DJ Puff

The Good
The colorful, nice-looking graphics, the addictive arcade action, the well-animated little characters, the great music. If you liked CJ you'll probably find it quite rewarding to play.

The Bad
For a start, DJ Puff himself jumps far too slowly, making avoiding enemy missiles nigh on impossible at times. His death sequence, every time you lose a life, takes an irritatingly long time. Some situations in the levels require the use of flame breath, others need bombs. You can collect both, but can't alternate between the two. Levels 2 and 4 are boring and slow. It's impossible to tell how close you can move to the edge of a bed of nails before you die. When precision jumping is involved, this becomes ridiculous. At the beginning of Level 3, for example, there's a pit of sinking sand which just looks like a yellow patch of ground. And the worst problem of all is the fact that all too often you can't see where you're jumping. You have to hope for the best you land on a platform and not an enemy or a pit of nails. This game contains very cheap ways of getting you to lose lives, and often you have to rely on luck rather than judgement. Or perhaps more play-testing was needed.

The Bottom Line
Puff the dragon (star of Little Puff) has grown up and is now a DJ. However, one day his CD collection is confiscated by Captain Kripp, the tyrannical gorilla who rules the tropical island on which Puff lives. So it's up to you, as Puff, to make your way across 2D scrolling platform landscapes, collecting all the CDs as you go. Being a dragon, Puff has fiery breath. He has an unlimited number of fiery boomerangs at his disposal, whilst bombs and flame-breaths can be collected (either from certain parts of the levels or from vanquished enemies). There are five levels, all filled with everything from killer snails to spear-throwing natives. The final level - set in Kripp's fortress - ends in a showdown with the music-hating monkey himself.

The Good
Learnable if off-kilter jump physics Pleasant music

The Bad
Irritating enemies Unclear and ugly graphics

The Bottom Line
DJ Puff on the DOS platform seems awfully underwhelming when you consider that Crystal Caves was released just two years prior. "DJ Puff" in comparison looks like a product from the previous epoch. The animation is jumpy and jagged and the graphics are passable at best.

The controls and gameplay are equally crude. The jump physics aren't the worst -- you can get hang of them fairly quick, and controlling Puff in the air isn't difficult (although he has an odd habit of jumping for no reason if you rapidly press several keys in a row?!) -- but the character's interaction with platforms is pretty confusing: when jumping up towards an apparently solid platform, he can phase through it like a ghost, but only to a limited distance before he hits an invisible wall and plummets back down... That said, although jumping feels janky, the first two levels at least don't seem to feature any particularly frustrating jumps.

The enemies are a lot more frustrating. Some of them jump or launch projectiles at completely unpredictable times, which can result in a death you couldn't possibly see coming. Thankfully, you get quite a lot of bombs that can kill enemies from a distance, but their functioning is janky at best; sometimes you can plainly see the bomb hitting the enemy, only to leave them unharmed.

The level of difficulty is annoyingly high. In some parts you need to leap to reach off-screen platforms, or jump into pits you can't see (if you're lucky you won't fall right onto an enemy). Better be prepared to memorize each level and the optimal way to defeat each enemy. Each mistake ends in losing a life, extra lives are very rare, and there aren't even any level passwords, so be prepared to start from the beginning many times if you want to complete the game. On the plus side, upon dying you instantly respawn where you died, so you don't lose any progress that way.

There's just one song (although, curiously, you can change it mid-level by attacking a block numbered "4"...), but it's not that frustrating.

Concluding -- I recommend you skip this one, unless you enjoy games that offer a challenge and don't mind if they're otherwise awful.