How to play Bounty Bob Strikes Back! online
- Walk, climb ladders: arrow keys
- Jump: press Z, then push left or right to pick the direction. The longer you wait between the two, the longer the jump.
- Utility hoist: hop on and it starts by itself; steer with the arrows, press Z to switch it off. A keypad key restarts it (press K for the on-screen keypad).
- Cannon: aim with left and right, press Z to light the TNT.
- Transporter: push up or down while the destination indicator is flashing.
- Start: Enter. Pause: P
Full screen and save states are in the emulator toolbar (move the mouse over the screen).
Gameplay
Someone dumped radioactive waste in a field without knowing that Nuclear Ned’s mine lay underneath, and the small animals down there slowly turned into mutants. Bounty Bob goes in after them. In each cavern he claims a section of framework simply by walking over it, and once every section has changed colour he moves on to the next. The computer version has 25 caverns, against ten in Miner 2049er.
A four-digit counter shows how much air Bob has left; it flashes below 1000, and at zero he implodes. The mutants are so radioactive that touching one is fatal, acid rain drips from the stalactites, pulverizers squash anyone who dawdles inside them, and a long fall kills Bob where a short one does not. Picking up one of Nuclear Ned’s possessions makes the mutants harmless to touch for a short while. The mine is full of Ned’s machinery: a hoist you steer yourself, elevators, cannons that fire Bob across the cavern with a charge of TNT, transporters, slides and suction tubes.
Options
An options screen, reached from the title or high-score screen, lists twelve settings; up and down pick one, left and right change it. The difficulty modes are Easy, where claimed framework stays claimed and dead mutants stay dead when you lose a life; Medium, with slightly faster mutants; Hard, where everything resets with each life; and C’MON, where the air timer starts 1000 lower.
Tips
- Check the top of every slide. The start of a slide counts as framework and is the piece most often missed.
- Grab a possession, then go hunting. While the mutants are harmless you can clear a route that is otherwise blocked.
- Start on Easy. Keeping your progress between lives makes the later caverns far more approachable than in Miner 2049er.
The story behind Bounty Bob Strikes Back!
Bill Hogue wrote both Miner 2049er and its sequel for Big Five Software. After the first game he had started on Scraper Caper, with Bob as a firefighter; it was heavily advertised but never came out. The Atari cartridge of its replacement holds 40K of program and data and bank-switches it into 16K of address space; AtariProtos notes this was larger than any cartridge of its day and makes reproduction cartridges hard to build. The game was shown at the January 1985 Consumer Electronics Show, and the computer version reached ninth place on Billboard’s entertainment software chart that June despite a $49.95 price.
The 5200 cartridge was developed alongside the Atari 400/800 version but is not identical: because the console’s analog stick is less precise, almost every one-block-wide platform was widened to two blocks, and a Big Five splash screen was added. Very few copies were sold, and it is generally regarded as the rarest release for the console. Hogue later called the game a good follow-up but “perhaps not the groundbreaking game we wanted it to be”.
