Jail Break.

It's been a little too busy here at the Victory Pellet Vault the last couple of weeks but yesterday I was able to put in a couple of hours playing X-Box Live. I decided to check out Game Room on Live and was very happy to see that they had updated the arcade with quite a few new title choices as well as a ton of Activision Atari 2600 titles.

The game that I spent the most time playing yesterday was a little gem released by Konami in 1985 called Jail Break. The premise of the game is that a mass riot has broken out in a Federal prison, the inmates have captured the Warden and are holding him hostage, while they also roam the streets terrorizing its citizens and killing any law official they happen to see.

Jail Break is a side-scrolling game where you are in control of a lone police officer called in to deal with the riot, starting off with merely your service revolver you can obtain two more weapons (a bazooka and tear gas launcher) by saving the civilians you come across, I was stuck with the revolver most of the time as my run and gun method unfortunately didn't lend itself to civilian safety.

This is a pretty tough game as the inmates do not just merely walk towards you, they swarm you while at the same time throwing Molotov cocktails at you and using their own firearms to try to kill you. I wasn't able to get very far in the game during my limited play time but I definitely had a blast playing it. You have to be pretty careful on how fast you advance on the screen as more often than not you'll end up walking into an oncoming bullet.

At one point I shot a barrel with my bazooka and a shirtless Batman appeared...smiled at me and then disappeared. I'm not sure what that was all about but at least it gave me a pretty hardy chuckle.

A little research shows that this game was inspired by John Carpenter's Escape From New York and that there is an Easter egg of sorts...a type that I've not heard of before...if you use your tear gas gun on the first sniper in the window it will reveal a brief glimpse of a pixelated topless female. I am going out on a limb here and saying that Microsoft made sure that was removed before it was released on X-Box live.

Thanks to the Twin Galaxies scoreboard, the high-score holder for Jail Break is Martin Deem with 265,450 points, recorded by referee on February 21st, 1985.

Universal Theme - Nigel Godrich (Scott Pilgrim Original Score)