Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Goat Jump

Old video games tend to be a source of weird shit - PC titles, obviously, but even unlicensed cartridges were fairly easy to do on a lark. I'm sure some people remember first-hand and others have heard.

I like to collect these weird games when I cam. Most of them are shit made by mongoloids, but some are funny or even creepy. Take Goat Jump. I got it from a pawn shop owner that knows I buy old games. I don't know if Goat Jump is the actual name, since the original label has been peeled off and a small one affixed with just those two words.

Goat Jump is, apparently, an unlicensed NES game. Pop it into your NES and it starts right up. There are no credits, no start screen, or any explanation. The graphics consist of a scrolling ranch/prairie. The player character is a shittily-rendered tiny cowboy. The 'goats' don't really look like goats, but they don't look like anything else, either.

A makes you jump, while B doesn't do anything. Pressing Start pauses the game, where the screen is mostly filled with the word "STOP" in white block letters. Pressing Select makes your character stop moving and a loud buzzing noise will play. The music is low-quality psuedo-western beeps.

Walking into a goat causes the same buzz to emit as if you'd pressed select. The screen switches to black with the word "LOSE" filling the screen. From there, the game has to be manually reset.

The gameplay consists of you jumping over goats. Your apparent reward for this is one point per goat, with the scroll speed and number of goats slowly increasing. Around the fifteen-minute mark, things start getting strange, as well.

The music is occasionally interrupted by loud beeps or scratching out-of-sync tones. The goat sprites begin to become varied with things like color errors; some even bome an incoherent mass of colored pixels. Your cowboy sprite kind of flips back and forth.

This steadily gets more severe and the terrain is eventually effected, too, with gray sky, brown trees, and red pixels I can only assume are supposed to be blood. By this point, the music is incoherent screeching and beeping with no tune, your sprite is gliding along his back, and the goat sprites are half-sunk into the terrain.

You come to the end of your journey around the half-hour mark, where you enter your first and only building. From there, your sprite glides into some sort of threshing machine or something and a shitty 'scream' plays. You get 100,000 points for it, too. A black screen with "YOU ONE" [sic] pops up, including a really fucked-up goat sprite dancing below the words.

Again, the game has to be manually reset. Graphical and sound glitches appear earlier or at random in subsequent playthroughs. Goats are occasionally replaced with your cowboy sprite laying on its back with 'blood' on it (and, occasionally, missing pieces). Randomly, your cowboy is replaced with a goat and, baffingly, a large boot.

Like I said, it's weird. I've never found any information on Goat Jump anywhere. I assume it was a joke or a personal project or something. What the fuck.

8 comments:

  1. What the heck is this game? Very strange.

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  2. Thank God xXxG4M3RxXx has shared his thoughts on this.

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  3. Randomly, your cowboy is replaced with a goat and, baffingly, a large boot.

    LMAO!!

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  4. Why does "glitchy" red sprites represent blood?

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  5. THEN WHO WAS GOAT?

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  6. Ok, who the hell would spend 15 minutes hopping over goats? I don't think I know anyone bored and disciplined enough to actaully pull this off.

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