Game 11: Rock Slide (1987)

United States
Released 1987
Genre: Arcade
Developer: Jimbo Barber
Date Started: 26 June 2025
Date Ended: 26 June 2025
Total Hours: 0.5
Difficulty: 2.5/5
Final Rating: 11

Another real quick review for the second Jimbo Barber game I’m playing, Rock Slide. This is another Boulder Dash clone, and certainly not the last one I’ll encounter by any means. It’s a pretty bland port that seems decent from a Programming standpoint (4) and is written in compiled True BASIC. Alas, the Controls are horribly laggy (this seems to have become a pattern on these early arcade games...) and keystrokes are buffered. This weirdly even happens while a new level is building up. I was impatient and tried a few keys to maybe speed up the process, but this somehow managed to kill the player once the level started properly. Oh, well. So it gets a 2 in this category. The Vibe is non-existent (0), the Graphics are pretty bland and unremarkable (2), there’s no Story (0) of course, and the Audio only consists of a few beeps and boops that would even be shameful on a PC speaker (1). Ultimately, it’s not very Fun (2) because all of that. That gives it a final rating of 11.

Jimbo Barber announced his coming-up game, Landing at Io, in the About menu of this game, so that’s what I’ll be playing next.

Update: I couldn’t fomd Landing at Io anywhere, so this is off the table for now.