Blue Falcon 2.0

This little thing probably won't ring a bell for you after thirty-five years. Blue Falcon 2.0 is the case of a game that a handful of fans remember, the rest ignore, and the publisher buried long ago. You stumbled upon it completely by accident while digging through the guts of shareware archives from the mid-nineties.

It's a classic action platformer with exploration elements. You play as a character — we'll skip specific names here, since sources aren't certain — who moves through levels, collects items, tries to survive enemy attacks, and reach the goal. Nothing revolutionary. Nothing you haven't seen in ten other titles from the same era. The graphics are pixel art, brightly colored, and without grand ambitions. Sound? At best, zaps and bumps, nothing that'll knock your socks off.

But you know what, it plays pretty solidly. The controls respond instantly, jumps have the right weight, nasty stuff like catching on invisible boss hitboxes or cheap shots aren't overly punishing. Levels are short and straightforward, you're not wandering around for twenty minutes without a map. That's a plus — at least the game forces you to solve a specific section rather than wander aimlessly. The minus is that once you get the hang of it, there isn't much playtime left to enjoy.

Blue Falcon 2.0 is a representative of the nameless mass of games born in the shareware collections of the eighties and nineties. Nothing was wrong with them, but it was all the same. The moment Sonic, Mega Man, and later Doom came along, these quiet types died in the dustbin of history. Nobody cares about the memory anymore.

Today you can try it in an emulator or online, and after half an hour you know everything. It's neither scary nor disappointing, just old paper that rattled around in every desk drawer in the computer lab. If you dig the graphics and design story of the nineties, it's acceptable food for thought. If you want an action game to actually play, you've got a thousand better choices.