DOS Longplay: The Jungle Book Walkthrough
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The Jungle Book is a video game adaptation released in 1994 by Virgin Interactive and East Point software for the DOS and other video game consoles of the time. A lot of times, movie-to-game adaptations turn out mediocre to...bad, especially if the movie falls into the wrong hands *cough* LJN *cough* Luckily, it's not the case with this one. You play as Mowgli, obviously, through 12 different levels, called chapters, in typical side-scrolling fashion while climbing vines, jumping gaps and dealing with different enemies. The goal in each stage is to find a certain number of red gems out of a maximum of 15 and then find a character waiting for you somewhere in the level. Most of the time it's a friend of Mowgly, namely Bagheera or Baloo, but in some levels it's one of the the other characters in the movie - Kaa, King Louie and of course Shere-Khan - who act as stage bosses and you have to fight them. There is a difficulty setting where you select between "practice", "normal" and "hard". This affects how many gems you have to collect to advance to the next level, how many lives you start off with, the time limit in each level and how many hits both you and the enemies take before dying. In "practice" mode it's 5 gems and the enemies take one hit to kill, in normal mode it's 10 gems and 2 hits, and in hard mode it's 12 gems and 3 hits. Collecting all 15 gems in a level takes you to a bonus stage where you collect different fruit to increase your score, although this is ultimately useless since it doesn't add up to an extra life and the game doesn't save it in a "hall of fame" or something - no, you beat the game, look at the score for 10 seconds and then it's back to 0. I guess you could write down the score every time and compete with your friends, but that's not the point of the game - the goal is to beat the game, not to get a high score. So anyway, Mowgli has assorted "jungle weapons" to fight with: an infinite amount of bananas which do the least damage; "double" bananas, which inflict twice the damage of the single banana; boomerangs, which have a chance of delivering an extra hit to the enemies on their return; a blowgun that fires some round projectiles (maybe rocks ?) and finally an invincibility mask that isn't really a weapon - it activates when selected and protects you from damage until the timer indicated next to it runs down. Your lives are shown at the top-left of the screen, next to Mowgli's head, which also acts as your energy meter. The total score is in the middle and the remaining gems in the level are shown at the top-right. In the bottom-left you've got the current weapon and how much ammo it's got, in the middle there's the timer and finally a compass in the bottom-right which points to the nearest gem. There are three ways of dying: there's the traditional way - getting hit too many times: the color on Mowgli's head in the upper left depletes the more you get hit. If it runs out, you die. You can refill it by finding red hearts. There are also instant deaths, specifically falling in pits or in water. Basically the entire bottom of the screen is instant death, so watch your step ! You also lose a life if the timer runs out. You can refill the timer by grabbing an hourglass. The death sequence is pretty funny: two monkey doctors run in with a stretcher and carry Mowgli away. If you lose all your lives you get 3 continues from the beginning of the level you died on before getting "game over" and you have to start the game from level 1. There is no way to save the game and there's no password system - you have to beat it all in one sitting, which is a bit of a problem, because it's a pretty long game and it gets tough pretty quick, especially on the "hard" difficulty where the time limit alone is a challenge ! At the time this game came out, the graphics are pretty good - the characters resemble those from the movie, they are cartoonish and colorful and the music is a really nice touch, reusing popular songs from the movie like the opening song, "The Bare Necessities" and king Louie's "I wanna be like you". Sure, there IS some stock music here and there, but there wasn't a great variety of music in the movie to begin with, so it's excusable. The game also manages to hit all the key scenes from the movie: the meeting with Kaa, the elephant patrol, the river scene, the ruins where you meet King Louie and of course the fight with Shere Khan at the end, though they took some liberties with the last two, because if you watched the movie you know that Mowgli doesn't actually fight King Louie himself - Baloo and Bagheera come to his rescue. He also doesn't fight Shere Khan at the end - Baloo does, while Mowgli just ties the flaming branch to his tail, scaring him away. Final verdict: very good. With the exception of the lack of a save feature, the game is definitely an all time classic on the DOS, try it out !