Joust

Each player controls a different knight and each of them rides a different mount. The first player is a yellow knight who rides on a flying ostrich. The second player is a light blue knight who rides on a giant stork.

There are three different enemy knights who all ride on giant buzzards and each of them are colored differently. The enemy knights are red Bounders, silver Hunters and dark blue Shadow Lords. The other enemies include the "unbeatable" pterodactyl and The Lava Troll, a giant hand that reaches out and grabs from one of the two lava pools at the bottom of the screen.

In each wave throughout the game, you must defeat every enemy knight in a joust. Everytime you defeat an enemy knight in a joust by ramming him atop his head, he will turn into an egg. You must then capture the egg before it hatches, otherwise, the egg will hatch and the knight will become the next more-difficult character. In other words, a Bounder will become a Hunter, a Hunter will become a Shadow Lord, a Shadow Lord will become a Bounder and so on. After the egg hatches, a new mount will fly out to pick up the newly-hatched enemy knight. You can also collect an enemy knight after he has hatched before he mounts his buzzard.

Sometimes the eggs will fall into the lava pits at the bottom of the screen in later waves. During the first two waves, there are platforms at the bottom of the screen that will allow you to walk over the lava pits, but in later waves, the platforms will be burned away. Also, in later waves, flames will start to burn in the lava pits.

Sometimes, a pterodactyl will show up in some of those waves, usually if you take too long. The pterodactyl will sometimes try to fiercely charge right at you. The only way you can kill the pterodactyl is by ramming him in the mouth to desintagrate him.

If you have your feathered mount fly too close to either of the lava pits, The Lava Troll will reach out and grab your mount by the legs and pull you both into his fiery home. If this happens, you must have your mount repeatedly flap really hard to escape from the grip of The Lava Troll. The Lava Troll will also grab the enemy knights on their buzzards and occasionally pull them in with him.

Even in the later waves, platforms will collapse and disintegrate. Occasionally, there is an Egg Wave where you must grab all the enemy eggs before they hatch. As you advance to later waves, the difficulty constantly increases.

Bug: The most famous bug is known as the "Pterodactyl bug". First, cause one of the red riders to get caught by the lava hands on either side of the screen. Then, position yourself so that you can kill the pterodactyls as they come in from either side of the screen. This trick only works on certain ROM revisions of the game, though.

Early production Joust cabinets came with optical joysticks instead of leaf joysticks and thus had a larger joystick opening in the control panel. The leaf joysticks were substituted later as a cost-saving measure.

These cabinets can also play Robotron and vice-versa with a swap of the program ROMs, the sound ROM, and minor wiring harness modifications for the extra joystick inputs required by Robotron. The control panel joystick openings will have to be bored out to accept the 8-way sticks of Robotron if the cabinet has the two-way leaf joysticks. Joust control panels with Opto-joysticks have larger openings and will readily accept 8-way joysticks.

Play the game on-line requires Shockwave at http://www.midway.com/classicGames/joust/joust.html