Toki

Toki started life in 1989 as an arcade action platformer from the Japanese studio TAD Corporation, published by Taito. Its premise is unusually easy to remember: the hero has been turned into an ape and his only weapon is a projectile spat from his mouth. That single idea shapes the whole game. Shooting and jumping have to be blended constantly, enemies arrive from both sides, and the platform layouts are built to force you to aim upward and diagonally rather than just straight ahead.

The arcade original stood out visually, with large colourful sprites and a cartoonish, slightly grotesque art style that did not look like most of its contemporaries. The Nintendo NES conversion had to fit that presentation onto far more limited hardware: a restricted palette, fewer sprites per scanline and no multi-layer background scrolling. The result looks plainer than the coin-op, but it keeps the level structures and the pacing, which depends on judging jumps precisely and reacting quickly to whatever flies in from the screen edge.

Difficulty is very much of its period. The game assumes you will memorise stages through repetition and treat losses as part of learning rather than as failure. Collectible items change the properties of your shot and give a short-lived advantage that a single hit can take away again. It is a one-player game and suits anyone who enjoys old-school console platformers with unforgiving tuning more than someone looking for a relaxed evening. Toki is remembered today mostly for its odd protagonist and distinctive artwork, which separated it from the crowd of late-eighties action platformers.