Classic Joust plays better on a console than a phone

Speaking of the influence of classic arcade games, one of my long standing holy grails of Android gaming has been to find a decent clone of Williams’ Joust from 1982. It looks like there was a version of Joust available from AppsZoom, but it seems to have been removed a long time ago and doesn’t seem to be available for download anymore. Beyond that I found some rudimentary classic Joust clones on some sketchy app sites (trust me, you don’t want me linking those app sites here) and when I say rudimentary, I mean they were bad. Really bad. Like, Do Not Install bad.

The fact is, and this is my completely unbiased. but still totally biased, opinion, is that Joust probably just doesn’t translate all that well to a mobile gaming environment. This I feel is due to Joust’s very unique gameplay and controls. Sure, we’ve seen “flapping” controls in Flappy Bird, but Joust is about much more than flapping. You also need to make quick movements with a gamepad or joystick to change directions. The very challenging nature of Joust‘s gameplay just seems to be better suited for a larger screen.

So at the moment there isn’t really a good, playable version of Joust available for Android, and by ‘good’, I’m really talking about an authentic version of Joust because I’m a a bit of a purist in that respect which is not to be confused with being ‘elitist’, although that can be a fine line too.

So here. Compare these two screen shots and you decide which one you’d rather play?

This low bit version:

Or this version (original graphics)

You don’t have to answer but I’m pretty sure you chose the second version, right? And that’s my point.

Where can you play classic Joust then?

So with all that said, you have a number of options if you want to play the classic version of Joust that’s closet to the classic arcade version.

Play Joust online – There are tons of classic video game websites with embedded emulators such as Classic Games Arcade. The only problem is that the look and feel is lacking as the graphics are a little scaled down. The response times are just not there and you will never get the true arcade feel or even come close to what an emulator has to offer. But hey, if you need a Joust fix on a shoestring, this may help you out.

Play Joust on a console: (preferred) You can get classic Joust for the NES or the PS2 as part of the Midway Arcade Treasures pack which is pretty much the closest arcade experience you can have, especially when played on a large screen TV. So head over to your local GameStop or wherever they sell consoles in your neck of the woods.

Laterz.

Update: I had previously mentioned that you could play Joust on the PS4. To clarify, you can’t play classic Joust natively. However, it can be achieved with a little bit of patience and determination, which basically means that you would have to unlock the PS4 so that you can play PS2 games since this backwards compatibility is unfortunately not built in.