Johnny Bazookatone – is a three dimensional hero in a two dimensional world. This game was designed for the launch of the first Sony play station console but also made an appearance on the Sega Saturn and the trusty old IBM-PC in DOS format. The game was one of the first games to be released on the new Sony and Sega consoles and featured (alongside core designs thunder hawk) on a cover mounted CD (Game Pro Magazine) dedicated to the respective games soundtracks - rather good to they were.
As well as being on of the first new console games, Johnny Bazookatone was one of the first games released to have had it's graphics developed using the all new, amazing and somewhat expensive silicon graphics 3D workstations. Despite the all the firsts and the wonderful soundtrack - Johnny Bazookatone remains a 16-bit age Platform Game trying to hold its own in a world of 32-bit competition. Technically, there was nothing new in the game to make it stand out on the new consoles that it was designed to embrace.
A nice cartoon plot line, zany characters and sound effects and deep and funky atmospheric music tracks to not make a good game, they are merely the parts with which the
sum can be a success or a failure - Johnny Bazookatone has the quality in the parts, but the game-play is sadly lacking and becomes tedious after a short time. The enemies are dumber than many its 8-bit artificially intelligent counterparts and yet seemingly impossible to kill at times, rendering our purple-quaffed hero back at square one.
The sprites themselves are beautifully modeled and animate well and a lot of thought has gone into the design of each level. So positive and negative attributes weighed up; a 16-bit player in a 32-bit playground, a good platform game but a platform game none the less; tastefully drawn graphics, well designed characters and backdrops; interesting plot with a fail bit of comedy thrown in for good measure; beautiful soundtrack with various genres of music to cover different levels, e.g. atmospheric hip-hop in the prison and cartoon cookery music in the crazy chef's kitchens.
All in all it’s a good game but nothing for the hardware to scream about. Total verdict for this game is 6 out of 10.
