RUMBA LUMBER
DEVELOPER: TAITO YEAR: 1984 GENRE: ACTION
■ You’re a caveman in a big old forest, and life would be great if that pesky pterodactyl wasn’t always flying about. Luckily, it only seems to fly around above trees, so you hatch a brilliant plan – get the pterodactyl to fly above only a small patch of forest, and live your life in peace. Who doesn’t love a good bit of deforestation, after all? So the idea is to run around the map, chopping down trees until the pterodactyl is trapped in an area of four trees or fewer.
If you find one, you can run a stone wheel across the forest to take out a whole row of trees, but mostly you’ll be chopping them down one at a time – and that’s a bit of a pain because the enemies here are super aggressive. The pterodactyl can shoot fire at you, a dinosaur runs around the areas you’ve cleared and can also travel through the forest, and if the very fast mole shows up, you’re done for. Different stage layouts with obstacles like rivers and thunder clouds liven things up as you make hard won progress, but only the most persistent gamers will take to Rumba Lumber.