by:	December 12, 2005

In the good ole days of arcade Joust was fun mostly because you could actually play with others, and because it was fairly simple. Basically in this game you control a guy on top of an ostrich, and you must flap your wings by rapidly tapping the A button, and when you touch an oncoming Jouster, as long as you are higher than them, you knock them down into a green ball. You then collect the ball to gain points; otherwise the buzzard they were riding comes back and picks him up. There are also pterodactyls that fly around terrorizing you, and they actually fly and swoop faster than the guys riding buzzards. They are particularly tricky to dodge and even trickier to defeat but if you do defeat them you are rewarded.

The guys how transferred the game to Xbox 360 did improve it a bit while keeping with the mood of the game. You see some 3D backdrop, with characters that are still sprites, but better looking, more colorful sprites than the original. The sound is also done well enough, although you have to keep in mind it is two decades old.

Other options in the game is making a bug so that pterodactyls are easier to defeat, although you can’t get ranked doing that, you have scoreboards, and you even have online co-op or versus. Still the bad thing about the game is, it will probably be annoying, or feel broken to a lot of younger gamers, but most older gamers will definitely appreciate the simplicity but difficulty of the game.

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Joust is a pretty good game, but it is strictly only for those who were actually gaming when the game was still out in the arcades, and at 400 points or five bucks you can’t go wrong. Put together the updated visuals with the classic gameplay and you have a pretty solid title.

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