Game:

Gold Miner Joe (2004)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 20:04

8,446 views

45

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Gold Miner Joe is a platform game released by Arcade Lab for the PC. As the name suggests, you take control of a gold miner named Joe, exploring different mines and collecting gold, gems and other goodies. You have to collect all the gold nuggets in one mine to advance to the next one. Standing in your way are various enemies patrolling some platforms or flying around in the air. The enemies you encounter are cavemen, which also take the most hits, little crawlies with green and red shells, birds that drop rocks when you pass beneath them and occasional bats. There are also guys popping out of green barrels, firing their rifles at you when you're standing on the same platform as them. You can knock them back in the barrel if you time it well enough and pelt them with a rock just as they stick their head out to shoot. Speaking of which, to defend yourself you throw an infinite number of rocks with the "SHIFT" key and also drop sticks of dynamite with the space bar and you start off with 6. On the hard difficulty settings, your dynamite supply is restored after every level, whereas on easy and medium it's not, so once you use it all up, the only way to refill is to find a dynamite crate which gives you another 6 sticks or however many you've used. You can never have more than 6 though, so before grabbing the crate, try to use the sticks you already have, otherwise you're pretty much wasting the rest of the crate you just found, because Joe collects it even if you haven't used a single stick and don't actually need it ! The dynamite is best used for taking out a group of enemies at once, instead of taking them out one by one with rocks. It's also used for uncovering hidden items: wherever you see small cracks in the ground, place a stick of dynamite close by to blow a hole in the ground, revealing extra lives, gems, or mining equipment like pickaxes and shovels, though you may also find something useless like fire or a rock. There are 3 difficulty settings: easy, medium and hard. These determine how many hits the enemies take before dying and how many hits Joe takes before losing a life: easy it's 2 hits, medium is one hit and hard is zero hits, meaning you die instantly upon contact with any hazard or enemy. Once you lose all lives it's game over and no continues, so the only way to pick up where you left off is to enter the password for the level you died on. The password for each level is shown on the "M" (map) sign in that level, provided you get to it without dying in the process. Even on the hard setting, I find this game to be really easy: there are no bosses, no secret areas, no unlockable levels and overall no change in theme - just keep going from level to level, throwing rocks at enemies and grabbing items. It gets monotonous pretty quick because there's little to no challenge whatsoever ! The only thing that keeps the game going is the sheer number of levels ! It's like they knew the game is very easy, so they added a lot of levels so it'd seem worth the time. Compared to how hard games like Ninja Gaiden or Adventure Island are, this is a good game to play after playing those, just so you may kick back and relax. The game has 3 soundtracks (5 if you count the bonus stage theme and the intro theme) which cycle from level to level - they're not bad actually, despite repeating a lot. Overall, Gold Miner Joe is not bad. It's a playable little platformer with a silly and cartoonish theme to it, but the replay value is pretty low because of the repetitive nature of the game and the overall lack of challenge. Try it out - it will hold you interest, at least for a little while.

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