Frankie Crashed on Jupiter
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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Frankie Crashed on Jupiter has convinced me of one thing: 12 year old kids wrote adventure games in 1985. Besides being filled with some really amazingly bad spelling and grammar (although not as consistently bad as that Aztec game or even the Masters of the Universe game), the space ship is called Frankie and you crash land on Jupiter, a gas giant.

FCoJ is another example of a game that sounds like it might have an exciting story and then turns the whole of the game into a really boring scavenger hunt. While crashing on and exploring another planet should be a wild bit of fiction with danger at every turn, FCoJ turns out to be a boring search around your crashed spaceship with danger at every turn. And what are you looking for? Pieces of your Commodore 64 computer! In the year 2111!

The writers attempted two different mazes in the overall game. I think. It's hard to say if they were supposed to be mazes or not. Each one had four locations which isn't really much of a maze at all. In both cases, I had found what I needed before even finding all four rooms in the maze! Which is just lazy on the programmer's part. Not that I'm truly complaining since mazes are generally just added to pad the amount of play time in a game. But if a programmer is going to add a maze, it's nice when they do something different or think up a new trick to navigate the maze.

Overall, the game was really easy. Like the mazes that weren't really mazes, quite a number of red herrings were added to this game that really weren't much of anything. It even seemed like some of the things in the game were there for a later part of the game. Perhaps the game was meant to extend into the city somewhat and the programmer's just decided to finally end it when they did. It really did seem half-finished, story-wise.

Another reason I tend to think the writers were young was the fact that the game actually allowed you to masturbate. While it didn't recognize the verb to masturbate, it did recognize FUCK. Any time you type FUCK anything in the interface, it assumes you want to masturbate and it drops all of your items so that you can get to work. The interesting part of this is that there is no drop all feature and utilizing the word FUCK actually becomes useful. Especially since a couple of items exist that you will lose if you drop them normally. But apparently you set them down gently while preparing to masturbate!



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