Rayman The Short Trip (Ubi Soft, 1995)
0Rayman is an unusual platform game originally released for Atari Jaguar and DOS. Initially Rayman can only jump and avoid enemies, but he quickly acquires useful abilities such as his telescopic punching fist, the ability to grab onto ledges, and helicopter hair, which allows him to levitate for a few seconds during a jump. The telescopic punching fist needs some explanation: Rayman fights by literally throwing his fist! It returns to him, of course, and causes damage while going and returning. The longer he winds up, the farther his fist goes. The worlds are full of power-ups such as "Tings": blue orbs which give Rayman an extra life when he collects 100 of them. Rayman already has the telescopic punching fist in the shareware demo, but not the highly useful helicopter hair. The original demo was released in a self-extracting zip file which must be run with the "-d" argument in order to extract the necessary directory tree. Ubisoft later re-released the demo in a Win32 self-extracting archive which resolves that problem. There are 6 worlds in this game, with only one level from the first world playable in the shareware version.