Ninja Tuck II: Booka
Release type: Retail
Release date: 1995
Levels: 10
Author: A-J Games
Retail price: $40 (with Ninja Tuck)
Related games: Ninja Tuck
Not to be mistaken for Yurik Nestoly's Ninja.
Often when I dropped in on my eponymous associate he would sing the refrain to a pop song that struck him as silly on some level. One of his favorite quotes was from Suzanne Vega's "Luka": "My name is Luka / I live on the second floor." The way he sang it, I imagined Hervé Villechaize popping his head over the bannister to welcome a new tenant. Whether due to the accent or my own whimsy, I also misheard the name. Thus, continuing the series of in-jokes from our first game together, I named its sequel Ninja Tuck II: Booka.
Whereas my earlier insertion games were flimsy, half-hearted affairs, my work on Ninja Tuck had inspired me to new levels of ambition. Having established a basic framework, for my second go around I was determined to make everything as original and as flashy as I could. Thus aside from the sprite, I redesigned everything from the ground up. As in Peach the Lobster I designed all of the enemies around a common theme — in this case plants — and for consistency I drew all of the sprites and backgrounds in Deluxe Paint. I even dragged in Metamorf to animate some in-game elements.
Why I settled on the plant thing, I am unsure. To achieve it, I pulled on vague memories of all of my favorite botanical levels from the previous five years. Those included Sega's Land of Illusion (the Game Gear sequel to the 8-bit port of Castle of Illusion), the Aquatic Ruin Zone from Sonic 2, and great swaths of Epic’s Jill of the Jungle. And then there were the monsters. It’s hard not to reference Piranha Plants, and the ones I had in mind were from Super Mario Bros. 3.
One of the later levels is based on a technique hit upon by James Faux of Eclypse Games, and used in his game Mortal Harvey. As an elevator rises, threats gradually present themselves; at the end of the ride, the floor opens up and the player moves on to the next level. In design terms, the level is all trickery. The player remains stationary, while the background animates; different columns of tiles shift at different speeds to create an illusion of parallax scrolling. Monsters slowly scroll down from above, to create the impression that the player is rising to meet them. My implementation was rather clumsy, but these sorts of levels do add variety.
James Faux also helped me to address that final bugbear of RSD’s engine, original music. For months I had been fussing with Amiga-styled music trackers, which consist of low-res digital samples keyed to MIDI data. Compared to the FM synth that Game-Maker supported, tracker music seemed like the way of the future. Furthermore, this stuff was easy to write. Thanks to the mid-’90s demoscene explosion, there was a free tracker for every UI flavor or song format one might like.
There were no obvious tools for RSD’s preferred format. I knew that someone had to be writing these .CMF files, as Epic Megagames used them for all of its early projects — Jill of the Jungle, Solar Winds, Brix. I was tempted to rip this music, which was as simple as looking for the correct headers and renaming the file extensions, but again I wanted to do something original. If I couldn’t, then to my mind it was better to keep using public domain material, even if it meant recycling the same pieces in every game I made.
For months I had been nagging RSD about better music support. I now know that there were complex plans on the board, but at the time my whining was met with silence. By the time of Booka, my petulance had reached a peak. With the aid of some awkward command line tools, James Faux and I were able to convert simple .MOD files to MIDI, and then to .CMF. It was a process of trial and error. Usually the result sounded like an angry modem. With a few tweaks, it might sound like an out-of-tune kazoo. Awful, but original!
Thus I scored my first game. Two or three tracks are by James Faux; the rest is all me, mostly to the game’s detriment. And yet, I was proud. Later I lopped off part of the intro music, adjusted its voicing, and turned it into the A-J Games theme.
After this experience I contacted RSD, and told them that I was “on strike” until they got the music situation in order. I wasn’t going to squander any more energy until I got the features that I wanted. Thus I rode out high school on small-scale games and half-baked experiments, waiting for a cue that never came. It would be years before I tackled and finished another game of this ambition.
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Contents
Story[edit]
Tucker Harding had just returned from India, where he'd barely escaped the followers of the cow god, Ghamuta.
He arrived at Logan and got his luggage. As he began to leave, however, he was accosted by a grinning figure in green robes, carrying a small tree.
The figure extended a hand to him. Opening it revealed a small petunia.
"Take this flower, sir, as a gift from us to you."
Tuck wasn't up to this. "Go away."
The figure frowned. "Please, take this flower."
"No! I don't want your stupid plant. Get lost!" He trudged away.
The figure glared at him.
"You dare to refuse our botany? We shall see about that!"
By then, however, Tuck had already left.
As Tucker waited outside for his ride, the automatic door behind him opened. Before he had a chance to react, four men, dressed identically to the figure from before, jumped him and dragged him into a nearby van.
When Tuck regained consciousness, the van was coming to a halt. The rear doors opened, and Tuck was yanked from the vehicle.
Outside was a strange land, with immense vines reaching in all directions, holding up entire boulders as if they were dandruff.
"You have angered Booka," growled the nearest weirdo. "By refusing his child, you have commited a most heinous sin, and you must be punished.
"Booka?" A strange expression crossed Tuck's face, half amusement, half confusion.
"You will be kept here, in Booka's heartland, while we ask for your punishment. Do not move."
And with that, the four figures piled back into the van and drove off, leaving Tuck scratching his head in the dust.
He stared after the quickly-disappearing vehicle, standing in a daze.
"Um." Tuck blinked a few times. "This kind of sucks."
Instructions[edit]
How To Be A Ninja
- G: Slash Left
- H: Slash Right
On Numerical Keypad:
- 7: Jump Left
- 8: Jump Up
- 9: Jump Right
- 4: Walk Left
- 6: Walk Right
- 2: Duck
- 0/Ins: Throw Shuriken
- Space Bar: Total Spaz!
Bad stuff[edit]
- Bookling
- Goomy Flipes
- Leaf
- Vampire Carrot
- Rolling Flower
- Acorn
- Steel Magnolia
- Technaflipes
- Dwarf Tree
- Squid
- Mushroom Person
- Thorn
Good stuff[edit]
- HP
- 1-Up
- 100 Points
- Extra "Spaz"
- 5 Shurikens
- Level Exit
Levels[edit]
- 1 - Vine Jungle
- 2 - Cave
- 3 - Garden
- 4 - Water Cave
- 5 - Temple
- 6 - Tower
- 7 - Metal Plant
- 8 - Nuclear Power
- 9 - Booka
Credits[edit]
Graphics, Sound, Idea: Aderack
Music: Aderack & OmegAkira
Character Based On, Voice: Tucker Harding
Engine: Recreational Software Designs
Testers:
- Hackman
- Morphio
- Omegakira
- Silverhawk
- Joe Chapman
- Terence
- Riley
(Hi there, Rike!)
Thanks to: Nick Asselin, for those nifty round ideas
Availability[edit]
Ninja Tuck II was intended as a registration bonus for the original Ninja Tuck. Prior to the Archive's online presence, Ninja Tuck II was not publicly available.
Archive History[edit]
Ninja Tuck II was retained as part of the archive from the game's inception.
Links[edit]
Sites[edit]
Interviews / Articles[edit]
Misc. Links[edit]
Downloads[edit]
- Ninja Tuck II: Booka (3.6 MB)
- Overall map (11 kB)
- Level 1 (Vine Jungle) map (124 kB)
- Level 2 (Cave) map (136 kB)
- Level 3 (Garden) map (24 kB)
- Level 4 (Water Cave) map (252 kB)
- Level 5 (Temple) map (247 kB)
- Level 6 (Tower) map (17 kB)
- Level 7 (Metal Plant) map (108 kB)
- Level 8 (Nuclear Power) map (150 kB)
- Level 9 (Booka) map (83 kB)
