Jump Raven

"The best damn copilot interviews in a hoverjet sci-fi game! Ever!!"

Ah, cast your mind back to the glorious age that was the mid 1990s... hey, don't try too hard. It wasn't that long ago.

At this special time, I picked up Jump Raven completely unheralded, along with many other Macintosh games (Power Pete, Voyeur, Riddle of Master Lu, Space Ace) at a huge software sale. It was an exciting day to say the least. I got them all home and I popped in the Jump Raven CD. The game didn't work. Crazily, I hit the internet and searched for 'something'. There was a patch! Talk about your lucky breaks. I grabbed the patch. I tried the game again and --ZING-- I entered the highly eccentric fun of Jump Raven.

This is a 1993 action game from a very inspired bunch of people called Cyberflix, who apparently released a game called 'Lunicus' prior to this one that was a critical stormer for the Mac. I say apparently since I never saw it or heard of it, but then again I only got my Mac in '96. Jump Raven is a freaky, heady and utterly distinctive mixture of arcadey 1st-person jetting through cities, hosing enemies from a cool flying car, extensive interactive copilot interview sessions, eco-consciousness and Robocop-style future doomisms and humour. It's hella-fun while still feeling like a gourmet dish in a restaurant where the amazing ingredients have been mixed in strange proportions - undoubtedly wondrous, but at times too weird to satisfy %100.

Save Earth's biodiversity - make a few bucks.

The Jump Raven hover jet! It's just like a Corvette, only crunchy. I mean, only with humongous rotating hover jets instead of tires. And we own it. In this game, set in an unspecified year of the early 21st Century, we take the part of a mercenary named Raven. Earth has gone right down the tubes. Humans have exploited her, torched the environment, and made the world a stinking miserable place to be. If this is the future I want to shoot myself in the head now. I hope you're listening up good, 'cos there's a message here and that message is 'Quit ****ing the earth up RIGHT NOW!!!' Quit polluting, start recycling everything, and DON'T grow up to be some kind of corporate yuppie scum like those guys in 'American Psycho'.

Back to the story. Rare DNA from endangered species of animals (that's pretty much all animals on the planet as far as I can tell) was sealed up in special biodiversity pods for protection. But the pods were hijacked while being moved for safekeeping, and are now in the hands of groups of extremists and terrorists.... in NEW YORK! I'm not sure which part of that is the scariest. You've been hired by the Environmental Security Agency (ESA) to fly around New York, blow away the terrorist creeps and recover the pods. I don't know why the terrorists are joyriding the streets of New York with the pods in the back seats of their vehicles, but it's quite fortunate for us that they are.

You might be itching to go nuke bad guys, but there's plenty of mission preparation to deal with first. You can check out a history of how the world got so messed up, have a chat with the gruff boss of the ESA, Lou Battaglia, outfit your vehicle and also interview for the position of copilot for the Jump Raven. These tasks aren't just here to slug you up and make you impatient for the action - they're actually star players in this game. They're just as important and as much fun as the shooting action, and actually with more depth than the game 'proper' in most ways! This is the kind of weird balance of game ingredients that I was alluding to earlier. For you older games, if you cast your minds back to such Cinemaware games as 'Defender of the Crown' or 'Sinbad and the Throne of the Golden Falcon', you will be getting a good impression of the kind of extra-curricular shenanigans you can enjoy in Jump Raven.

''I may have been a bookworm, but I can still drill a skinhead at 30 paces.''
-- Lt. Nikki Nakamora

The interviews are terrific fun, in spite of the fact that they ultimately have little concrete effect on gameplay. The experience of the interviews themselves is the purpose here.

There are 6 potential copilots available to you, each with an absolutely distinctive outlook and personality. First up is Lark, the straight-shooting Single White Female lieutenant with the lyrical voice. Asian-American Nikki is a Shakespearean scholar when she's not having psycho runs on the ammunition. Thrash is the laughable rebellious geek with spikey black hair who speaks in sledgehammer Bill and Teddisms. Cheesestick is the 'funny' black lieutenant (he's not very funny. At all.) Chablis is the extreme blonde valley girl/ airhead. And Dogstar is a reactionary macho cyborg with one eye missing.

When you're going to speak to someone, it's just like a real-life conversation: they front up to you, you're looking into their eyes and their framed face fills the screen. You choose from a list of up to 5 options at a time as to which questions to ask each applicant, trying to work out what they're good at.

What bowls you over here is the awesome expressiveness of the facial animation. When the characters speak, the lip-synch to words is %100 accurate. Every facial tic - the motion of brows, eyebrows, eyes, and mouth - is immaculate to the emotion of the character at any moment in the conversation. Anger, excitement, disappointment, skepticism.. all flow across the screen within fractions of a second. The interviewees shuffle about and move their head and shoulders too.

This is without a doubt still one of the ABSOLUTE BEST systems for game character facial animation I have ever seen! It's not even a case of it vying with reality. This is a 1993 game, and resolution doesn't even fill a 640 x 480 screen. The graphics are approaching a photographic quality, but still plainly within the design aesthetic of a computer game and the artist who created them, and they're really charming. It's the nuances of expression, and the fact that the expression is maintained with complete accuracy for every split-second of every turn of a conversation, that will entertain you supremely.

If only the interview content was as sophisticated as the system that carries it. There just aren't enough questions to go around to each candidate. Don't get me wrong, what's here is really fun. And voice-acting throughout Jump Raven is a standout. It's always either

(a) Genuinely great, or

(b) So enthusiastically performed, it wins you over anyway

Anticipating that I would be a typical young male videogame player, the game's creators figured that the first stupid thing I would do in the interviews would be to try to crack onto Lt. Lark. And you know what? THEY WERE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!

But she snapped back and frowned and told me to ask more appropriate questions. What should I be saying?

- 'You sound green.'
- 'You seem very passionate.'
- 'What are your feelings about Cyberpunks?'

The choices and replies are too funny. Try Thrash, the skateboarding rebel geek:

'How's it hanging DUDE. Thrash here at your total command.'

The 'dude' factor here is off the charts laughable. If you sit there not speaking, you'll get this:

'Yo your gnarliness, it's, like, time to have greatness thrust upon us, dude.'

?!!!

And you get to take one of these guys into combat with you on each mission.

The amount of extra detail surrounding the interviews is incredible. You can read psychological profiles for each candidate measuring stress, political leanings and reflexes. You can even read up on their personal histories and get ESA's opinion of them. It's this heavy detail in the extra corners of the game that makes Jump Raven really surprising all around. You could enjoy fooling around with interview candidates for ages and forget that you actually have a mission to complete...

''Welcome to Arms-Mart.''
-- The Weapons Lady

But eventually your mission does rear its head, and it's time to tool up. We have to visit 'The Weapons Lady'.

'Hey, we LOOOOOVE the weapons lady!' enthuses my new boss Mr. Battaglia.

I can't describe said lady better than the game's production notes do: She's 'an unflappable British technocrat.' And when you get a look at her, with her tight facial features, broad shiny skull with shortish hair swept right back and severely oval-rimmed glasses, it just feels right. Listen to her practical but plummy tones as she sells you lasers, machine guns, rockets, missiles, bombs and defensive chaff. Once again, the detail for a shop sequence in a game is astounding. When you ask for info on any particular weapon, you get a screenful of details and animation that is almost overwhelming, as well as the Weapons Lady's voiceover in which she silkily sells you that weapon like it was a prize on a gameshow!

'Remember, it's not just another machine gun, it's a Yard Rake.'

We're still not even up to the fighting yet. Last step before we step out is to pick some music. There are 4 fictitious bands in the game who produce new tracks we can listen to in the Jump Raven cockpit during each of 3 missions. It's pretty cute how they figured the soundtrack into the game's story. There's a groove/soul band, a techno group, the grunge group (grunge as in 'lazy delivery', not 'impressively heavy') and a death metal group called (drumroll)... DeathKiller. So you can customise your musical experience throughout Jump Raven, and this will have a drastic effect upon the mood of any particular mission. The tunes themselves are more mantra-like than melodic which suits the mantra-like action.

''We've got to get those samples back! Once they're gone, so are any hopes for the earth's biodiversity.''
-- Lt. Lark Williams

Time to kill. There are three boroughs to scour for pods: the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan. Your main view takes up only %50 of total screen area, but it works. It's a vertical block in the middle of the screen, with a view from behind the Jump Raven looking down the mean city streets. The vertical space is pleasingly filled by the very tall New York buildings, picked out with nice nighttime details. Weapons are at the bottom, radar information is on the right and the monitor constantly displaying the face of your copilot is at the left.

The background detail for the game is spectacularly dense, so it's a big surprise that core gameplay is so basic. Yet its simplicity is probably a big contributor to its arcadey charms. All 3 cities are made up of an endless grid with no street variations or dead-ends. You fly around at your leisure, watching for bad guys on the radar. The keyboard governs your steering and the mouse is used to select weapons and fire them. Kill bad guys for the cash bounty which you can use to buy fuel, more weapons and repairs later on, and keep a special eye out for the enemies who have pods. When you blast one of these guys, the pod bounces impressively around the streets, picked out by a cool green targeting effect, and you have to zip over and suck it up.

There are air targets such as jets, sleds and helicopters, and ground targets like tanks and armoured cars. You have to play with different kinds of weapons for different foes. Some weapons lock on and track, others require manual aim. Launching a tracking rocket that chases a bad guy around the corner is cool, as is the 'lock-on' chiming sound. Inversely, it's very hard to be manually accurate with certain weapons, and some jet sleds streak faster than you'll ever be able to aim while you're busy. Solution? Delegate some tasks to your copilot.

Grab my joystick! Grab it!!!

Yep, here's another huge innovation in this game. Your copilots can be delegated between zero and three of the three major piloting tasks - Navigation, Hover, and Weapons, and this is genuine delegation, not some token flourish. 'Navigation' is choosing where to turn and fly in the city. 'Hover' covers onscreen horizontal and vertical positioning. And 'Weapons'... you know!

Excepting the case of 'Navigation', the copilot AI is pretty good. If your copilot's working hover, they'll try to dodge around shots and descend to pick up pods. With weapons, they will do a decent job of choosing targets, and a truly impressive job of destroying enemies, at least if they're using gun-type weapons. With rockets, missiles and bombs, they just won't cut loose and they fire at a slow-as-molasses rate. The frustrating result is that you will rip control of the weapons back off them, then madly click the mouse at the trouble tank or 'copter that's causing you grief.

The copilots pretty much make this game. You can genuinely play a successful game of Jump Raven just taking care of navigation yourself and letting your copilot do most of the killing and hovering. This in fact is my preferred style. It feels eerily like flying with a real mate. Add to this that your copilots yell out, react to the situations and thank you if you work with them, and you have a great illusion going here. They'll tell you if enemies are sneaking up, complain if you flee needlessly, and champion their own successes. The bad guys' faces cut onto your monitor too, to intimidate you or yell abuse. And your copilots will actually argue with the bad guys as well! The whole game just feels so alive with the constant interaction between the different parties.

To me, choosing a copilot is more about choosing the in-game atmosphere I want than the kind of skills I want them to bring. Choosing Lark will give me a serious and intense time, whereas choosing Chablis will turn it into an airhead comedy. 'You're hosed now geek!' she cries as she shoots down a skinhead. Or, after being insulted: 'Who peed in HIS cornflakes?'

''We've caused over 40 major head-on collisions, but we've walked away from every one.''
-- The frontman for metal band DeathKiller

There are only 3 levels here, but they're reeeeally long. You have to collect something like 30 pods to gain access to the next borough. Sometimes you'll find 2 pods in 15 seconds, at other times you won't find any pods for minutes. Once you do collect all pods in a level, you have to destroy a boss robot who's guarding the exit. Alas, these boss fights are pretty hopeless. The boss does nothing but hover there, firing endlessly and faultlessly at your position. It's just a war of attrition - grab your best weapon and click madly, hoping that you don't die first. If you beat the boss, you get some cut-scenes, story development, and most touchingly, a screen depicting all of the animals whose DNA you just saved! Though this feels weird too. While I was shooting skinhead-manned helicopters, I'll admit that I forgot that I was saving the Koala and friends.

During the levels, if your shields, fuel or weapons are dwindling, you will respectively be able to visit the Repair Bay, Fuel Truck or Weapons Lady (in her helicopter). These helpers only show up when the relevant resource is depleted. They appear on your radar and you have to chase them up and meet with them in a certain amount of time. This experience ranges between tedium and frantic fun on the basic skill levels, but ploughs into INCREDIBLY ANNOYING territory on higher ones.

If you get distracted, you miss the helpers and they just leave. On the high difficulty levels, the time given to you to locate helpers is ridiculously short, not to mention that the increased enemy fire will probably have blasted your radar out and you'll be trying to find them blind. And get this: If you are drawing too much fire at the moment you find the helper, the helper is likely to be blasted to smithereens! Worst-case scenario: You're sitting on top of the fuel truck and the bad guys blow it up. You go up in flames. Then you put your fist through the computer monitor.

They make you have to keep doing this stuff throughout the levels just to stay in business. So this is one part of the game that becomes very wearying. Sometimes you wish you could just cruise the streets without interruption, gleefully shooting bad guys and grabbing pods, but your fun will always be broken up for another pit stop. You will develop a personal hatred for the whiny fuel truck driver and boorish repair guy, the most hated characters in Jump Raven (I think the creators wanted them to be lovable - they failed), who both appear on your monitor and are prone to having a moan before scuttling off like spoilt children. At least if the fuel guy is pissing you off, you can help nuke his truck yourself, then laugh diabolically as bits of the trashed vehicle rain down on the streets of New York. 'It's a hell of a town!'

As you go through the levels, graphical change is minimal. The buildings are tinted different colours, and you have different enemy bosses making cameo appearances on your video monitor (and one of them speaks only in Mandarin!), but everything else stays mostly the same. The enemy craft are too small for you to make out individual differences from level to level. This stuff doesn't matter too much, as it's just an extension of the basic arcade style and the kind of thing older videogames would do to distinguish between levels. The main atmospheric differences are under your own control - your selection of cockpit music and above all, your choice of copilot! Basically, the cruising and bruising action is good clean arcade fun, given depth and excitement by the antics of your copilot.

Jump ravin'

Add together all the time spent in interviews, buying weapons, cruising New York and watching cut-scenes of the Jump Raven performing various manoeuvres (these scenes vary from 'okay' to 'bland' in quality by today's standards), and a typical game session lasts for a fair while. You have 5 lives, and unless you're playing 'Advanced' or 'Expert', you'll get a lot of mileage out of each life. This is my main gripe for replayability. The higher skill levels should challenge your increasing skills, and be able to be matched by them if you get good enough. But no amount of skill can overcome the midget time window granted to find helpers on high levels, or the beefed-up bosses' firing rate. So that's some poor design. Fortunately, with all the interviews, playing with different copilots, and the core simplicity of gameplay, you can have a lot of fun just playing on 'Intermediate' over and over. Plus the endings are quite funny if you win; you get a different end comment from each copilot.

Jump Raven is quite the wacky mix. The interviews are more startling than anything else in the game, while hardly affecting the rest of the gameplay. The arcade stuff is basic fun that would be right at home in any 1980s blaster, except for the copilot assistance which is something amazing. There's an elaborate background story, but the heavy environmental themes are in-your-face at one moment, forgotten in the next. Some of the near-future predictions are pretty good too! Check this one out:

(ESA lady talking about the greenhouse effect)

'When was it that things really started warming up? Wasn't it during the last Clinton administration? Hillary's, not Bill's.'

It's all very novel, and I can see how it would have been a significant groundbreaker as a fleshed out interactive experience in 1993. Still, the boldness has also resulted in making Jump Raven a strangely uneven experience.

If you want to check it out (and it's worth it), I don't know where you'd find it these days, as Cyberflix seems to have become a part of Barracuda Inc., and I don't know if anyone is distributing this game anymore. I also don't know if the anticipated port from the Mac to the PC ever happened. But if you see it 2nd-hand or in a sale - GRAB IT! The interviews are truly distinctive, the cruising and blasting action is highly replayable, and it's a unique if not entirely successful gaming experience that was probably ahead of its time.

-- Jump Raven -- 7/10 --

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 03/26/01, Updated 03/26/01