Jackal

http://meatfighter.com/jackal/

Jackal is an overhead run and gun game. The Jackal squad, a four-man team composed of Colonel Decker, Lieutenant Bob, Sergeant Quint and Corporal Grey, is sent to rescue soldiers kept as hostages by the enemy. The player controls the team in an armed jeep, which must venture through several enemy strongholds to rescue comrades imprisoned by the enemy. In each of the six levels, the goal is to rescue POWs from various buildings and then transfer them to helicopter dust-off locations. Once the soldiers are secure, the player must proceed to defeat the boss at the end of each level. In the last level, there are two bosses that must be defeated.

There is a point system that grants the player extra lives depending on the score attained. If a collision occurs with an enemy vehicle or the jeep is hit by an enemy bullet, a life will be lost. Some buildings contain one flashing prisoner; if this man is rescued, the jeep’s primary weapon will be upgraded. In addition, if enough prisoners are rescued, a weapon upgrade will be yielded during the unloading process to the rescue helicopter. The Jeep’s initial weapons consist of a machine gun and a grenade launcher. The grenade launcher can be upgraded into a rocket launcher, which can be further upgraded to shoot long-range missiles, and two kinds of spread missiles. Although the grenades and missiles fire in the direction that the player faces, the machine gun shoots upwards exclusively. This may seem like a restriction, but it provides a tactical advantage by enabling you to fire at enemies while retreating.

Use Options | Input to remap the keys or to configure your gamepad. Adjust your browser zoom (ctrl + mouse wheel) to fit the game within your display or hit F12 for full screen mode. The options menu also allows you to select between normal and hard mode. To see the real ending, you’ll have to beat the game in hard mode.

One last thing, you can run over enemy soldiers.

A tiny snippet of text would no doubt convince a few more people to check it out :slight_smile:

I edited the original post accordingly.

Nice one there ! I liked playing it although I found rotating the jeep left/right a bit hard and less sensitive.

I loved the art as well, cute grahpics & sounds :slight_smile:

Looks strange while scrolling on my makeshift graphics card (GeForce 8600 on Windows 7 64 Bit, Java 7, latest drivers): http://jpct.de/pix/buggy_buggy.png

Try adjusting the browser zoom.

That helps, but i actually never adjust the zoom. I use the default settings and that’s where it looks flawed.

What is your default zoom? How does it look at 100% zoom?

Nice little game. Like an oldschool acarde game -> very nice!!

But same problem as EgonOlsen with the default zoom.

What is your default set to?

100 %. I never adjust the zoom too like Egon.
After adjusing the zoom to 120% and then back everything works fine. I don’t know why.

Another suggestion … please think about the qwertz keyboard. I don’t like x and z. Please make y and z to shoot and not only z. Thanks =)

I was afraid of that. For each tile, it looks like it is pulling an extra row of pixels from the sprite sheet. I wonder if it is a consequence of the scroll offset; I’m scrolling by fractional values (e.g. increments of 0.25 pixels).

As for the keyboard, use Options | Input to remap.

nice, reminds me a little of Commando, was that you inspiration?

Is available as a non applet version?

It’s actually a remake of the NES version of Jackal, which was Konami’s response to Capcom’s Commando.

jackal.jar contains a main method. You’ll need the slick and lwjgl jars as well. The source is available if you want to mess with it.

It looks like I’m not alone:

I’m unable to reproduce this effect on 2 PCs that I have here. Also, I’m using XMLPackedSheet, which appears to use GL_NEAREST by default. I’ll have to research this further.

To anyone getting this problem, please post pics. Thanks.

Being an “Expert” level player in Jackal, I have to say that the positions of the enemies, triggers and everything are very accurate with respect to the original. I’ve only played the first level, but the graphics are also so similar that if it weren’t for the differences in animation I would have thought it the same.

But I’d like to know how you got it to such amazing accuracy. Do you have an emulator built-in which is reading off the original .nes file and then rendering the graphics?

One difference I noted is that in the original, you can press the direction key and fire key and he will launch a rocket/grenade in that direction without having to point the jeep in that direction. In yours, the rocket/grenade is launched only in the direction the jeep faces

For others not familiar to the game, you can play it online here:

http://www.virtualnes.com/play/?id=NES-JK

Thanks for playing. For a real challenge, try to beat hard mode to see the alternate ending scene.

My remake is not an emulation. But, I studied the game carefully in an emulator to reverse engineer it.

In the original game and in this remake, you do not need to wait for the jeep to rotate in the target direction before firing. Tap in any direction and then immediately hit fire.

For those experiencing graphical glitches, please try this alternate version:

http://meatfighter.com/jackal/jackal2.html

I added padding to the tiles in level 1. No need to adjust your browser zoom; leave it at the default of 100%.

Any download? Applets basically don’t work on Mac OS anymore. :frowning:

jackal.jar contains a main method.