Review by: Eastman

This is a counter-review to the ones posted by Dave Z and Dark Falcon. I cannot say silly as many times as Falcon Boy, but at least I can offer a totally different view of the game. I got the it for $30 and I was pretty disappointed. Why? Give me a dollar and I'll tell you...

We all know EWJ2 is a slightly enhanced version of the SNES/ Genesis platformer from Shiny. Hmm, it started out with a mildy-amusing but painfully bad intro. No real story here, except for "save the princess". I would have just loved some FMV of the cartoon series, or original animation. Then you get a really fun tune at the title screen, where you can change the difficulty, enter a password, (should have had a save option) and view the control but not change it. Why do they taunt you with the bad button setup, almost as if you could fix it? I know a lot of people would like the "change weapon" button to be R, so easy to reach while still using the other buttons. Man, the loading screen is lame too, with a seemingly-64 color SGI image of Jim, unlike the Sega Cd game which had a nice little animation there. But what about the game, you ask???

I don't like how EWJ2 plays. Only a couple of levels are true go-anywhere platforming, the rest are gimmick levels put in for the sake of variety. There are some cool special weapons you can get, but they can be used in just a few of the stages, and you lose them if you die, which you will, so they're practically worthless. The enemies mostly hit you before you have a chance to shoot them anyway, with the most annoying being the fat guys in the shooter level.

The real attraction to the game is humor. Jim does wacky things like eating a "Tiny Elvis" and says lots of silly lines, including "That hurt me you know!" Got that, Falcon? Yeah, you will probably laugh when you have to dip cows in milk, or run from a flying salt-shaker. I guarantee you'll get used to the jokes after a little while, and then the total lack of depth starts to hurt. Almost no story, no scoring system, and no replay value. The ending is a joke too, like the first game, but it is 100% the same as the 16-bit versions, black background, tiny text and everything, so I did not enjoy it.

I bet you already know about the graphics, but I should say some levels don't look improved enough. There are places with no parallax, no background animation, and low-res colors. Here and there the game looks pretty nice though. I do love the music, especially the first-level Spot-like tune, but the tunes are way short, aww.

So, what we have here is a game that you will laugh at for a while and then get tired of, I'm afraid. It's a pretty good rental, I admit. If you need a platformer fix, Sonic Jam, Magical Hoppers (import version of Pandemonium), Mega Man 8 or X4, and Metal slug would all be much better choices. I don't want you all thinking I am super-critical and hate most games, that's not the case. I just don't like shallow games such as this one. I do like bananas, but that is irrelevant.