Zool 2

Year 1994, summer vacation, four o'clock in the afternoon. Some purple alien flashed across the monitor and I spent the next twenty minutes searching in vain for where I actually was and what the game wanted from me. Zool 2 by Infogrames was exactly like that — colorful chaos that gradually crystallized into something pretty usable.

It's a side-scrolling platformer, a sequel to the original Zool from 1992. You play as a purple ninja-ant from another dimension — and yes, that's the actual game description, not the result of a hallucinogen experiment. A character named Zooz was added, so in two-player mode you could play it with your buddy sitting next to you at the keyboard, which was still quite a rare bonus for PC platformers in the mid-nineties.

The gameplay loop is straightforward: run, jump, eliminate enemies, collect stuff. Zool moves swiftly, at times uncomfortably so. The pace is higher than the competition and the game throws enemies and obstacles at you at a tempo that in 1994 felt like a major advantage — today it's more of a reason why you die before you manage to get your bearings. The levels are thematically divided, the graphics are sharp and contrasty, the color palette sometimes bordering on physical pain. Sound Blaster accompanied it all with music that couldn't be turned off fast enough.

Zool 2 was clearly Infogrames' answer to Sonic and Mario — something fast, colorful, with a mascot character. On the Amiga, the series had a stronger foundation; the PC version felt like a proper port, not a labor of love from the studio. What the game retained was its visual style — that garish nineties aesthetic has its unhealthy charm today. What aged poorly is the difficulty in the "learn by dying" style, without much of a safety net between checkpoints.

Today Zool 2 appeals mainly to those who want to remember what platformers looked like when the PC was still desperately trying to catch up with consoles. It's not a masterpiece, but you'll spend a pleasant twenty minutes with it in your browser — or you'll realize that the purple ninja-ant from another dimension wasn't the reason you were glued to your computer all night in the nineties.