Bumping Buggies

The Good
Data East’s Bump ‘n’ Jump is an arcade game where the object is to ram cars into the side of the road and jump over large obstacles, including large bodies of water. With the exception of the Sharp X1, not one computer received a home port; and as a Commodore 64 owner back in the day, the only closest thing I got to the game was a clone called Burnin Rubber. Another clone for the C-64 was Bumping Buggies from Bubble Bus.

The front cover for the game is well designed, and begins with a spelling mistake, followed by someone in a yellow car approaching a set of spikes. He isn’t thrilled at the idea and is oblivious to the car behind him. The title – with that same spelling mistake - is always animated on the initial screen, except when you are entering your name in the high score chart. I like the way it scrolls down when you press the fire button to start a new game. The cars you have to face have different shapes and colors so that you can tell them apart. The tracks also have different colors to reflect the four seasons. Sound-wise, a nice piece of music plays on the title screen where you can select which track you want to start off on (20 is the maximum). I suppose that there are more tracks than that. There is no music during the game, but a game of this sort doesn’t need it.

The Bad
I didn’t find anything bad about this game.

The Bottom Line
Since no official version of Bump ‘n’ Jump exists for early home computer systems (except the Sharp X1), it was up to smaller game companies to produce a copy of it, and one of these was Bubble Bus, who created a good clone called Bumping Buggies, in which the title is misspelled. It is faithful to Data East’s version, and the graphics and sound are OK. Definitely a title to add to your C-64 collection.