← Infant Arcade

There’s a lot going on in this game and I can’t immediately recall how it all works.

One player controls my nephew, the other controls me. By his design, this game has an interesting movement mechanic where at the peak of your jump you enter a Superman-style flying pose and just kind of hang up there until you come back down to the ground. With a bit of fleshing out, such as a minimum horizontal speed, that could be a really nice mechanic.

I have a flaming sword I can activate with some button or other, and he has a different attack on each level — the levels take place in the same environment and it just depends if you’ve defeated the evil butcher, who I think is just a regular butcher and not any kind of serial killer. There is no indication in the game that he is a butcher, but I am assured that he is.

The butcher appears when you get to the right part of the level, and can be defeated with either player’s weapons, although he takes a few hits. His shirt says “I love Toxic”, referring to the bright green blocks of Toxic which serve as obstacles in this game. If you touch the Toxic then your head falls off, which has a variety of effects because the game is badly programmed on account of we did not plan any of this ahead of time.

When you defeat the butcher, a portal appears. Climb inside to go to level 2, which we never really finished. The butcher is supposed to appear in the large mass of ground to the right, but since my nephew insisted on filling it with a special block that puts your head back on, the butcher has usually jumped out by the time you reach him.

Code and additional graphics by me; lead design and lead graphics by the kid.

This game briefly featured a bug where the butcher would follow you into the portal, which I rather liked, but while it amused the kid, he did insist it be fixed.