YJL

xjump is a jumping platform game, all you do is jump and jump and jump.

It’s fairly easy to play and also easy to fall of edges, wasd, hjkl, or arrows to move or jump, also Space to jump and P to pause or resume.

There is a timer ticking, and slowly you will be forced to go up and only up, falling back down won’t be a platform to catch you. It comes with three themes as you can see on the right.

Not really sure why it’s also named “FALLING TOWER,” because you will fall of the platforms of a tower?

This game brought me back some memory when I was a student. We had some classes that required lab time, that is doing with computers. So, you see a bunch of young kids in a room of computers, the teacher was in front briefing what the goal was for the day, but not everyone cared.

I couldn’t remember the exact year, but I knew it was the beginning of a semester when the teacher finished what he had to say and left the room. Some students just began to start when a small group of people gathered in front of one of the computer.

Needless to say, I went to check out, wondering if someone already finished the tasks, although it was highly impossible. Anyway, when I got to peek at the screen, there was this little guy jumping just like this game, although I can’t say it’s the exactly the same, because the memory was really vague. But it couldn’t be since this is for X Window System and we were using DOS/Windows.

The student explored the computer he was assigned to, you got to give him some credit, even he didn’t listen to a word of what the teacher said. He found a directory hidden deep somewhere, and opened it up, and ran what’s inside. The rest is pretty easy to guess.

In the next few moments, we managed to copy the game — another brilliant student suggested — with a 3.5” floppy disk, there was no Internet, not even LAN. That’s what you call sharing, not something you click a button in these days; and true and old-fashion distribution, manually via disk, one handed the disk to next one; and real piracy, no such thing as download but copy. Thank god, this ain’t happening, but I am sure that was at most a shareware.

In a very short time, every computer got a copy of that game, and nobody was doing the tasks the teacher gave us, all we did was going higher and higher like there is no way down, literally and figuratively. Every student in that classroom was quiet, keeping eyes on screen, concentrated in the class, just not the class.

Eventually, someone faked a cough that loud enough to alert everyone. Alt-Tab, minimizing, whatever you can do to cover up and bring up IDE as fast as you can, then pretend that you are doing your task with extreme concentration as a student should. Just staring at your screen as the teacher walking past behind you, even there was barely any characters typed in the editor, you’d be fine.

As soon as the teacher went around for a circle and left again, the tapping noise was coming back as everyone pressing Space. That was a fun start for a class.

Good thing the students by the door hadn’t forgot their designated duties. Oh right, the only students weren’t playing the game, because they had to on look out. You don’t have to tell then what to do, it’s like an unwritten rule in student conduct handbook, if you sit by the door, watch over for your fellow students.

But it’s not without a catch. None of us knew there were hitchhikers, some computer viruses. Yes, it’s plural, if a virus can infect another virus, that probably also was the case.

I couldn’t be sure, but the Ghost was used to restore, but that might just general practice to make sure every computer had exactly data for student to use. Of course, it’s also good for eradicate computer virus. The teacher constantly reset the computers, and we brought our own disk which was made sure it’s clean.

In the end, a hardware card was installed into every computer, it automatically restores on boot. No virus would survive, but that meant we needed to bring the disk every time.

I clearly remember that someone found another jumping game from Internet at home, adding it to the collection of the games we played during the classes. In that game, there was a sound effect when you jump, it sounded like dwaee, you know like the sound effect in cartoon when a cartoon jumps in funny way.

Funny thing was teachers knew about those games, of course, some students got caught playing when the teacher standing quietly behind them, that’s fun to watch the teacher watching the student playing the game. If only the student could spare some focus from the game to the study, his grade would improve dramatically.

Nonetheless, It was a memorable time.

Since 1997, xjump has been made jumping by Tatsuya Kudoh and Masato Taruishi, it’s now written in C99 with X11 under the GPLv2, currently version 2.9.3 (2015-05-10, post v2.9.1 (2015-05-01), post v2.7.5 (2002-01-25)).