Platform games, you either love 'em or you like 'em a lot. Unless you have them, but then you'd be a really sick individual. I mean what could be a more perfect game form? They manage to combine the hand to eye co-ordination and finesse of the finest sports sims, the deep thought and strategy of the best management games, while at the same time the speed and reaction of the greatest shoot-em-ups.

Plus they include the brain teasing element of puzzle games. If God ever invented a computer game, instead of (allegedly) creating the world, the land and the seas and all the multitudinous creatures thereon, he would surely have written a platform game. Probably Rainbow Islands, but quite possibly Yo! Joe!.

Platform games come in two kinds. The incredibly cute and colourful kind like the aforementioned Rainbow Islands, Rodland and Robocod. And the dark and atmospheric kinds like Gods, Myth et al. Here, in the shape of Yo! Joe! we have a bit of a hybrid. The scrolling, small sprites, flip intro and music are all from Cutesville, Tennessee. The pick-ups, weapons, levels, baddies and bosses are all from a place far more funereal in atmosphere.

Sexually challenged terrorists
Joe has probably been hideously put upon in some fashion. Maybe his father has been kidnapped by Bangladeshi terrorists, or his homosexual lover abducted by an evil dragon from the planet Sleam. The details aren't important, and to go into them here would probably just add fuel to the flames of the sexism in computer games argument. The plot doesn't matter, who ever bother to read the flippin' manual anyway? The crux of the matter is that you've got to get from the start of the game to the end without expending a predetermined number of lives in the process.

If you've never played a platform game before, welcome to the planet. If you have, you'll get the general idea of this little romp in no time. But Yo! Joe! is no ordinary platform game. If it was I'd have been going to bed before dawn for these past few days. Yo! Joe! is that rare, and much treasured, thing - the truly great platform game.

The difficulty level is just right, and progresses in a way that keeps you coming back for more, rather than sending you heading for the pub in a fit of righteous indignation. When you lose a life in Yo! Joe! you know you've only got one thing to blame, and that's your own unwieldiness at joystick waggling. Which means you pick yourself up, dust down your pride and get stuck straight back in.

Come down our local
It would be easy to say too much about a platformer. With Yo! Joe! there really is no need. It's just a perfect example of the genre. I personally guarantee that you will love this game. If you don't, come down to Hatchetts pub and I will buy you a pint.

Yo! Joe! is huge, what you see here is just a portion of the giant first level, and it's excellent. Games like this come along far too rarely, and occasionally they fail to receive the attention they deserve. Don't let this one pass you by. Yo! Joe! is a complete stunner.

Yeah, I know, it's been pretty sickening for all you readers to plough through our hopelessly sycophantic dribblings as we waited for this new release from Hudson Soft, and we're sorry. It must have been like reading - no, no, I can't. We don't do those tedious jibes here at AMIGA POWER, it'd be terribly poor form.

Anyway, deepest apologies. It's just that Hudson Soft have been responsible for so many of my personal favourite computer and video games of all time, it's hard not to get excited when there's something new in the pipeline, and I'm glad to report that Yo! Joe! hasn't let me down.

Let's see if I can convince you. Let's tell you all a secret. Details. That's the secret. Do you know how to write a brilliant video game? Well, first you have to be a phenomenally talented programmer, right? Wrong. Anyone with a basic grasp of programming can write a game. Programming isn't difficult, it's a simple skill which can be learned, like speaking French. I don't want any angry letters from programmers at this point, either - I'm not trying to belittle your talents, just pointing out that it's not some magical gift from the gods, okay?

But back to the point. Some of the best games ever have been written with a very elementary level of programming expertise. Perhaps, then, the secret of writing a brilliant game is to pack it with groundbreaking trickery, bigger sprites than anyone else has ever done, sixteen billion shades of orange moving a nine-zillion-frames-a-second (Bit of a stupid idea, that, since TV's can only display 50-frames-a-second images - Technical Ed) and all that stuff. Rubbish.

If one more person comes up to me and says that, say, D/Generation is no good because the graphics "Don't push the Amiga to its limits", I'm going to take them outside and twat them. Sensible Soccer, with its vast expanses of green and miniscule graphics, hardly pushes the envelope, does it? Yet it's your favourite game of all time, and ours too.

Maybe, then, you need some kind of revolutionary idea, a game design that's never been seen before, a second Lemmings or some such? Nah. Originality is a very good thing, for sure, but it isn't necessary. F1GP, original? Body Blows? The Chaos Engine? Driving game, beat-'em-up, Gauntlet clone, but all great games. It's details. Trust me.

LITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT
Attention to detail is the common characteristic of almost every truly great game there's ever been (and conversely, the thing missing from so many crap ones - when you look at International Rugby Challenge and notice that they can't even be bothered to spell 'tries' correctly, for God's sake, you know you're not in for a treat).

Anyway, Yo! Joe! - bog-standard platform formula, 1991 visuals, programming that lets the game down when the screen's busy - is the most painstakingly and lovingly detailed game I've seen in years. You want examples? Well, you're getting 'em. How about the way that a tiny little Joe runs along the bottom of the score bar throughout the game mimicking everything you do? How about how when you pick up a bonus item the game goes 'bing!', but when you pick up two at once, it goes 'BING!', twice as loudly?

Or there's the menu screen where every option selection (music on/off, sound on/off - anything you'd expect in any self-respecting game really, but which, of course, you don't get in so many of them) is accompanied by a little bit of dialogue between Joe and Nat, or even the high-score table, which is displayed as graffiti on the train which chugs along underneath the title screen.

I've deliberately picked some examples that don't affect the gameplay in even the tiniest insignificant way, because they're the ones that really show the programmers have been giving it their all - anyone can do clever little touches that jump up and punch you in the fact and demand you notice how smart they are, but finding stuff like this really makes the player feel like they're in on the joke as it were.

But anyway, Let's talk about Yo! Joe! as a game, rather than an excuse for an essay on another one of my pet theories. You don't want to know about the plot, so instead I'll give you short, relevant facts with numbers in them, because that's what people want in these information-culture days. And because Knowledge is Power obviously. (Get your fabulous new AMIGA POWER T-Shirts on page 97, bargain lovers! - Colin The Publisher)

Yo! Joe! has six levels. They're all really big, except the fifth one which is a little train-ride interlude. You can play on your own, or with another player taking the part of your mate, Nat The Rat, who surprisingly isn't actually a rat. The scrolling in two-player mode follows whoever's leading, and stops when one player would fall off the edge of the screen. You can punch or kick your way through the bad dudes inhabiting the levels, or collect any of five extra weapons which you'll find lying around.

The weapons all have different properties and advantages - for example, the nunchuks are less powerful than the length of pipe, but you can jump up and grab onto ledges while you're carrying them, which the pipe won't let you do. The chainsaw is extremely hard, but needs petrol to run on which you have to collect separately (and which runs out alarmingly quickly). You can hold all the weapons at once and switch between them at will, so you should be able to pick and choose the best for each situation.

JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM
There's a bonus shoot-'em-up stage between levels where you can earn extra lives, but you get infinite continues anyway (back to the start of the level current level), so they're not that important. Scenes covered include an Egyptian pyramid, a jungle temple with underground caverns, and the interior of an Oriental pagoda-type building, all rendered in beautifully-drawn and lushly-coloured graphics, with nary a wasted pixel - almost every bit of landscape does something to you or conceals bonus weapons or objects.

Joe himself is an athletic dude, able to leap around impressively, crawl through very narrow passageways, and grab ledges and pull himself up onto them in a Prince Of Persia manner, all with the simplest and most instinctive joystick movements you could wish for. Bored of facts yet?

I love this game. It got me shouting and squealing in the office (much to my embarrassment) as I plunged towards spiky pits only to save myself by clutching on to something with my (or rather Joe's) fingernails, cackling manically when I lobbed a petrol bomb right under the trousers of a particularly troublesome bad guy, shrieking with surprise when a load of zombies came out on the walls on level one, and swearing abusively at the smouldering corpses of defeated bosses (of which there are several in each level).

The noise was so bad, the rest of the team actually asked me to put some of my 'special' music on the office stereo to drown out the racket, but I countered by simply turning up the game's rather fab music, which is something I haven't done in a while, I can tell you (Thank heavens. - Rest of AP Team).

If everyone took this much care before they unleashed their games on the unsuspecting public, the world would be a finer place. Yo! Joe! is one of the finest games of the year to date.

There have been many benchmarks in the field of Amiga platformers. Games like Rainbow Islands and Zool have shown us all what is possible with an Amiga. Unfortunately, Yo! Joe! is not in the same class as those giants. That's not to say that it is bad - it is, at best merely mediocre.

The plot contains the usual number of graphically different levels. Apparently, a gang of evil nasties has gathered together to question an all-seeing Oracle. They want to know ho well their drug dealing will go next year. Even for drug dealers this bunch is weird. I mean there's Count Costrimo, a vampire; Sheebop, the half-sister of an Indian goddess; and even Professor X, a mad cyborg.

The Oracle has some plans of its own however and, in an effort to avoid being locked away, tells the evil boys that two boys must be destroyed if they are to be successful in their chosen profession. Joe and Nat are the sprogs in question and, unluckily for them, manage to find themselves outside Count Costrimo's castle. What a coincidence!

There are a few sub-plots involving graffiti and gang warfare, but they are even less believable than the main one so I won't dwell on them.

HOTTING UP
The aim of the game is to traverse six levels of platforms whacking as many enemy sprites as possible and collecting any treasure you may find along the way. Initially, Joe's only weapons are his feet and fists so he can punch or karate kick opponents away.

Some of his opponents are pretty tough, so he'll need to find the many weapons scattered around, such as the fast-spinning nunchakus (flails), lead piping or molotov cocktails (petrol bomb). Only the flails and pipe are permanent collected whilst the others need topping up, so be careful how you use them.

The main levels are varied with various types of bad guys with their own methods of attack. Level three, for instance, is set in a South American temple full of mad cannibal Incas; these guys attack you with spears, axes and boomerangs. Level four is in Japan and is strewn with ninjas popping up out of the floors and walls with knives, blowpipes, shurikens and swords.

Joe is a pretty resourceful character though, and once you've found a decent weapon, the enemies can be dispatched with relative ease. The same is sadly true for the end-of-level guardians. You can easily beat a guardian without losing any energy.

ELVIS IMPERSONATOR
The game has a very polished feel and it's clear that much time and effort has been put into the sound and graphics. The sampled effects are excellent with vicious cracks and booms accompanying Joe's martial arts blows. The background music skips along unobtrusively.

The graphics are quite reminiscent of that old Bitmaps' classic, Gods, and have a distinct French style which is hard to describe but easy to recognise. Joe himself is a well-developed lead and has some smooth animations especially when he's spinning the nunchakus. But, for some reason, Hudson Soft decided to make Joe look like Elvis, complete with white suit! Perhaps it's some kind of continental thing that I haven't cottoned on to.

It's a shame that after so much skill has been employed in the rest of the game, that very little has gone into the prolonging gameplay. I'm not an excellent platform player but I managed to complete the whole game in one morning!

No matter how well presented Yo! Joe! is, you will complete it quickly. It is nothing more than a flawed attempt at producing a classic game. Wait for the budget release.