Hello there and many thanks for visiting my blog. Hope you are having a great Christmas. 🙂
Today we are going to have a look at a game that I have fond memories of playing at school in the 90’s. Most PC’s at school had games installed that people had taken with them from home. When break came, some of us sat and played games. Good fun.🙂
The game is called Jones in the Fast Lane and was developed by Sierra, a company famous for games like the Kings Quest, Larry and Police Quest. It came out in 1990 for PC’s with MS-DOS.
There is no native version for AmigaOS 4, but we can easily run it through the wonderful tool ScummVM. If you want to know more about ScummVM and how to get it working on Amiga, please check out my post about The Flight of the Amazon Queen.
Jones in the Fast Lane
Ok, let’s get down to business with this classic.
First of all, where do you get hold of it? You can either buy a second-hand copy on sites like eBay or you can download it. The game is freeware now, so it’s perfectly legal to grab the file on the Internet. Here is a link to a page featuring it for download:
http://www.myabandonware.com/game/jones-in-the-fast-lane-1xb
Once it has finished downloading, unpack it to a directory of your choice (right-click icon, choose “extract to”), preferably your ScummVM one.
Now you need to add the game to ScummVM. To add, click on “Add Game” and select the directory where it resides and follow the prompts. Should be quite straight-forward.
Now we are ready to join Jones and enter a world of both business and leisure.
You can play the game in a window on your Workbench desktop or you can play full screen. I tried full screen first, but switched to window mode later. Taste differs.
Gameplay
Jones in the Fast Lane is a life simulator. In this game the goal is to climb the ladder in society by working, getting education (to get better paid jobs) or to just have luck and win the lottery. I’ve taken a bunch of screenshots while playing, so let’s go!
As you can see from the screenshots and the descriptions, the game is kind of like real life. It’s very fun, but more challenging than it looks. You’ve got only so much time you can spend on different tasks, so you must do the right priorities. I found myself broke in the end with no solution in sight, while Jones was rising to become the top banana in the local community.
It’s also worth mentioning that you can play this game with other people. It’s turn-based and works pretty well.
Conclusion
This is a fun game, very fun indeed. There is a lot to discover, there are strategies to learn, there is humour and pretty graphics to boot. I really like it and I love the fact that it is now playable on AmigaOS 4 through ScummVM. Back in the 90’s I was so envious at those who had PC’s, since they could play this game at home. Now us Amiga owners can too!
I highly recommend giving Jones a go. A super game!
Thanks for reading and hope this sparked your interest in trying this game on AmigaOS 4.
