Zulu

The Good
Actually, Zulu isn't set in the jungle at all, but its theme suggests that it is. The game is right up there with other games like Firebird, such as Headache and Park Patrol, that feature a simple objective and doesn't involve a huge plot, unlike most of today's games.

The game is just like Pac-Man but it is slightly different, in the way that you cannot stop moving once you push the joystick in a specific direction, and that the 100 golden masks that you need to collect are scattered around each of the mazes that you have to negotiate. The Zulu warriors that you need to avoid are quite aggressive. On more than one occasion, I attempted to get a mask only for a Zulu warrior, who was quite a distance away from me, go to my spot immediately and I had to use my shield. It's as if they were saying “Oh no, you don't”! The added cauldrons scattered around each of the mazes have a side effect, and encourage the player to think twice before going along a certain path to get to a mask.

The graphics were good at the time. The mazes are color-coded red, blue, and green for some reason. The player's character is animated nicely as he walks along, and the golden masks look cute; they look like happy faces with feet and hair, both which are also animated. Also, when you are leaving a maze, the screen scrolls to the new one, which I think is much better than the flick-screen effect.

There are nice sound effects in the game, and out of all of them, I like how you activate your shield. Doing this causes the player to whistle, annoying any Zulu warriors nearby. There is no background music in the game, but only on the title screen (although I do like to imagine some tribal music playing when you lose a life). However, I don't think its absence warrants a comment in “The Bad” section as a lot of games released around its time have no music whatsoever.

The player is given a choice of what control methods they can use, be it joystick or keyboard. I found the joystick easy to use, that way you don't have to spread your fingers across the keyboard. Finally, the game doesn't have an ending; it is just one of those see-how-far-you-get-without-running-out-of-lives type games.

The Bad
Ironic that after the beautiful loading screen in Headache, the one in this game is absolute crap.

The Bottom Line
As mentioned earlier, Zulu is one of those games with a simple objective, and that's what I enjoy about them. The graphics and sound is good, and the game itself is considered the score-attack type, since there is no real ending.