Virtually Overlooked: Earnest Evans
With the latest Indiana Jones film thrilling and disappointing audiences in theaters right now. In true Virtually Overlooked style, we have decided to celebrate this release (which was pretty great in the popcorn-movie sense) by ignoring all the Indiana Jones games that have been put out over the years and look at a Japanese-developed game that takes its inspiration from the series.
It's not hard to see the similarities, even if you ignore the boxart: Earnest Evans has a keen interest in archaeology, where "archaeology" is defined as "running around in caves whipping dudes." He quickly encounters the supernatural in his search for artifacts. The game takes place in the 1920s, which is before the Indiana Jones movies, but close enough.
Earnest Evans is actually a prequel to Wolfteam's El Viento, and features a cameo from El Viento's Annet. But despite the connection, the two games couldn't be more different. El Viento is a fast-paced platform-shooting game, but Earnest Evans is a lot slower and more methodical -- in fact, it shares its pace and its whip mechanic with Super Castlevania IV. It's also a lot more awkward than El Viento.
The reason for the awkwardness is Earnest's sprite. Rather than a single sprite, like most player avatars, Earnest is composed of a bunch of jointed, rotating sprites, like a shmup boss (or Gunstar Heroes' Seven Force). What should allow for more natural movement than hand-animated frames comes out well into freaky territory. Earnest's movements are too fluid, and a bit sluggish.
Earnest's design affords him a decent range of movement. He can whip in multiple corrections, crouch, and lie flat. He can also climb walls. And chances are you'll do all of them, all the time, without really trying. Playing Earnest Evans is like playing slow pinball with a ragdoll. It is extremely difficult to make Earnest go where you want -- his exaggerated movements put him all over the screen. You'll whip a hook in the ceiling, trying to fly across a small gap, and end up jumping halfway across the level before landing in a crouch and duck-walking into some spikes.
Earnest Evans came out in Japan on the Mega CD, with an excellent Motoi Sakuraba soundtrack, but it was a cartridge-only release here courtesy of Renovation. The CD version had anime-style cutscenes that tied the Earnest and Annet characters together, but we don't need that story stuff. We just need WHIP WHIP WHIP JUMP RUN WHIP. It was followed (again, in Japan), by another game starring El Viento's Annet, called Annet Futatabi (Annet Again), which changed the gameplay again, this time to a Streets of Rage/Golden Axe brawler. All three are interesting, and the others are better, but Earnest Evans is the weirdest.
