Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Atari Games created an Indiana Jones game based on the movie, Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom. It was one of the few Atari titles that used a film license (the other ones are the Star Wars Trilogy and Batman). The arcade game was created in 1985 during a time when Atari made experiments with speech synthesis. Almost every game used a few voice samples and Indy was no exception.

The gameplay is quite simple: the player controls Indy through the Temple of Doom. The only weapon Indy has is his whip. The whip can be used to hit enemies and reach other platforms. Indy can not jump and has to find other ways to reach platforms. If he does not pay attention he can also fall off the platform. Unlike older platform games, the Atari game has a pseudo 3D look which means that Indy can move up and down.

There are three main enemies in the game. If you collide with one of them, Indy will lose a live. The first ones are the snakes which just sit on the ground. One hit with the whip and they disappear. The second type of enemies look like Arabian warriors and can not be killed. If you hit them with the whip they will be disorientated for a while. Fortunately, they are not very smart. It often occurs that they fall off the platforms. The third enemy is Mola Ram (from the movie) and he throws flaming hearts at you if you don't keep moving. There is no way to avoid the flaming heart but the whip can destroy it. Other enemies are introduced later, e.g. a giant bat.

There are three different scenarios which are repeated until you recover the three Sankara stones. The first is the cave where you have to rescue children. (Interestingly, Indy only has to free the children and they seem to find their way out alone.) The next scenario is the mine cart. Other carts follow Indy and he can influence the direction of the cart while swinging his whip to hit enemies. The last scenario is in front of the temple shrine: Indy has to get a mystical stone. Unfortunately, the ground before the stone can disappear and Mola Ram, the shrine keeper appears after a while to throw more flaming hearts.

The graphics of Indiana Jones are well done although it is very obvious that the Atari engineers spend much more time on the Indy sprite than on the others. The animation on the enemy sprites look clumsy. The background graphics are painted well although all caves look the same.

As I have written before, Indy has voice samples. Unfortunately, they do not fit into the game and I think Atari re-used some of them in A.P.B. Especially some of Indiana Jones samples sound ridiculous. The classic Indiana Jones theme is played at the end of each game.

Although I would say that Indy is a nice platformer, there are some annoying things in the game that should have been fixed. The Arabian warrior is incredibly stupid and sometimes when Indy climbs to another platform you can see that a warrior jumps off the platform into his death. It's a miracle that they don't fall out of the mine carts, too. Indy is certainly not a bad game but it is the weakest of Atari's movie arcade games.