 Z z z z... That's drunk! Alright, imagine you're at a rental store, and you see a game you notice the title S skull-jagged, or Revolt of the Wessedicans, and you see THE COVER. Holy crap, hell yeah, I'm renting this. This looks insane. It looks like Sengat from Street Fighter 2해서 integrated over a fight between two comic book heroes. How can you go wrong? Well, this is how you can go wrong. 때w Forgive this is not what I imagine based on the cover and the title. The thing is, though, this game isn't all that bad. Yeah, the art design, sprite work, and the color palette make this look closer to an NES game than a Super Nintendo game, and the controls are definitely a bit floaty, but Skulljagger is still a perfectly OK action platformer. Plus, there's a couple really interesting things here that make this game stand out that I'll get to in a minute. But first, the basics. Skulljagger is a story-driven game where you play as a dude named Storm Jackson, only it's Jackson spelled with an X, so you know he's cool! The game has broken up into seven chapters that each have three sections for a total of 21 levels, with each chapter concluding in a boss fight. You have five lives and one continue with plenty of opportunities to earn more, but if you use a continue, you start way back at the beginning of the chapter, and that's where the passwords in this game start you out too, just FYI. As you can see, it's pretty typical action-platforming stuff here, although like I said, the jump is not the greatest, and it adds to what is a frustratingly slow pace overall. The level design is OK, it at least avoids being repetitive, but there's not a lot of interesting ideas here, it's all very standard stuff. Not bad, just not memorable. Your health is represented in these gemstones you collect. The green ones will give you extra lives and continues if you have enough of them, and the red ones add this sad little projectile to your sword attack. Jeez. If you think that's funny, get a load of this. Storm Jackson's secondary attack is bubble gum. Yes, that's right, you collect fruit throughout each stage. What is this? Adventure Island? There's a total of four different fruit-flavored gumballs you can use that each have their own special ability, just press A to use them. Orange gives you a more powerful projectile that you spit that lasts for either 8 seconds or 35 shots, whatever comes first. Cherry allows you to fly, just tap the A button until you blow a bubble, and seriously, this is just so hilariously goofy and out of nowhere. And I thought stuff like Young Merlin was weird. But it gets better, and by better I mean weirder. Grape puts you in a giant protective shell, presumably made out of gum, that kills enemies and allows you to jump higher by holding up when you bounce. And the watermelon has the same effect, only you just fly around uncontrollably destroying anything in your path. So yeah, you sit down to play your badass swashbuckling pirate adventure and sail to high seas and fight bad guys and, uh, roll around in a giant ball of gum. Yeah, strange stuff going on here. But despite the weirdness, there is one really cool thing Skulljagger has going for it, and that's that the game came with an 80-page manual that doubled as a comic book that told the entire story. Now that is really cool. You'll see when you play the game, the story is only told in text blurbs here and there, but the manual is a whole different story, and I'd love to show it to you here to tell you more about what's happening in the game, but there's no scan of the manual online. Man, someone get on that pronto because what I've seen of it looks really interesting, and I'm always down for interesting and unique instruction manuals, and this one sounds like it'd be a fun one to flip through. Anyway, yeah, Skulljagger Revolt of the Westacons is all over the place. The cover makes it look like it'd be awesome, then the first impressions of the gameplay make it seem lame, then the bubblegum powers make it seem... I... I don't even know. It's hard to say whether or not to recommend this one. The graphics miss the mark, the music isn't that great, and the gameplay has nothing to write home about, but it's not like this game is that bad. It's just from a basic gameplay standpoint, there's about a gazillion games out there that are better playthroughs than this one. This is another game where I'd actually recommend the manual over the game itself, because that seems like it'd be a little more interesting. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.