Extropia’s Retro-Gaming: Hoppin’ Mad

EXTROPIA’S RETRO-GAMING

“HOPPIN’ MAD”

‘Hoppin’ Mad’ was a multiformat game that came out in the late 80s, and was published by Elite. It was actually a sequel to a game called Cataball that had been part of a compilation package that included Airwolf 2 and other games whose title I don’t recall.

In ‘Hoppin’ Mad’, youtook control of a string of four balls that bounce along a two-dimensional side-scrolling map. The controls were pretty simple, consisting of moving a joystick left or right to accelerate and the fire button to jump. The secret to success in ‘Hoppin’ Mad consisted of gaining the right amount of speed in order to achieve the right amount of height per jump.

Why was jumping necessary? Well, for one thing there were all these enemies you had to avoid contact with, such as stinging insects, birds, and something that looked a bit like a Venus flytrap. Should any of these touch one of your balls, it would burst and once all four had been popped you had to restart that level. In order to progress to the next level you had to collect ten balloons.

The level designs consisted of various locations. There was a desert, a level that resembled Roman ruins, a level set in a forest reminiscent of that old videogame ‘Wonderboy’ (anyone remember that?) and probably others, although I can’t comment on them because this game was too difficult for me to complete.

Ah yes, the difficulty. This was a tough game. The nearest thing in modern games I can compare it to is that ‘Flappy Bird’ thing for mobile where you had this hopelessly unaerodynamic bird that had to be guided between pipes.

You will recall that I mentioned this game was a followup to something called ‘Cataball’. It would be reasonable to assume that Cataball must have been a pretty good game if it warranted a sequel. In fact this was not true at all; Cataball was not a particularly good game. Still, that would not have mattered if Elite had taken the opportunity to spruce up the gameplay and make it more fun to play. But this is not what they did. Instead they just made ‘Hoppin’ Mad’ longer than its predecessor, and in so doing achieved nothing except turn a boring game into a long boring game.

Not exactly a classic, then.

Thanks to Elite for the images.