The Final Word game review

Johnny Bazookatone -- USGold

In the future, Johnny Bazookatone has brought peace to the world through his music. The future is now, and Mr. L. Diablo, Lord of the Underworld, has stollen Johnny's cherished guitar in an envious rage. Diablo has also kidnapped many of the legends of music as well. Your job as Johnny is to bring hell to its knees and bring back music to the world. USGold's Johnny Bazookatone is available for the Sony PlayStation.

E.Phoenix
Johnny Bazookatone is not a very good side scroller... in fact, it almost bored me into actually going to sleep at a "sensible hour". The graphics are almost as good as DKC2 (what the hell is going on here?), the music is pretty good at times, but the control and collision are way off. On top of the collisions, you can't configure the controller into a normal side scrolling layout (ie: the jump and shoot buttons are reversed). Once you get used to the controls, falling off ledges and dying only occurs semi-regularly. Skip this one.

R.I.P.
First off, I really liked the music in this game... sure it's done by a couple of the guys from Bon Jovi, but I'll let that slide. Gameplay is pretty straight forward for a platform game, and the game overall is enjoyable. I did have a problem with a couple of places where it wasn't even remotely obvious what you needed do and you either missed out on something, or you would be stuck for days trying to figure it out. For instance, one of the stages involves you paying a toll to a ferry man so that he will carry you across the level, nowhere does it say where to get money to pay him, and the only thing on the level that you can interact with are fish that jump out of the water. So... you shoot the fish right? Yes and no. One shot does nothing to the fish... heck 10 shots does nothing to the fish, and now your thinking they're an invincible obstacle. Then you find out that if you pump rounds into the fish from the moment it comes onto the screen until it's nearly half way through its jump, it will throw out a coin or something else. Personally I thought this was ridiculous, but hey... In any event, aside from that, the game was pretty good, and had a reasonably good replay value for me. If you like platform games, check this one out over a weekend, but don't expect to solve it.

>>>>> 30.5/50 <<<<<		E.Phoenix	R.I.P.
Graphics		4.0	4.0
Sound		3.5	4.0
Gameplay/Control		2.0	3.0
Longevity/Playability		1.0	3.5
Overall		2.0	3.5
Total		12.5	18.0

(07/96)