The Electric Yo-yo was released into arcades in 1982. It's a surprisingly complex action puzzle game for the era. You control an orb that has the yo-yo like ability to shoot out a line and grab onto stuff and pull itself to that location. The object is to clear the field of blocks that are arranged in various patterns. Touching a block makes it vanish. On the field is a snake like creature that bounces off the borders of the screen and is just randomly going about its business. You have to avoid it. The snake thing drops a couple of little bird like enemies that move one space at a time and actively pursue you. You can move in four directions, no diagonals. When moving on spaces where there are no blocks your movement is slow. When moving from block to block, or across the empty space from one block to another, your movement is lightning fast. The snake will sometimes cause blocks to glow for a short time, hitting one of these grants you invincibility for a short while allowing you to move through the enemies. The game was actually developed in the United States. It's pretty fun, and impressively complex.
Zoo Keeper was also developed within the US and was released in 1982. Zoo Keeper has you trying to save your girlfriend trapped within a zoo where the animals have escaped their cages and are running amok. You play on two types of fields. The first one has a cage in the middle where animals keep pouring out. You run along the outside of a rectangle repairing the brick wall that keeps the animals in. They're rampaging around inside smashing sections of the wall away. You're rewarded for how many animals you can keep contained. When they get out they'll run along the same path on the outside of the rectangle as you are. You'll have to jump them. You're rewarded more for jumping two or three animals at once. You have to keep this up until the time runs out. Occasionally items will appear on the path for bonus points. There is one that will allow you to return any escaped animals to back inside the wall. After a few levels of this you'll get a boss battle that is essentially a Donkey Kong rip-off. You'll have to make your way up through the moving platforms to get to your girlfriend who is at the top next to a coconut throwing monkey. The game is frenetic and actually quite fun. Interestingly enough, the player looks an awful lot like Luigi before Luigi even existed, and your girlfriend's name is Zelda. The first Zelda of gaming isn't the one we all might have thought.
Jungle Hunt was released in 1982 and was another title developed by Taito America Corp. It's essentially Taito's take on the Atari 2600 game Pitfall, which itself was a take on the opening sequence of the 1981 movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Standard game story here, out to save the girlfriend. The game takes place over four stages. Stage one has you swinging from tree to tree via vines. They're not all swinging in synch of course, so you have to time the jumps as to be able to catch the vine. From the last vine you jump into the ocean where you have to avoid crocodiles and air bubbles that slow your movement making you an easy target for the animals. You only have so much air, so you'll need to return to the surface every so often. You're able to stab the crocs to kill them, but it takes some decent timing. At the end of the water, you jump out on to land. You'll be running up a hill with boulders coming down. You have to jump the boulders. This level is forced scrolling and you only have minimal movement backwards and forwards across the screen. The final section is just one screen. It has your girlfriend suspended over a giant kettle. There are a couple of mask wearing natives armed with spears dancing around in between you and your girlfriend. You have to jump and avoid them, and then make the leap to your girlfriend, while also avoiding the kettle. Once you've saved your girlfriend, it starts all over. Except you play as the girl out to save the original character. They speed things up, make the timer faster, and add a few surprises along the way like monkeys on the vines you have to avoid. Shampoo, rinse, repeat. The characters and creatures are large and detailed and they contain a decent amount of animation. Impressive for the era. The game is still rather fun. I loved the arcade game, and the Commodore-64 port.
In 1983 Taito released a classic arcade game by the name of Elevator Action. You're a spy being sent into high-rise buildings to steal documents. There are guards you can shoot patrolling the buildings. You must take the elevators and escalators down the thirty floors of each building. There are numerous doors on each floor you can enter to hide from the guards. Red doors contain the target documents. You need to collect them all and make your way to the bottom floor to the awaiting getaway vehicle. It's classic cat and mouse espionage gameplay. The guards will follow you from floor to floor and they'll come in and out of doors. You can duck their shots, but they can also duck and fire low. You can also shoot out the lights to help them not be able to track you. Once you clear a stage, it's on to the next one in a seemingly never ending parade of levels. This game is a true classic and is as fun as it ever was. Again though, I don't think kids these days would be able to cope with its visuals or gameplay. Most of them anyway.
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