Joust CGA

An ostrich as a war horse. In 1983, this was an idea most reasonable people would have dismissed out of hand — yet Williams Entertainment pulled one of the most memorable arcade games of the decade from it.

Joust is an action game originally from arcade halls, available on PC in CGA version. You play a knight on a flying ostrich, zooming across a screen full of platforms and ramming enemy riders on emus. The rule is simple: whoever is higher at the moment of collision wins. The defeated rider turns into an egg, and you must collect the egg before a stronger enemy hatches from it. Then comes the next wave, and again, and again.

The controls have a specific weight that makes Joust an arcade game and not just a reflex test. The ostrich doesn't respond immediately — it builds speed, loses altitude, has momentum. You press spacebar or a button and it flaps its wings, but gravity does what it wants. This "spongy" control either becomes something you learn to love or bothers you the entire time. It took me about an hour before I stopped fighting the game and started fighting the enemies.

The CGA palette — orange, red, dark green — isn't beautiful, but for a four-color standard of 1983, Joust works surprisingly readably. Platforms, enemies, eggs — you can distinguish everything at first glance. Sound from the PC speaker is another story: beeping and hissing that announces the game's presence more than it enhances it. SoundBlaster was still a distant future back then.

What Joust retained is the loop. One wave lasts a minute, the reward is immediate, difficulty increases smoothly. In 1983 it was addictive, and surprisingly it remains addictive even today — at least for twenty minutes, until you get annoyed that you didn't grab that egg in time. For today's player, Joust is mostly a historical artifact: proof that simple mechanics with a touch of physical complexity can survive forty years without needing to explain why the game is good.

In a browser it suits anyone who wants to touch the roots of nineties action games. Pure mechanics, no filler, instant start. If you have ten minutes and a craving for something that won't take half an hour just to load — the ostrich awaits.