Pogo Joe

Pogo Joe is a great game! It looks and plays like a clone of q-bert, the wildly successful coin operated classic from the nineteen eighties. But, it doesn’t stop there. Pogo Joe has many things going for it that q-bert lacked. First and foremost there were many different levels and level configurations. Each level had a name, and I played dozens and dozens of them and never saw one repeat. The names were mostly in-jokes, one of my favorites was, “Troutman’s special recipe,” which I believe was a reference to the film character in Rambo (he was the Commanding Officer, and friend to Stallone’s character.

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Pogo Joe had more enemies than Q-bert and more challenging levels and it had a great sense of humor. The designers made a true classic, not just some cheesy knock off like most cloned games. I believe that I actually played this more times and for longer than any other platform game of the time. The game pogo Joe was a nice diversion from the other games that were out at the time. Pogo Joe really made the grade compared with home versions of Q-bert. Q-bert was a fun game but Pogo Joe could enthrall a player
In a way that Q-bert simply could not. The level names could make you laugh the very first time you read one and later the 35th time you read it. There were even levels where Joe would vanish and the only way you knew where you where was to see the cylinders light up and go dark. Pogo Joe had many reasons to play and replay. I can’t remember any other clone of an arcade game that I actually liked better than the original besides pogo Joe. Another great aspect of the game was the cool music, soothing rather than annoying, as I recall. The commodore was awesome at producing great musical soundtracks. It was much better than the other systems available at the time. The enemies would hatch from eggs that dropped onto the cylinders and Joe had a chance to jump on them and destroy them before they hatched. Some of these enemies could still be jumped on to destroy them and others were just plain lethal from the moment they hatched. There were teleport cylinders which would warp you from one side of the playing field to another reminiscent of Q-bert’s floating discs. I wasted far too many hours of my teen age life playing this game, yet I don’t feel cheated. Time spent with this classic is truly time well spent.