Toobin'

Tubing down a river on an inflatable ring — that's Toobin' in a nutshell. It's not a game about leisurely water travel like you'd imagine. It's more about not getting smashed against rocks, tangling yourself in vegetation, and just barely keeping your grip on this cursed unstable contraption.

It's a cocktail of platformer and racer. The river tunnel pulls you forward, you move left and right, jump between obstacles, and grab items along the way. Except your play time is limited and the current is just pixels behind your back — it's not a race against time, it's a battle against the physical uncontrollability of your own position.

The controls are an awkward mash of things that don't belong together. You can push the tube left or right, but jumping on an inflatable ring behaves like a square peg in a round hole. You feel the lag, the lack of that sweet spot for when to launch and when it's too late. Yet—or perhaps because of this—that's exactly what makes the struggle fun. When you actually make it through the first few scenes without splashing into the water, it's a shaky kind of victory.

The graphics are typical DOS from the late eighties: colored pixels, nine-pixel characters, speaker sounds that annoy more than they please. For its time it was an original pitch — no dungeon, no space nonsense, just an inflatable ring and a river. Everyone could take a look, but hardly anyone remembered it a week later.

Today there's nothing particularly enlightening about it. It's not a classic like Lemmings or Prince of Persia, but it's not total rubbish either. It's average with one interesting idea, worth firing up in an emulator to feel what made the eighties briefly fun. Five minutes is about right, then it repeats and the novelty wears off.