Jason Storm, Safari Software's (who would later go on to merge with EPIC, makers of Unreal) first game, is a side scrolling platform shooter much like the original Duke Nukem. It was made of three episodes, City Under Siege, Fortress of Doom and Showdown in Orbit (Space Chase was the collective title). The first episode was the shareware episode, and once you ordered the full game you received parts two and three, as was common with other games of the time (e.g. Doom).
The simple plot was that Jason Storm, secret agent super-hero type, had to chase down Bad Guys INC, whose name said it all, over their various lairs until he caught up with them.
Jason Storm, Safari Software's (who would later go on to merge with EPIC, makers of Unreal) first game, is a side scrolling platform shooter much like the original Duke Nukem. It was made of three episodes, City Under Siege, Fortress of Doom and Showdown in Orbit (Space Chase was the collective title). The first episode was the shareware episode, and once you ordered the full game you received parts two and three, as was common with other games of the time (e.g. Doom).
The simple plot was that Jason Storm, secret agent super-hero type, had to chase down Bad Guys INC, whose name said it all, over their various lairs until he caught up with them. The player had to navigate levels and find keys
to doors while facing off against such imaginative enemies as the Denebian Lint Ball (think a ball of fluff with a foot that never actually dies and you're pretty much there), the Lizard King, Slime Devils and a horde of robots. A few of the levels are bonus treasure levels, in which you must choose a path and get treasure, with the cinch being that you can't go back (not entirely true, my sister discovered that if you jump into a wall enough, you can actually walk through it). The "puzzles" basically include finding the right keys to doors, which isn't really that hard, but this is not really a puzzle game. Around levels are scattered multitudinous health power ups, ammo, and items, which give you bonus points (randomly ice creams and teddy bears for some reason, which although made perfect sense when I was 10, doesn't make a lot of sense now.)
This game is worth a download if you're up for some simple side scrolling action. It's not the greatest or most complex game ever, but it does deliver some fast paced jumping and shooting action, and I spent many hours of my childhood trying to beat this DOS classic. If you were persistent, it wasn’t too difficult, but at 30 levels, it should keep you occupied for a fair while and should be good fun too. And if you happen to share a PC, like we all did in the days of DOS, the scoreboard allows you to keep track of who's top. So, give it a go, at less than 1MB, it's not exactly much for some good quality hours of old school gaming from a bygone era.
