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.

Game 10: Amiga Chinese Checkers (1987)

United States
Released 1987
Genre: Board Game
Developer: Jimbo Barber
Date Started: 26 June 2025
Date Ended: 26 June 2025
Total Hours: 0.5
Difficulty: -
Final Rating: 11

I’m switching to a quick rating for these little adaptations to save some time. Chinese Checkers is a simple board game adaptation of the classic Chinese Checkers game. This looks fairly alright and seems like a solid implementation, until you actually try to play it. The mouse control is super finicky and laggy, making it hard to drag and drop the pieces (heck, even the movement of the mouse cursor itself is super choppy). It features computer players, which is nice, though I didn’t get far enough to see how well they play, because the game crashed to a Guru Meditation error after a while and I lacked the patience to start over. It gets a 4 for Programming because it’s basically a decent implementation (and also makes fine use of menus), but the Controls are just too bad to be enjoyable (2). It has no Vibe (0), the Graphics are decent (3) for a board game, there’s of course no Story (0), and nothing to show in the Audio department (0). Ultimately, it’s not very Fun (2), thanks to the laggy controls and the crash I experienced pretty early. This gives it a final rating of 11.

For some reason, apart from Jimbo Barber, the game is also credited to 17 Bit Software, which I was unable to verify. It’s never mentioned in the game proper or the documentation. It was likely conflated with another similar adaptation, Chinese Checkers from 1989 which was indeed published by 17 Bit Software.

As for Jimbo Barber, he seemed pretty active in the Amiga PD scene, we’ll meet him again shortly for 1987s Rock Slide and Landing at Io, 1989s Star Trek: The Game, and 1990s Destination: Moonbase. He’s also credited for Sextimates, an adult game from 1990, which looks odd and would have been an interesting entry, but it’s a commercial game, so I won’t cover it here.