Lazy Jones

Lazy Jones is a platform game for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, MSX and Tatung Einstein. It was written by David Whittaker and released by Terminal Software in 1984. The Spectrum version was ported by Simon Cobb. Lazy Jones is a collection of fifteen sub-games. The game takes place inside a hotel with three floors, connected by an elevator. The character is a lazy hotel employee who does not much care for his work, but prefers to sneak into the rooms to play video games instead.

he main screen in Lazy Jones is the hotel interior. There, the character can use the elevator to travel freely between the three floors, but he must watch out for enemies: the current hotel manager on the top floor, the ghost of the previous manager on the bottom floor, and a haunted cleaning cart on the middle floor. The enemies only walk around and do not pursue the character, but contact with them is fatal.

Each floor has six rooms, three on each side of the elevator. Each room can be entered once. Inside most rooms is a video game, which the character immediately begins playing. As well as the video games, there is the hotel bar, a bed, a cleaning closet and a toilet. The bar works like a video game, but the bed, the cleaning closet and the toilet are useless decorations (intentionally added, because Whittaker had run out of ideas for new games). When all rooms have been visited, the game starts over again, but increasingly faster, each time.

The sub-games are generally simplified versions of 1970s and 1980s video games, such as Space Invaders, Frogger, Snake, H.E.R.O., Breakout or Chuckie Egg. Their plots and gameplay are very simple, and in most of them the player simply must avoid incoming enemies long enough to score many points. In some, the player must shoot enemies to score points. Each sub-game has a time limit. In some sub-games it is possible to 'die', thus ending the sub-game prematurely, while others only end after the time limit expires. But this also depends on the portrayed game version. While a 'death' in the Commodore 64 may return the game character to a certain point in the screen, in the MSX version the same death results in the premature end of the sub-game.

The fourteen video games are as follows:

99 Red Balloons: Red balloons continuously fly towards the top of the screen. The player has to grab hold of two balloons to fly upwards, to get to kiss a woman. Then they need to grab hold of one balloon to fly back down to kiss another woman. A bow tries to shoot arrows to puncture the player's balloons.
Eggie Chuck: A simplified Chuckie Egg clone.
Jay Walk: A simplified Frogger clone. The player has to cross a street without hitting any of the cars, to get to kiss a woman. Then they cross the street back to kiss another woman.
Laser Jones: A Space Invaders clone where the aliens do not shoot back.
Outland: A very simple shoot 'em up. Spaceships descend from the skies and the player shoot them to score points.
Res Q: A simplified H.E.R.O. clone. The player has to rescue men trapped in a cave without touching the cave walls.
Scoot: A game of skill where the player has to steer some kind of hovercraft in a cave.
Star Dust: A shoot 'em up where the player can shoot balls of dust.
The Hills Are Alive: A shoot 'em up very similar to Outland except this time the spaceships fly horizontally.
The Reflex: Bones fly down from the top of the screen and the player has to bounce them back up.
The Turk: One of the strangest settings. Roast turkeys slide on a conveyor belt and the player has to fire a fork at them to score points. A telephone flies diagonally around the screen, getting in the way of the player's fork.
The Wall: A simplified Snake clone. The player must steer a continuously growing garden wall without hitting themselves, the screen boundaries, or any of the plants.
Wild Wafers: A shoot 'em up where the player can shoot spinning wafers.
Wipeout: A simplified Breakout clone