Approximate Release Date: May 1, 1992
Genre: Action
Developer: NovaLogic
Publisher: IGS
I couldn’t get past the first level of The Rocketeer.
The game starts you off in a plane race on an oval course against a red plane and a blue plane. You have ten laps to finish in first place. Ten laps of the most boring gameplay you’ll ever experience.
Just look at The Rocketeer in motion. It’s ugly and most of the screen is in a side view that is worthless. That little window at the bottom of the screen? That’s what you use to tell if you’re going to run into anything. I never looked at the top window. I quickly got a headache from focusing on such a tiny viewport.
But try as I might I couldn’t win the stupid race. Blue and Red were too good for me and, quite frankly, it was the opposite of fun or entertaining. Maybe the stuff in The Rocketeer after this first level is amazing and wonderful, but I’ll never know because I don’t want to keep trying to beat the first three minutes of garbage.
The Rocketeer seems badly thought out at a conceptual level. I don’t know anything about the movie or comic book it is based on, but I have to imagine it’s better than this. Do not play under any circumstance.
Tomorrow: If you know what Romance of the Three Kingdoms II is, you know why I’m not looking forward to figuring out how to play it.
I’ve been meaning to watching this movie again. I remember the game, not playing it though. Glad I didn’t.
Is the movie good? I know nothing about The Rocketeer except for what I learned from playing the game.
The NES game was pretty mediocre, but this one looks worse.
Saw the movie in the theaters when I was a kid. We loved it, so we bought this game for the PC. I am so glad you struggled with the first level (and by struggled I mean controlled your anger and didn’t hurl the controller into the screen).
We never won the race and I don’t remember anything else other than that. Thanks for the memory though!
This is one of those weird games where the more powerful platforms got the worse version of the game.
I’m sure there are more examples, but I’m pretty fascinated by that. Did the PC version look much different?
Not really, but then again – all I saw was that plane level! We never got passed it.