Top Banana (Amiga)

Today I'm taking a quick look at obscure Amiga platformer Top Banana, because I must. I played this once when I was really young you see and it's haunted it me ever since. I can't actually remember anything about the game though, like I've formed a mental block in my head to protect myself from going entirely mad by thinking about it. But the time's come to confront the game one final time and hopefully get some closure on it.

Warning some/all of the screenshots in this post could likely give anyone a seizure, especially the image coming up next.

Techno techno techno techno.

Actually this tune is kinda terrible; I can't find a link to a video of it for you but trust me you're not missing out on much. Plus these same handful of images seem to loop like this for the whole song without ever changing.

In fact, here's a link to the intro of Amiga racing game Burning Rubber instead, which does a similar thing but pulls it off far better: Burning Rubber Intro (Youtube). It's got absolutely nothing to do with Top Banana at all, but that's probably a good thing really.

Crap, well this is a great start. The music isn't working, it plays the sound of someone drinking from a straw every time she jumps, and it seems that the graphics file must have gotten corrupted somehow, turning the level into an indecipherable mess of colour.

I'm playing Amiga port here, but the game was originally developed for the Acorn Archimedes and fortunately I've got that version on hand as well so we can see what the game's actually supposed to to look like.

Acorn Archimedes

Oh.

Well it turns out that the game really does look and sound that bad. Either the hardware just wasn't good enough at the time to support what they were trying to do with the visuals, or they had no idea what they were trying to do with the visuals. Back to the Amiga then.

Oh no, a bulldozer and a chainsaw have teamed up and are patrolling the branches to prevent KT from completing her sacred quest! Actually who knows what they're really meant to be, I'm just happy and a little surprised that I was able to spot them at all.

To be fair it's not quite as hard to make things out when the game's in motion because the background scrolls at a different rate to the platforms as I ascend through the level. There is no left or right in Top Banana, there is only up.

Rainbow Islands (Arcade)

It kind of reminds me of classic arcade platformer Rainbow Islands a bit actually, except without the rainbows. Or the music.
 
Also I have to admit that I'm finding Top Banana more fun to leap around in, as it doesn't lock me in one direction once I'm airborne. But then being less annoying than Rainbow Islands isn't exactly tricky.

Shooting enemies with my short range heart bullets makes them explode and release... hearts, similar to Rainbow Island's gems. These quickly float off screen though, cycling through colours as they go. I imagine that collecting the entire spectrum will get me something awesome, but right now I'm struggling to even catch one of them. I'm trying not to get too close to the enemies, you see. They've already taken off my character's jaw and forehead, down there on the bottom left of the frame, so she hasn't got much head left to lose.

Also there's little splats all over the platforms which get me points when I walk over them. I haven't found any health pick-ups to fix her ruined face though.

A completely different game (Kid Chaos - Amiga 500)

Here's a screenshot from something else to give your aching eyes a rest for a second. This is from Kid Chaos, a game made two years later running on the exact same hardware. Plus it also has music and three million layers of parallax scrolling in the background.

What's really impressive about Kid Chaos though, is that it's possible for the player to see... things on the screen. Like Top Banana it also features a character wearing red against a wall of solid green, but there's an obvious distinction between foreground and background layers created through different level of contrast and colour saturation.

Uh, what just hurt me?

Getting hit gives me a second of invulnerability flicker, though that doesn't entirely work in my favour as while she's immune to damage, she's also immune to landing on platforms. So I fall through a few ledges and lose a bit of progress each time I'm hit.

Atari ST

Oh I see what it was now! That pickup-looking item to my left is actually some kind of hazard and I have to shoot it to make it double in size before I can safely collect it. No idea what's going on with that.

This screenshot is of the Atari ST version of the game by the way, not that it's any different really. It seems that the game was released exclusively for beige/grey keyboard-shaped computers, so console and PC owners were quite safe at the time. CDTV owners on the other hand weren't so lucky, as there was version of the game published just for them as part of the Global Chaos multimedia disc. But then they owned CDTVs, so they already had bigger things to be miserable about.

COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT CDTV INFO BOX!

By the way if you don't know what a CDTV is (and why would you really), it was Commodore's attempt to enter the multimedia all-in-one living room box market in 1991 by taking Amiga 500 hardware and shoving it into a CD player. In fact it was not dissimilar in function to Philip's CD-i (you know, the one with the shitty Zelda games). This didn't quite work out for a number of reasons, the main one being that there was no multimedia all-in-one living room box market.

Also the idea of taking a popular computer system, removing the mouse and keyboard, making it so it can only play a tiny percentage of the machine's library, and then sticking it in a box to go under a TV was a pretty insane idea really. I mean, it'd never work out would it?

Oh shit it's raining... something! Some kind of food probably, but I'm not taking any chances. Not until I find an umbrella power up anyway, though they probably decided to hold onto that idea in case they decided to rip off Parasol Stars instead for the sequel.

Don't worry, this never got a sequel. That I'm aware of.

Well I've survived the downpour, but now I have a new problem. Getting around hasn't been so hard so far, KT actually moves quite well for the most part, but getting up onto this ledge will be tricky with that yellow enemy patrolling above her on the right because I don't have any control over the height of her jumps

The biggest threats I have in this game so far have been the enemies pacing back and forth across my jumping arc on a ledge above, especially when they're just a little too far up for me to shoot like this yellow bastard two branches above me on the right. I know you probably can't see him, but trust me there's an enemy there.

Success, I managed to jump around the yellow thing without getting hit and losing KT's eyes, so to celebrate I think I'll just blindly run straight into this wall for a bit. Actually that's really annoying and I'm not sure why it's happening.

Oh right, I must have collected something on the way up that flipped my controls, so now I'm having to play it backwards. Weirdly this isn't giving me as much trouble as you'd expect; I guess playing so many terrible platformers these past couple of years has given me enough practice to cope with it. The main issue I have is that I don't know when it'll wear off, so I'm having to sneak around a step or two at a time, paranoid that she'll suddenly fly off towards an enemy or down the hole all of a sudden and second now.

Aha, I went through my screenshots and found the likely culprit. Of course it had to be a mushroom, so many platformers were obsessed with the things back then. I blame Alice in Wonderland. Well, and Mario obviously.

You know, I don't think this reverse control power up is ever going to wear off. I'm going to be stuck with it forever, until I accidentally collect another mushroom and run straight into the back of a bulldozer I meant to run away from.

Oh by the way, these obvious yellow frogs are entirely harmless background objects and that decapitated head over there is the end level goal. Nearly there now.

Finishing the level drops the entire stage into freefall giving me a chance to float from side to side collecting... things. Whatever they are, they're getting me massive points.

In fact I refuse to live in ignorance any longer, one way or another I'm going to find out exactly what these things are meant to be.

There, I found one of the spritesheets for the Acorn version clearly revealing that they are meant to be various sweets and candies. Well there's a great message to send to the kids: eat as many sweets as you can find, wherever you find them. Eat them off the dirty jungle floor and eat them off the branches. Just make sure to shovel as many as you can into your face or you'll earn a pathetically low score and be a failure in the eyes of your peers.

Man, this game really is a perfect example of why it's generally not a good idea to use digitised objects as sprites. Unless you're developing a remake of Mortal Kombat or an incredible work of stop-motion genius that is, obviously. But there's a good reason why pixel art caught on as the dominant style for low res, low colour games.

A game with hand pixelled graphics (Ruff 'n' Tumble - Amiga 500)

That reason is because you can work miracles with the technique within the ridiculous graphics limitations that 16-bit games were stuck with at the time. Like Kid Chaos, the game in this screenshot is running on the same hardware as Top Banana and yet it looks like it belongs on a way more powerful machine. Of course it helps that it's using technical cleverness to get twice the colours on screen, but it also uses those colours far more precisely.

This time the foreground and background have the same level of contrast and saturation and the characters are a similar colour as their surroundings. Yet they still stand out, because of the careful use of shading to clearly define their shapes.

If you took the colour out of this screenshot everything would still be instantly readable. If you take the colour out of a Top Banana screenshot however:

Yeah, good luck with that KT.

"Beware Behave"? I finish level one and that's all the game's got to say about it? I didn't even get a health refill for my trouble!


STAGE TWO.

Oh shit what's that noise? Who set off the monkey siren? Oh, I guess I just lost.

Enemies in this tend to just pace back and forth on the platform they're on, so I though it'd be safe for me to glance away from the screen for a second. I was wrong. That yellow weather map cloud suddenly started to chase me and I was too slow to grab the controller and get KT out of the way.

So that's it then, game over. Despite the two hearts behind the score it seems I only have a single life in this and no continues. Back to the very start again.


SOON, BACK ON STAGE 1.

Oh crap, that can't be good. I decided to take my time on this attempt, trying to collect all the sweets and avoid taking damage if I can help it, but it would appear that the game has a time limit; the water level is creeping up beneath me as the entire rainforest is inexplicably flooded. This really IS trying to imitate Rainbow Islands!

Fortunately touching the water is not an instant kill, it only costs KT a little bit of health.


STAGE 2 AGAIN, YAY!

Oh that's a hilarious trick, certain enemies don't explode when I shoot them, instead they turn into mini versions of themselves and continue their patrol. There's no way to tell the different enemies apart before I shoot them, which is just what I need when I'm down to zero health and one mistake is game over.

So anyway, I made a mistake here, got another game over, and turned it off. The end.


The weirdest thing about Top Banana, is that despite the graphics, the sound, and all the many terrible design choices, is that it actually hasn't been that bad to play so far. At its core it's actually a functional arcade platformer with reasonably precise control and despite how ugly and cruel it is I just can't hate it.

Not that I'd recommend it to anyone either. The game's earned a place in history for sure as an excellent example of how not to do videogame art design, but gameplay-wise you might as well just play Rainbow Islands instead. Personally I'm just happy I can forget about the game now.

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If you want to talk about Top Banana, terrible looking video games, the site, or anything else that seems halfway relevant, please feel welcome to leave a comment. I always look forward to reading what you've got to say about my writing... with a sense of deep dread and foreboding. But also curiosity!