Casual Explosion's My Game Space page: Explosionville!!!
8.1 ultra recommended
Remember that shuffling, pointy-hatted wizard from the old Commodore 64 game Wizard (you may also know it as Ultimate Wizard)? Well, he's back and this time he's got a better idea than jumping around on platforms and avoiding monsters - instead he kidnapped a kid and a skeleton to do it for him! If you were just watching TV or rotting in your grave and a wizard kidnapped you, you might be a bit upset. To keep natural enemies Bucky (AKA Skin) and the corpse (AKA Bones) from squabbling, the wizard has promised them their heart's desire if they can retrieve all his gems.
Skin & Bones, from Addictive 247 Games, is a simple oldschool platform game. Gameplay involves jumping around from platform to platform and collecting all the gems on a level. Only Skin - a hip blue jeans and backwards baseball cap wearing kid with plenty of pockets - can collect gems and bonus coins. Only Bones - a horrifying arms outstretched walking animated skeleton - can destroy enemies and traps like spikes. Switching between them, you make your way through each level, bouncing on star springs and standing on each other's head and what not. Only one can be conscious at any time - switching to Skin immediately sends Bones into a deep sleep, and vice versa.
Foes include bats, crabs, robots, birds, little creatures that shoot at you, and walking candies. I found them to be fairly realistic enemies because I hate and fear those things as well. You don't have to press any attack buttons or keys to defeat these enemies as Bones - one touch of his corpse power and they're done for. Occasionally you'll meet friendly know-it-all gray furballs which give you hints about gameplay, but you can't defeat them so don't even spend twenty-five minutes trying.
Skin doesn't like water (or lava), so Bones must wade into pools so that Skin can jump on the skeleton's head and thereby cross safely. I've always read that animated corpses fear running water, so this aspect of Skin & Bones didn't really make sense to me. If I had designed the game, Skin would have to jump on Bones' head to cross lava, and Bones would have to jump on Skin's head to cross water.
I think that idea would work well, but one possible flaw is that Bones can't jump as high or far as Skin. For example, sometimes you have to jump the skeleton up on Skin to get a little extra height if you want to clear an obstacle. Unfortunately you can't run around with the skeleton standing on your head. Can you imagine how funny that would be? Ha ha! I'm gonna bust a
Oops I pressed the button too soon, so I’ll have to finish my review here in the Discussion section.
Of course there are wizard gems everywhere, just waiting to be scooped up. But there are also “bonus” coins on each level. Activate one and a letter (B, O, N, U, or S) will start floating upwards. Collect enough letters to spell a mystery word (I’ll let you figure it out) and you’ll receive 5,000 bonus points. This is the same basic idea from Mr. Do and it works just as well here. Sometimes you’ll be frantically trying to catch a letter before it floats up out of reach.
The graphics are simple but effective, and each of the worlds Skin and Bones travel through have appropriately moody background music. Your games are saved automatically using a slot system which is probably an attempt to make you think you’re playing a console game.
A two player version of Skin & Bones would be great, however since the levels are larger than the screen, working out scrolling issues could be difficult without using some sort of split screen display. So for now it appears the game is single player only. If you like platform games or skeletons or games where skeletons stand on people’s heads, you’d be crazy not to download this game right away.
Does anyone remember an old Amiga platform game where your character throws little gnomes across gaps so they can activate switches? I only played it a few times before I started cataloguing ghost sightings/haunting reports and lost track of the game. I always wanted to play that one again.