Rick Dangerous is a well-known platform game that parodies the tomb-raiding adventures of Indiana Jones. It was developed by Core Design and first published by Firebird Software in 1989.

Playing as Rick himself, you must make your way through four different levels, each of them crawling with enemies and riddled with traps. Just like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Rick is up against the Nazis from World War Two.

Rick can drop dynamite to blow stuff up (similarly to H.E.R.O. by Activision), and he can shoot a gun. Rick also has a stick that allows him to hit and temporarily paralyse enemies.

Dogs will run at Rick as soon as they sense him; soldiers will stick to strict patrol patterns, and occasionally something will even throw stuff at you.

Many traps are invisible and give no warning, which is a real shitter, as it means losing a life if you discover one.

In the final level, Rick must infiltrate a secret Nazi missile base and destroy the rockets, before they’re used on London.

Overall, Rick Dangerous is fun to play for a while, but will undoubtedly have you tearing your hair out eventually. It’s an unforgiving game where trial and error is the only way to progress. Either that or you have to have a really good memory to avoid all the traps. While this does make the game very challenging, it also makes it a bit of a missed opportunity in terms of lost playability. Or you could just use a trainer… 😀

I don’t know what designer/programmer Simon Phipps‘ target platform for this game was, but it could have been the Commodore 64. In spite of the small play window, this is a good fit for the system.

Was also released for Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, ZX Spectrum, SAM Coupé, and PC MS-DOS.

More: Rick Dangerous on Wikipedia
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