alt title(s): Toejam And Earl
Ouch, man. That's cold.
Supremely funky alien homeboys ToeJam and "Big" Earl, proud residents of the planet Funkotron, have crashlanded on the decidedly lame and non-funky planet of Earth. The impact, while leaving them unharmed, scattered pieces of their spacecraft all over the planet, and finding all of these pieces is the only way to get back home. Sounds simple in principle. The Earth's natives might be a bit of trouble, though...
ToeJam & Earl is a series of video games known mainly for its first entry, released in 1991 on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, although two more games exist. The first game, with the same name as the series, is an exploration-oriented
Action Adventure game with
Isometric Perspective and (the option of) randomly-generated
levels. The sequels are
ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron, an extremely different two-dimensional
Platform Game released on the Mega Drive in 1993, and
ToeJam & Earl III: Mission to Earth, a three-dimensional
Platform Game released on the Microsoft Xbox in 2002.
This series provides examples of:
- Abnormal Ammo: The original game features tomatoes as the titular Funkotronians' weapon of choice. Panic on Funkotron features bottles that capture enemies.
- Chest Monster: Items come in presents. A few types of present (which types these are are randomly determined at the beginning of each new game) will harm you. Presents can be purchased from mailboxes. Some mailboxes are really mailbox monsters that will rip you a new one if you try to use them.
- Cool Shades: Earl sports them.
- Easy Mode Mockery: "Lil' Kids" mode in Panic on Funkotron makes it impossible to die, but ends the game after level five, thus robbing players of the chance to collect the Funkopotamus' favourite things and get the good ending.
- Floating Continent: Each level in the original is a piece of land floating in a void. If you drop off the edge, you will land in the previous level, implying that they are arranged in a vertical stack. Try falling off the bottom-left corner of Level 1.
- Fragile Speedster: ToeJam is faster than Earl but has a shorter life bar.
- Humans Are Bastards: In this case it's more like Humans Are Lame.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: Food items heal you to varying degrees, generally corresponding to the tastiness or richness of the food (e.g. a hot fudge sundae will heal you more than a bowl of cereal). Some food items will harm you instead; these take the form of rotten foods, or a few stereotypically unpleasant "healthy" foods, like cabbage.
- Mighty Glacier: Earl is slower than ToeJam but has a longer life bar.
- NPC: Helpful Earthlings include the Wise Carrot, who will tell you the contents of a given present in your inventory for two bucks, the Opera Singer, who will kill all enemies on the screen with her voice for three, and Santa Claus, who will drop presents from his sack if you can sneak up on him.
- One Hit Kill: Accidentally open a "Total Bummer" present, and your character dies instantly.
- Roguelike: Partial use. The first game is not a true roguelike, but it has elements of one in that it has two gameplay modes, Random World and Fixed World. In Random World, each level is randomly generated, along with the enemies therein and the locations of presents. In Fixed World, all of these things have set forms and locations.
- RPG Elements: There are nine player rankings. Which ranking you currently have is based on your score, which is primarily increased by opening presents and exploring more of the map. "Wiener", as seen in the screenshot above, is the lowest ranking.
- Totally Radical: It would be hard to find someone in Real Life who uses the games' peculiar blend of slang without irony.
