Joust Tribute

Full View is a Must!

Anybody remember Joust, one of the coolest video arcade games ever?

Click the link to learn more about "Joust": [link])

Before they invented the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and Super Mario Brothers, there was "Joust". It was one of many popular arcade games of the early 1980's (before my time), and still entertains original fans and new gamers today.

The Digital painting above is based on the game and it's elements. I was inspired to create it after playing the emulated NES version on my PC. The character in the foreground is the hero knight on his Ostrich-like bird. The knight riding the green condor-like bird in the background is a "Bounder" (low level enemy). He is attempting to fight an "unbeatable" creature that I misinterpreted to be a fire-pheonix of some kind. I later found out that this is actually a "Pterodactyl", that can be defeated with the proper attack. But I left the fire-bird in the painting, since he looks awesome.

I only have 2 problems with this game:

1-
In the arcade version, you can play until you run out of Quarters (25cent coins) or Arcade Tokens. With the NES version, you only have one set of lives, and no way of continuing (Lucky for me, my PC NES emulator has a "save" feature, which makes extra lives virtually useless).

2-
I don't know weather the arcade version has an end to it, but the NES version seems virtualy infinite. I figured that once all low level enemies were replaced by max-difficulty ones, that would be the last level of the game. Wrong! The max difficulty levels just repeated themselves indefinitely. Maybe the game will end after the 99th level? Wrong again. Like the lives meter, after 7,8,9 comes A,B,C.

After Reaching the the level "A2", I gave up. With "S" lives, and a super-high score that would make someone using real Quarters break down and cry, I called it quits.

((Created in Adobe Photoshop CS))