ScrollBoss - Game Index - Jungle Hunt (arcade)

Jungle Hunt (arcade)
	Company: Taito Genre: Platformer Released: USA: 1982
From the game's flyer The hero, smitten with love, (not malaria as he had first believed), must put is prowess to the test to rescue his beloved who has been kidnapped by savages! First he must fly through the air, swinging from rope to rope, out monkeying the gorillas that threaten his grip. From the heights to the depths, the player must now swim through Reptile River, stabbing the man-eaters and avoiding the Mysterious Murk that can trap him and render him defenseless. Every now and then, he must swim to the surface to re-fill his lungs with air or he'll become fish bait! Next, it's a dry land run against a rockslide that he must outmaneuver with fancy footwork, leaping over the rocks or ducking under them. Finally his goal is in sight! His girl is hanging from a rope suspended over a bitter barbarian brew! Now the player must jump over two barbarians thrusting their weapons and duck from another throwing his poison dart with deadly aim to save his love, a tasty morsel indeed! Jungle Hunt one of the first side-scrolling action games in which the player controls a running and jumping hero instead of a vehicle. It also has one of the first examples of the parallax scrolling effect where background layers scroll at different speeds to create a psuedo-3-D effect. The game is divided into four scenes. The first three scenes are auto-scrolling stages (rope swinging, underwater crocodile combat, boulder dodging) while the fourth is a fixed screen stage where you jump over the kidnappers and save the damsel-in-distress. The original version of this game was called 'Jungle King' and starred a hero who was so Tarzanesque that Taito almost got into some legal trouble over it. Even the logo on the game's marquee mimics Tarzan by using a font similar to Tarzan's logo from the newspaper strips and 70's comics. Jungle Hunt is the more well-known version in which the Jungle King was replaced by a pith helmeted jungle Explorer. Other Jungle Hunt changes include the first stage's vines being replaced with brown ropes and the brown-skinned natives on the final screen are now green and the brown pixels of the boiling pot's fire are now pink. One graphical quirk in both versions of the game is that the hero's outfit and hair color change in each scene to fit the colors used in the rest of the stage's sprites. It's even more glaring in Jungle King because the hero's hair color is different in each scene.
Player Characters:

Enemy Characters:

Other Characters:

Screenshots (click to see full-sized):

Game also appears in:
Taito Legends (PS2), Taito Legends (X-Box)
ScrollBoss Section Links:
Sprites - Tatio sprite hub page Minus World - mentioned in the "Run, Woman, Run!" article Logos - Jungle Hunt and Jungle King logos

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