Pandemonium

Revisiting the subject of a fond memory can be a perilous thing. There’s always the possibility that the passage of time has added an increasingly rosy tint to your hindsight-specs. Generally speaking, no medium ages worse than video game.

Fortunately the reverse can also be true, and a game that you had written off in the past can seem remarkably fresh and relevant in the present. Meet Pandemonium.

It’s a game that first reared its head on the original PlayStation in the late nineties, and was the subsequent poster child for the first N-Gage system in 2003.

It’s a kind of 2.5D platformer, in that the graphics are fully fleshed out in chunky 3D, but the action sticks to a resolutely two dimensional plane.

I remember being fairly unimpressed with this approach at the time of its original release in 1997, when sprawling 3D worlds were starting to turn gamers’ heads. I was only slightly more impressed with the N-Gage version six years later, when tight 2D platformers were experiencing a resurgence on the GBA.

It appears to be a case of right time, right place for this latest re-release, because the hullabaloo has died down around 3D platformers and the release of truly excellent 2D platformers has petered out too.

To top it all off, one of the things the current N-Gage platform lacks is a decent platformer.

And it seems that Pandemonium really is a decent platformer after all. It’s not a classic, able to rub shoulders with Mario and Sonic, but it does what it does with considerable skill.

Part of that is down to its tight controls and smooth game engine. Despite the still-impressive 3D visuals, everything moves along at a silky rate. And thanks to the simple left-to-right gameplay, it’s a dream to control - you run, you jump, you collect stuff. Simple.

Not much has been added from the original N-Gage version, apart from a few low-res cut-scenes which show their age far more than the in-game graphics do.

However, the simple implementation of a landscape view and the accompanying controls (if you have an appropriate handset) is improvement enough. You can now see a far wider section of the level at any one time, which is perfect for planning your more acrobatic manoeuvres.

And Pandemonium is full of those. Most of the stages stretch up almost as much as they do across, and the majority contain multiple hidden paths leading to extra loot. You don’t have to take these, but you won’t attain 100 per cent completion (or as much satisfaction) if you don’t embark on at least a few exploratory detours.

That’s not to say that Pandemonium is unwieldy for the mobile gamer, though. Quite the opposite. Each level, while full of detail, is short and sharp and will take mere minutes to run through, making it a perfect game for gradual progress when you get the odd spare minute.

Pandemonium is far from perfect. The art style and character design - particularly the two playable characters, Fargus the jester and Nikki the sorceress - are as ugly as ever, and the world they inhabit lacks a little soul.

While the levels are fun to traverse, they don’t possess the defining features and sense of place of the genre classics. One stage tends to blur into the next, and no one moment really stuck in my mind.

There are also a few glaring oversights that suggest a slightly careless conversion process. The biggest example is Fargus’s special attack, which is activated with the ‘9’ key regardless of how you hold the phone. This is fine in portrait mode, but it’s all but unusable in the otherwise preferable landscape mode.

Fortunately it’s far from an essential move, so you can easily get by without it, but it’s a baffling oversight.

All of these issues can be overlooked if you’re after a platformer for your N-Gage. Pandemonium has aged better than most 12-year-old games, thanks to its slick, mobile-friendly gameplay. There may not be much of an alternative on N-Gage, but you probably won’t even be looking for one until the credits have rolled.