Memories: Brainchild Design

By: Derek Yu

On: April 3rd, 2007

I was reminiscing with my friend Jon the other day about games we had played in our formative years, and Brainchild Design came up. I’m sure a lot of you remember them: they made two delicious little freeware games back in the day, Quadnet and Jump n’ Bump (and then promptly jumped the shark). But for those who haven’t (or for those who have forgotten)…

Quadnet is a fast-paced shoot ’em up that took place on a single grid. The camera angle twisted around depending on where you were on the grid. Robotron-esque control scheme. Really fun, fast-paced little game that we loved competing in.

Jump n’ Bump is a flat-out great hotseat multiplayer game. Using the keyboard, mouse, and/or joystick, the goal of the game is to squash your opponent by jumping on their head. And you play as cute little bunnies, so it’s really, really funny. There’s nothing better than dropping on friends one after another and watching garbage bags full of gibs ’spode out of their furry little bodies. You can quote me on that!

Both games crash on start-up in XP, but run perfectly using DOSBox.

Update: Good ol’ Mr. Hollow pointed out that JnB is available as a Win32 binary. Thanks!

Posted in Freeware, Highly Recommended, Multiplayer, Platformers, Shoot-em-ups

shinygerbil

Uhh, half the text appears to be stuck in the navigation bar on the right. Using Opera here.
Derek

Hmmm, does that fix it?
BenH

Ahhh… Jump n’ bump. I used to always want to emulate how they did the gibs in that game :D
http://blog.tidyapps.com jop

Thanks! you just made me feel way too old! I end up thinking about games like atic atac on my 48k and bruce lee on my friend’s dad’s 386 when i reminisce. Or moving on a few years – slay marathons on my 486 laptop back in uni. Jump n bump’s still cutting edge!
http://www.jrnetwork.co.uk Jimbob

You know you want C-Dogs to be the next installment… well, I do.

Jump n’ Bump was bloody marvellous. A lot of the user-made content was pants though, it seemed to be a lot of people’s first encounter with Paint…
Dan MacDonald

Yeah, I’ll second a C-Dogs appearance… same keyboard co-op hasn’t been as fun since the PC version of Double Dragon.

:D
haowan

hot-seat means you take turns no?
mrhollow

Jump ‘n bump has nice Linux and Win32 ports available, no dosbox required:

http://icculus.org/jumpnbump/

Cheers.
http://triplet.xf.cz/ Triple T

>hot-seat means you take turns no?
Literally, yes. But I ensure you Jump’n’Bump is more of a “simultaneous hot seat” game.
I also quite liked Knockin, although it’s not as classic as the games mentioned here.
Xander

Ah, Quadnet was fantastic! We used to hot-seat that one constantly, taking it in turns to try and beat the other before you. Damn sweet little game.
http://www.josephkingworks.blogspot.com Joseph

wow Jump nâ€™ bump was a fun game, I only played it a little bit, that was a few years ago. But I still remember crushing my sisters with bunny-feet of doom heheh…
Hannes

Woohoo! Jump n Bump .. an alltime classic! But players should be prepared for breaking with their friends after splattering their bunnies all over the place again and again and again :D
Twisted

I’m so glad people still remember their games – it’s a real shame BCD haven’t made any in a while. Even Knockin’ (see brainchilddesign.com) was a great networked game for windows, though I don’t know if it works on XP.