Atari under license shortly after the arcade original's success in arcades. The player moves through a series of distinctly designed jungle scenes - swinging from side to side on vines over hungry crocodiles, swimming through a raging river among sharks and piranhas, dodging tumbling boulders in a narrow canyon, and finally facing spear-throwing natives, with the goal of rescuing a kidnapped heroine before the time limit runs out. Each scene has its own rules of movement and distinct dangers, which keeps the game at a constant pace and forces the player to quickly adapt to changing mechanics.

The Atari 5200 version manages to preserve the diversity of the game's individual sections as well as its basic visual style, with a color palette typical of the era's Atari 8-bit hardware, with the vine-swinging and swimming sections among the visually most interesting and memorable moments of this port. Analog-stick control for timing jumps between vines requires considerable practice, since a single mistimed release means an instant fall into a crocodile's jaws or the loss of precious seconds off the time limit. Contemporary reception was positive, with Jungle Hunt valued precisely for its variety and diversity of gameplay situations compared to the more simply and repetitively structured platformers of the time.

Today the game feels like a pleasant demonstration of an early effort at genre diversity within a single platformer, and its vine-swinging sequence remains a recognizable motif even beyond the narrow circle of hardcore retro gaming fans. On the Atari 5200, it's a compact, well-paced game that's easy to return to years later for a quick session, enjoying once again the variety of its four distinct sections and their still-legible, if simplified, graphics.

Why play it: For a quick return to a compact, well-paced platformer with varied sections that, even after all these years, still offer pleasant, easygoing fun.