Fix-It Felix Jr. (Arcade)

The 2012 animated feature Wreck-It Ralph featured many loving homages to classic gaming and cameos from major characters from video game history, but for the characters important to the central narrative, Disney invented a fictional arcade classic. Fix-It Felix Jr. is the imaginary game created to serve as the source for some of the film’s key players, its detailed visuals and technical features not aligning with the real world advancements in video games but still feeling at least somewhat possible as a real game by taking cues from other old arcade games like Donkey Kong. In an interesting case of defictionalization, Disney had cabinets made featuring a newly made Fix-It Felix Jr. arcade game to promote the film, and surprisingly, it feels like a natural fit in an arcade.

A large muscular man named Wreck-It Ralph was content to snooze in his stump until one day a construction crew displaces it so they can build an apartment building on the land it was occupying. Outraged by being displaced, Ralph attacks the new building with his massive fists, shattering windows and knocking bricks loose. Before the building can be reduced to rubble, the citizens of Niceland call out to Fix-It Felix Jr., the repairmen able to use his magic hammer to undo the damage and chase Ralph to the roof where he can be tossed off to end his rampage. Every level of Fix-It Felix Jr. involves the gradual scaling of the apartment building, the player needing to fix the damage on a screen to move onto the next one until the scene of Ralph being tossed off plays and the next stage can begin. The story-telling and scenes conveying it definitely seem higher in quality than what a game of its supposed release year of 1982 could pull off, Ralph’s sprite especially too complex in design for it, but other breaks from trying to be authentic to its fictional era of invention benefit it quite well. Rather than looping the same levels over and over, Fix-It Felix Jr. seems to randomize which windows are damaged and introduces new elements that stick around to modify the following stages.

The main task in Fix-It Felix Jr. is the repair work, and hopping between windowsills to smack them with your hammer is fairly easy task on the surface. The joystick allows you to easily hop between windows and the Fix button will repair any damaged window instantly, but the cabinet oddly enough includes a Jump button as well that feels almost unnecessary next to the versatile joystick. For the most part the Jump button can be safely ignored as Felix can easily bound vertically and horizontally as he tries to repair all the windows on screen before Ralph can shatter any more. Ralph sticks to the top of the screen while you play, hammering his huge hands on the building to send down showers of bricks that can threaten to take a life from Felix. Dodging these as you go about repairing the apartment exterior is the main activity, Ralph moving around enough to keep you on your toes and the bricks raining down unevenly so you can potentially slip through them while also requiring a quick escape if you want to avoid an unexpected brick drop pattern. If you can grab a pie placed on a windowsill though, Felix will briefly become invincible, Ralph hammering out bricks in an otherwise undodgeable pattern in frustration but the player able to pass through them without concern as they fix windows during this period free of peril.

After the first two levels ease you in and get you accustomed to your task, Fix-It Felix Jr. begins to up its difficulty both in how many windows are destroyed initially on a new screen and in new obstacles to completion. Ledges will appear beneath windows that block you from vertical jumps and soon Ralph will send down clusters of bricks that can do the same for horizontal movement as they get jammed between windows. The brick clusters are actually the only real use I found for the Jump button, Felix leaping over them to get to the next window with the button but smashing his face right into them if you rely on the joystick to hop towards them instead. Riskier movements become necessary to get to windows that can’t be fled from as easily if bricks start coming down from above, and when you reach the highest layer of the apartment complex, you also will have to contend with ducks who patrol an entire row of windows and threaten to steal a life if they make contact with Felix. While perhaps too easy in its starting stages, the introduction of these extra elements means Fix-It Felix Jr. can settle into a more challenging design that is more entertaining to overcome, and by maintaining these elements no matter how far along you are, you’ll be facing Fix-It Felix Jr. at a level that doesn’t dip in difficulty the way a properly looping series of arcade levels would.

You can pretty much see all there is to the game by the completion of its fifth level and from there the alterations are mostly just being more generous with impassable ledges and brick clusters, but the small climb in difficulty and additional variables make Fix-It Felix Jr. an easy arcade game to play again after a loss, the game feeling less like repeating the same task or progressing through the same stages due to the way it is structured. Bouncing around to smack windows quickly before more can break asks you to spot the safe movement options quickly, this becoming harder when your routes can be blocked in later levels, although the score challenge isn’t all that meaty. Repairing a window provides a flat 100 points and since new windows can shatter during play you can continue to fix them for additional points, that being the only real shake-up to otherwise just repairing everything as quickly as possible to get the bonus points for clearing a screen. I initially thought standing beneath Ralph’s rain of bricks with the invincibility power-up active would provide a bonus for even brick deflected, but the invulnerability is simply a free time to fix windows when it could have had an element of trying to rack up points quickly at the price of progression being made a bit more difficult for shunning your window repair opportunity. Perhaps Disney realized that modern gamers are more interested in beating levels than earning plenty of points so I can’t fault them for this decision, but it does mean Fix-It Felix Jr. has to rely on the platform action alone, something that is thankfully up to snuff.

THE VERDICT: While it was created mainly as a cute way to promote a film based heavily on arcade gaming, Fix-It Felix Jr. still came out in a form that makes it worthy of having a cabinet beside the classics. Window fixing and brick dodging require constant action on a screen with plenty of options for movement, and when the later levels come along, they begin to appropriately up the difficulty by blocking routes and upping Ralph’s aggression. While certain details like the graphics aren’t quite authentic to the old games it is paying tribute to, some of the ideas from later games like the variability in which windows shatter and the constant forward progression allowing the difficulty to stay consistent rather than looping ensure Felix’s task stays fresh for as long as you can last.

And so, I give Fix-It Felix Jr. for arcade machines…

A GOOD rating. Retro tributes aren’t rare in the gaming industry but they can sometimes miss the mark on what made their inspirations appealing. Fix-It Felix Jr. identifies the simple fun of early arcade games but doesn’t just settle into an infinitely looping design that would stagnate quickly. Newer ideas are implemented into it in a way that makes it harder to pretend it is some old fixture of the arcade but do help it be more enjoyable in a modern day where we’ve experienced so many games that don’t rehash the same screen until you die. Felix’s adventure starts easy enough to please kids who recognize its tie to the film but then scale up to a difficulty level that can entertain an experienced gamer for a while, the simple task shifting around enough with its small degrees of randomness to make the next level feel different despite having all the same ingredients. Coupled with that small degree of progression and Fix-It Felix Jr. is pretty fun to replay even if more modern concepts could have been integrated to elevate it even further. The line between looking the part of a supposedly retro game and being enjoyable in modern times is hard to ride for sure and sacrifices like deemphasizing high scores were made in doing so, but it still turned out surprisingly well for a fun way to pay tribute to the lore of an animated film.

Both while playing the cabinet and looking it up online I found people who believed Fix-It Felix Jr. was a real game that existed before Wreck-It Ralph’s production began, so while it doesn’t pass muster if you know certain details to look for, it has achieved its goal of slipping in amongst the ranks of arcade classics. While I’ve pointed out the flaws in faithfulness a few times, I think its breaks away from the rules of the games it was meant to mimic benefited Fix-It Felix Jr. and helped it earn a small niche in the arcade. It isn’t just some imitator, even already breaking away from the design of its strongest inspiration Donkey Kong before you factor in its modern elements. An arcade game can’t make too big a splash in the modern gaming landscape so modernity hurt it in that way, but for the places that do set up this well-executed bit of defictionalization, they’ll at least have an enjoyable product to share for a quarter a pop.