NES Homebrew review: Jammin Honey

Jammin Honey is a hombrew NES game that scratches a nostalgic itch that I'm not sure too many people besides me have. There was a game in the 1980s on Commodore 64 called Jumpman, and my best friend and I loved the heck out of that game. The graphics were simple, but readable, the music was sparse, but catchy, and the action was frantic. It was a series of single screen levels where you had to collect these orby things while robots and other enemies tried to kill you. What made the levels really fascinating was that sometimes when you collected an orb, it would change something in the level, like a platform or ladder might appear enabling you to get to places you couldn't before.

The only other time I can remember seeing this particular kind of style gameplay was, weirdly enough, from the licensed Game Boy title Bill and Ted's Excellent Game Boy Adventure, which I also really enjoyed for the same reasons. Sure, the graphics were fairly primitive, the music repetitive, and the game didn't really do much to incorporate the Bill and Ted license, but it felt a bit like Jumpman so I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Jammin Honey looks and feels very much like an NES take on Commodore 64's Jumpman, right down to the minimal background and steel girder floors. One of the enemy types even mimics one from Jumpman; in Jumpman, these white blocks, which I always thought of as seeking bullets of some sort, would slowly pan across the screen, and if you got in their line of sight they would suddenly speed towards you. Jammin Honey has bees that act in very much the same way. And since the creator, Doug Fraker, wrote on the NES Dev forums about the game as he was designing it, the connection to Jumpman is obvious, with Doug naming it in the very first post announcing his plan to make the game, along with some basic sketches of the screens.

So in Jammin Honey, you play a girl, Honey, with a guitar. Before the game even starts, there's a nifty customization feature, letting you change the color of Honey's guitar, clothes, hair and boots. It's a fun little extra. The game tasks you with playing through 30 single screen levels collecting all the music notes in order to proceed to the next level. Unlike in Jumpan though, this girl has a weapon, her rockin' guitar! Pressing the B button will cause the heroin to strum her guitar, causing a sonic wave to shoot out from it that can kill or stun enemies. It also has a nice little electric guitar sound effect that plays. Music notes come in two varieties, the normal smaller notes, and a larger note that usually changes something in the level, adding a ladder or something to get to the remaining notes. There are also coins to collect, and since the level ends as soon as you collect all the notes, if you're going for a high score you want to map out your route so that you get all the coins before the final note.

There are a few different enemy types, each with their own patterns and attacks. There's the bee I mentioned earlier, there are slimes, which just go back and forth, and then something which I always thought looked like a green apple that will stop and shoot a fireball-like projectile, and birds that will go back and forth and occasionally stop to drop an egg.

I know there's a boss at the end of the game, but I haven't quite gotten that far yet! I've really got to put some time into the game and finish it. It's fun and fair, but certainly has some difficulty to it. There are limited lives and no continues or passwords, however you can earn extra lives with points, so planning your route through a level to gather as many of the coins as you can does pay off.

Overall this is a really fun game, and if I have one complaint about it, it would be that there was never a physical release for this NES homebrew, and this is one that I'd love to have on my shelf. If this kind of gameplay appeals to you, do yourself a favor and try this game out. Doug Fraker has a link on his website to the game via Dropbox, so I'll put that link here.