Journey to the Center of the Earth

The Good
The game did have some nice drawn or scanned background graphics. The death screen comes to mind here. The sound effects were even astounding for the time. Especially the intro-song of developer ‘chip’ was rad.

Oh, and since this was a very bad game the fact that it can be played through in under a half an hour must be counted as a good aspect too.

The Bad
Good grief, this game was a mess.

The gameplay on the big map screen was repetitious and rather pointless: You directed your character with four arrow keys North, South, East or West. But you did not once in the game get an indication of where you were at the moment. You could set red markers on the map yourself, but what use is that if you only barely know where you start and have no clue of how far you moved with one push of a direction button?

So you had to resort to the text windows that describe what went on. And most of them were of not much help either, since they told you only what just happened, not what lied ahead.

Then you had the random events. Sometimes they meant you had to play a mini-game like Evade-the-Mammoth or Whack-the-Pterodactyl, most of the time they just meant you get randomly injured. Or poisoned. Or sick. Nothing you could really do about it, except hoping that your med kit suffices for the random number of times bats bite your head in this playthrough. It was rather annoying to just barely survive a mini-game with a dozen rocks falling on your irresponsibly helmet-less head and then die because “some boiling water dropped through a crack in the ceiling … on your head”.

Apart from some nice backgrounds the graphical presentation was awful, bad animations and a low frame rate made the action-segments even worse than they were made by clumsy controls.

And although you certainly wouldn't hunger for more in this game, it really was ironic that this ‘epic journey’ was so short and poor on content. There were four plot-important locations with one special screen each - and that’s it. The rest of the underground world was just empty room and gas and magma chambers, that would kill you instantly when you entered them. Which you would on a regular basis, because you didn't know where you were or how far you we're traveling with one move...

The Bottom Line
It was not much of a game, quantity- and quality-wise. Of course - being a dumb little kid at that time - I played it over and over again. That I managed to beat it in record time out of sheer luck with the random events and remembering every single step when I had the attention span of a sleep-deprived woodpecker really does not speak in its favor.