Adi Jr. (April 5, 1993 Localisation Beta)

I had this floppy disk somewhere in a drawer and pulled it out recently out of curiosity. Adi Jr. looks at first glance like part of some educational series that was sold in the nineties at hypermarket stalls — a small game with big pixels and simple MIDI music.

It's a platformer where you guide a character through simple levels full of obstacles and collectibles. The game carries the spirit of those older educational titles that were supposed to teach math or the alphabet, except Adi Jr. isn't clear about what it's doing. The levels are simple, the graphics are dirty and almost without animation. It looks more like something that crawled out of a beta version or localization experiment than an actual game.

The controls work and the platforming is straightforward — jump, collect, move on. Nothing catastrophically broken, just nothing interesting at all. The forbidden dimensions stretch on without incident, without a point, without a reason to look at it for more than five minutes. The first moments are just as boring as the last.

Historically speaking, it's interesting more as an archival piece. The name in the title, a comma, and a note about the localization beta tell you that this wasn't a finished project. Maybe it was practice for some bigger game, maybe an unfinished market exploration. Today it would fit in a collection of old games as an exhibit on "what went wrong in development," not as entertainment.

If you're trying to find hidden gems in the nineties, Adi Jr. isn't even worth a second look. It's more a case where DOSBox and archives emulate everything including errors that should stay buried. Playing it today only makes sense if you're archiving history or you have time left over after cataloging actual games.