Jukebox (ColecoVision)

Video games are full of spectacular music people would happily pay for the pleasure of listening to, but in the early 1980s such tracks were few and far between. Still, Jukebox on the ColecoVision decided to base its concept around keeping the music playing and whipped up a few original music tracks to support that idea, and while they’re fairly short and simple, the music composed by Ed Bogas is lightly varied and pretty decent. Unfortunately this concept begins to crumble rather quickly when you realize that there are only three songs in total to even listen to, and they’re barely a minute long each.

Jukebox’s gameplay is thus forced to bear a lot of the responsibility for trying to keep this game interesting, and there’s actually a bit of a sound idea at play in how you keep the game’s jukebox playing. The player is presented a grid of twenty squares arranged in five columns and four rows, a pair of shoe prints starting in the upper left to represent a dancer about to hit the floor. Players are able to move in eight directions and take a hop to the square their feet are pointing at each time they press the button, but doing so willy-nilly will be one’s undoing. Each time you land on a square, it’s upgraded to the next symbol in a sequence. Starting with a small record with a pink background, improving to a large one with an orangish-red background, and finally hitting a massive record with a barely present white background, most squares will undergo this evolution as you hop back onto them. However, to keep the music playing, you’ll need to earn coins, and these are only earned if you can make a gold record.

At the start of a round of play, three spots will begin flashing gold. These are the only areas you can make a gold record, and doing so isn’t as easy as just landing on them a fourth time to add an extra upgrade. You can only upgrade a tile if you were moving to it from a tile that is equal or higher in value. You can jump down from a white tile to a pink one for example, but you won’t be able to hop up from a pink tile onto one of the orangish-red ones. This means to navigate the dance floor you’ll need to pick how you want to approach the gold squares to properly build them up into gold records, and if you can only hop onto spaces that can’t be upgraded further or you’re boxed in by ineligible destinations, you’ll get a game over and the music will stop, although some dancing cats at the top of the screen might soften that blow a bit and they even have a unique tune to accompany their performance.

When a gold record is made though, if there is an eligible blank spot on the board, it will begin to flash gold instead, giving you a new spot to work on as best you can and one that might not be easy to predict since it randomly selects from the available positions. There is a bit of a puzzle element in Jukebox, the player needing to figure out the optimal path to make sure they can make as many gold records as possible to keep earning coins, but since there’s no high score to beat unless you track it yourself, your reward for figuring out a more profitable route is just more time spent listening to the same three songs on loop. Even stranger, the timer that is meant to make a demand of your coins isn’t that greedy. You can hear two of the game’s songs before you’d run out of time on the jukebox, so even just getting a single coin is enough to hear all the unique content. If you want to keep the music playing as long as possible still there is nothing forcing you to move so once you built up your coins you can sit and wait until the coins are all spent and time runs out. If new songs played by holding out longer there would at least be an interesting reward for your efforts, but you really have to self-motivate if you want to figure out how to make as many golden records as possible in Jukebox.

Jukebox does at least offer a few more ways to play beyond one puzzle. You can change it so the spots that glow gold at the start of a round are different so that’s at least going to require a different optimal route you can figure out, but the two-player mode feels like it could have been an interesting competition only for it to instead keep that focus on keeping the music going. Both players take turns moving a single tile at a time in Jukebox, each player having a dedicated timer they need to keep fed with coins but it only goes down during their turn. Working together to grab the gold records is going to be a little more difficult than solo play since it necessitates planning out two routes instead of one but it still isn’t a particularly deep challenge. If you decide to try and make it competitive anyway though, if you do manage to trap a player where they have no moves available, the game is kind and lets them linger on a spot and upgrade it until they can hop onto an eligible tile nearby. You can still try to make it a contest to see who gets the most coins, but it’s a hollow attempt to draw something out of the game when it tries to nudge you towards working together on a fairly basic task.

I don’t want to outright condemn the gold record building concept at Jukebox’s core because it could work in miniature. If a larger game had a puzzle in this format and making more gold records lead to better rewards, it would be a simple interactive way to test your planning via a minigame and pay out nicer if you figure out a smart way to navigate the small grid. Here in Jukebox though the game expects this style of play to hold up the entire experience and the rewards are paltry and almost irrelevant since they are so easily achieved. It feels a bit like being offered a word search activity book with only 5 pages and not even that many words to find per puzzle. The idea isn’t awful, but the video game is so empty that it can’t expect to entertain with such lean offerings.

THE VERDICT: Jukebox offers an experience that fills a few minutes at best, the incredibly shallow music pool meaning you can’t engage with its premise of keeping the jukebox playing and the puzzle solving itself fairly basic. You can replay it to try and optimize how many gold records you earn in a specific layout and maybe tackle the slightly harder version where two players work to do it instead, but you’re pursuing the weak reward of making the same three tracks play on loop longer and figuring out how to approach making the gold records isn’t even that demanding of a challenge. The ideas aren’t awful necessarily, but in such a tiny package you quickly exhaust what little there is to do.

And so, I give Jukebox for ColecoVision…

A BAD rating. As said earlier, the golden record building puzzle isn’t a bad idea on its own, and for those first few minutes with the game, there’s at least something to trying to figure out the best path for earning as many coins as you can. The small grid, the simplicity of what the puzzles ask of you, and the end goal being to hear the few music tracks the game offers over and over really aren’t able to make the game last much longer than that initial period of trying to suss out a profitable route. Shuffling the flashing gold tiles around the board doesn’t really inject more energy into the game, so having an entire video game based on offering hardly anything beyond this basic puzzle ends up leaving it hard to recommend. Again, if Jukebox was slipped into a more robust collection, either appearing in concert with other minigames or just being a diversion in something more substantial, its idea could be a fine timewaster or a way to put the quantity of rewards you earn in the player’s hands. Unfortunately Jukebox on ColecoVision is far too basic and its concept a little too close to being solvable without needing much thought. It’s not entirely obvious how to optimize your movement and some things like the small randomization on making new flashing tiles appear or having different starting tiles means it’s not a game you can play once and bumble into a perfect performance, but it’s not really a compelling puzzle concept with such shallow rewards and limited complications.

Jukebox makes the rather laughable claim that it is an educational game simply because you need to use some logic to solve its single puzzle type. Sure you need to be a bit sharp and think ahead to get the most gold records possible, but problem solving is a major element in many video games and even ones not based around puzzles exclusively can feel like they’re asking for more thought than the premise of Jukebox. Jukebox isn’t mind-numbingly easy or anything like that though, that bit of thought able to sustain it for the few minutes its music lasts, but the presentation feels all wrong in terms of its scope and thus it’s hard to get much satisfaction out of even earning as many coins as you can. It could be interesting to see Jukebox’s ideas, be it trying to keep the music going through good play or just the puzzle’s actual format, in something more conducive and content rich, but this ColecoVision title tried to get by on very little and it’s hard to recommend it when even awful games can sometimes offer a stretch of better play than Jukebox despite being worse overall.