The museum turned out to be the last level, and it was indeed significantly more difficult than the rest of the game. Much of this difficulty came in the narrowing of platforms, which would ordinarily be easy to land on but required the awful diagonal jumps to get high enough. It reminded me of the Dizzy games, where you had to work out which pixel to jump off in order to land in the right place, except more frantic and (often) with death awaiting if you fell.

Despite the setting and the increased difficulty, there were few innovations which set apart the last levels. There was an annoying obstacle which saw a laser shooting around a frame which you had to avoid, and flames shooting out of gargoyles at seemingly random intervals, and circular saws embedded in many platforms. Some of the enemies were immune to my diagonal attacks, or rather were sometimes immune (but at other times they popped, for no discernible reason). It was getting a bit frustrating and boring.

I quickly realised that it was pointless spending hours waiting for appropriate windows in obstacle attacks, since there were normally multiple life pickups – the As in the bottom-right corner – following any difficult section. As a result I often just barrelled straight through and dealt with healing afterwards. This wasn’t always the case, but due to the beauty of regular save states I had sixty-odd lives available anyway.

And then I got to the final level. The boss came in three stages, and before each battle there was a frantic vertical platforming section, with an ever-rising laser beam ready to cut the climb short. This took a fair while to do, even with saving, because of the awkward placement of platforms and the inaccuracy of Aero’s jumping. In the third section there were countless spikes and other enemies to avoid while also trying to land on minute platforms. Whenever I caught up with the boss, there was fight where he put out floating clowns to get in the way, and also streams of water coming from his giant clown face flying vehicle; while I tried to know his jaw off.

At the end of the second fight, the lower jaw came off, but that didn’t stop him from spawning clowns and generally being a pain the posterior. Instead of the jaw I had to hit his red nose, and after doing that 32,977,421 times he admitted defeat.

This wasn’t a great game. It was tolerable, and there was a nice fluidity to it – but there was perhaps just a bit too much inertia to allow for accurate jumping and platforming. Whoever designed the diagonal attacks should never have worked in the industry again. The jankiness with the controls may well have been an emulator problem, but I did see at least one review mention it.

Will I replay it, or play the sequel? I’ve got quite a lot of other stuff to do first.