Run-and-gun platformers like Metal Slug and Contra used to be very common games, but now they’re more of a niche ’old school’ genre. Twisted Pixel seemed to understand this when they produced Comic Jumper however, using that old formula while merging it with excellent controls and a hilarious plot that add up to a pretty entertaining game. You play as Captain Smiley, a gun-toting superhero with a huge ego who is accompanied by a talking ’sidekick’ who is built into his costume and utterly despises him. This leads to a lot of bickering and verbal barbs traded between them even as you run through several stages and fighting your way through hordes of enemies backed by regular boss encounters.

As the name suggests, your character jumps from comic to comic as a guest star and it’s your job to guide him to victory, and impressively enough the art style changes for each comic. In one set of stages you may be visiting a 60s era comic so the art is very exaggerated and retro, while another issue is a nod to the heavily-muscled ’barbarian man’ style of comics, and so on. While Smiley’s look changes with each comic, his moves mostly keep the same repitoire of some basic hand-to-hand attacks and other tricks along with a pair of rapid-fire guns that are his main weapons. In addition, he has the usual array of platformer maneuvers: sliding, running and jumping, and so on plus they’re all handled with great controls. This makes it easy to learn and play, so the real challenge lies in mastering the game’s various challenges; they usually boil down to "finish this section without getting hit" or "clear this area in a certain amount of time", and success is rewarded with a great deal of bonus money that can be used to buy upgrades to the Captain’s health meter, melee damage, gun damage, and so on. It can also be used to buy pieces for a collectable art gallery that shows off a great deal about the game’s world, giving you something to do after you finish the dozen or so main levels.

Characterization and humor are also a very important part of the game, and they do a lot to cover for points where Comic Jumper’s platforming action occasionally gets dull. Captain Smiley and his sidekick Star really don’t like one another, and they don’t think very highly of most other people so they alternate between creative ways to mock one another followed by taking shots at whoever or whatever happens to be nearby. For example, when they visit a 1960s ’Silver Age’ style comic, they’re more than willing to point out how stupid it is that they’re being penalized for violating the morality-policing ’comics code’ of that era with their use of harsh language and being willing to fight certain ’forbidden’ enemies yet it’s perfectly fine that a blatantly racist Japanese stereotype character is running around in the same comic.

For that matter, just about everyone else gets their turn being mocked. Famous politicians, insane comic fanboys that will fiercely argue the most minute details of series canon, and several others all get made fun of, and most of it is hilarious. While the plot is ostensibly about Captain Smiley getting his own comic line revived, the tone of the story is more like what would happen if one mixed The Simpsons with Mystery Science Theater 3000 and had ’bitter humor’ comedians like Lewis Black telling the tale... so it’s pretty random and more than a little mean, but hilarious. If this seems like undue attention to a game’s sense of humor, understand that it’s really about half of what Comic Jumper has to offer.

This leaves just the actual game mechanics to cover, and Comic Jumper gets this right most of the time. The majority of your play time is spent in typical platforming sections where you run, jump, shoot enemies, slide under attacks, climb ladders, fight large bosses, etc., and good controls make it pretty fun. These sections are joined by a mix of others; brief ’quick time events’ (fortunately very brief; they serve as short breathers from more intense sections), scrolling shooting segments, and third-person-view shooting segments where you’re auto-scrolling through a general area but have full control over your aim and some control over your movement; these sections in particular tend to be home to the game’s most artistic moments. The only real flaw in the game mechanics would be a lack of variety in enemies, with a few stages using the same group of foes in the same way over and over. Fortunately this problem is rare, and when it does happen there is usually something hilarious going on to cover for it.

The end result is that Comic Jumper is a platformer that is generally pretty good and still at least decent in its worst points, joined by a hilarious albeit incredibly sarcastic story. With about a dozen main stages that each last ten to twenty minutes, and several challenge stages that are much shorter (but also much more rewarding for mastering), it should last you several hours. And they’ll be hours well spent when good platforming action combines with lots of comedy and well done graphics that are simultaneously tributes to and parodies of several comic genres, Comic Jumper does so many things right that its flaws can be forgiven. 1200 Microsoft Points/$15 USD puts it in the upper bracket of XBLA game prices, but this is one game that definitely earns its price!