Jug

When in the hands of talent...

Jug is a scrolling shooter by one of my favourite companies, Microdeal. It's set in the distant future and we are tasked to save Spiraeus, a living planet. That's suffering from a nasty tumour that urgently needs to be eliminated. However, an autoimmune system thinks you're a threat so unleashes its defences intent on your demise!!

Yeah, I know. This sounds really silly but stick with me because Jug was programmed by Paul Hunter (Armour-Geddon) and is no lazy Amiga port. In fact, quite the opposite and certainly pushes our old STFM to the limit.

Playing Jug is a strange and frantic affair, as it combines elements from games like Blood Money, Droid, and Return To Genesis. Sometimes combinations like this fail and sometimes they work! Check out this screenshot...

Some eye candy is pretty ghastly whereas others are great examples of beautiful pixel art.

One smooth shooter

Our ship moves left or right but also has the ability to fly. However, this is affected by gravity, similar to Alien World, and also requires fuel top-ups. The controls work well but movements are a little slow thus making it difficult to avoid the nasties without losing precious energy. The action is relentless with lots of baddies constantly zipping across your screen in various attack waves; it's a frantic hell and never seems to stop. You wanted excitement, you've got it!!

However, they aren't the brightest bulbs and appear to move/shoot blindly with little AI thus it's almost like they aren't even aware of our presence. Weaponry is an upgradeable mixed bag: however, the plasma gun is mounted far too low to be fully effective. How did that happen? Anyhow, replacing that with a laser cannon is lots of fun!!

Playing Jug is never dull and always fun because the action is near-constant and challenging. It will take practice to beat because of the map layout, which I found confusing. The enemies increase gameplay to a crazy pace and this makes the whole journey exciting and a thrill. Or at least try to - this is a tough game that will eat away your spare hours.

Look out for teleporters... And when death comes it's pretty demoscene'y. Which I love!

Aesthetics

The best thing about Jug isn't its humorous name (based on the ship's barrel-chested assets!!) but its visuals, which have been gorgeously designed by Martin Kenwright. It boasts ultra-smooth parallax scrolling using a cool metallic palette - so you should use a real Atari ST to fully appreciate the graphics breezing across your screen.

Theme music is a masterpiece, by Paul Shields. So leave the main menu be, to enjoy the incredible chiptune! In comparison, the sound effects are totally overshadowed, but they do their job good enough compared to the quality music.

Arghh, not again? Is it me? Am I actually this bad at games? How could this be? O_o

The CryptO'pinion?

Jug has all the ingredients to be a brilliant shoot 'em up but incorporates some weird mechanics that hogged my desire to continue. I would instead recommend any of the above-mentioned games along with Uridium, Cybernoid, or Sideways!! The gameplay difficulty is far too overwhelming and the map layout is quite confusing too.

Technically superb but I'm also on the fence because it's left me with mixed feelings. Plus the need to use a trainer, which is wrong. Or am I wrong?? What do you guys think about this game? Well, let me know in the comments below...

If you have a hard drive or Ultrasatan then grab this download which is so cool.

Floppy disk addicts can find Jug on the Stonish website.

Finally, and untested by me, here is how to get infinite energy and extra lives:
 Press and hold down the ESC key on the title screen and then use the mouse to click on the right-hand edge of the screen. This should help the game be a little more achievable, you'll need it!!