Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

I have to be honest I don’t remember this game in the arcade, but perhaps that is because it was so weird it freaked me out and I have post traumatic distress disorder. As you will see in the video below I had no idea what I was doing even though the game is pretty straight forward, again it’s the weird sounds that did something to me like that song from Battle Star Galatica.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was released to arcades in 1985 and was based on the movie. This was the second game released and seeing how it played I have to track down the first. It was the first Atari arcade game to use digitized speech, but it sounded worst that my old Texas Interments learning computer that would yell at me for taking too long to solve a math problem (Your Turn!).

So the object of the game is to free the slaves within the temple grounds which includes children, if you leave any behind you get the on screen text “Mola Ram will be pleased” if you save them all you get is a boat load of points.

The second object is to collect the three Sankara stone which you find after freeing the captives, during your search you come across guards, snakes and traps. There are three parts to the game, the mines where the slaves are, the mine cart tracks where you race down the mine shaft in a cart fighting the thugs and parts of the temple where you find the Sankara stones and reach the third part of your goal, defeat Mola Ram.

When you start the game you can choose the difficultly setting and once you accomplish all your goals and defeat Mola Ram you get another boatload of points and start all over on a higher difficultly setting.

Sounds simple right? Well somehow I failed at this horribly as you will see below. This game later was ported to many consoles and computer systems such as the Commodore 64, the Atari ST the Amiga and the NES.

Now please excuse me as I call my therapist.

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