Power Pete

Overview

Power Pete was a great Mac exclusive by MacPlay, Interplay's brand for Mac games, though by the time Pangea got back the rights to it and renamed it Mighty Mike (if I recall, they disliked the Power Pete name but their first choice couldn't be used due to trademark reasons), the classic Mac OS was on its way out. Thanks to Jorio Ports, you can play it again, and it's still worth playing. The review below is created from the old 2021 Games version and the page's previous version with some edits.

Review

Power Pete was one of Pangea's earlier (if not earliest) title and one of the best. Telling the story of an action figure in search of stuffed rabbits that have escaped throughout the toy store's many themed departments and the other toys that are out to get revenge for their poor sales (read the manual), playing Power Pete years after I first played it was still a delightful experience, and not just because of a new open-source port to modern systems. Playing it for the first time since around 2010 (when I used an actual Mac OS 9-running iMac) was fantastic, and thanks to resources from Macintosh Garden, I was able to extract the maps to the levels, which I appended with locations of keys and bunnies. The page also included quality scans of the rare strategy guide, but other than an interview that reveals that were supposed to be twelve "worlds" instead of just five, it only included text descriptions of how to beat the levels.

The game's not hard if you have any real video game experience, and the only bug I found in the port I played was a rare collision error that crashed the game in the third level of Candy Cane Lane (about a third of the way in). Unfortunately I didn't get specifics before the game quit out. There's a few frustrating trial-and-error sequences in the fourth world (Magic Fun House) and the hitboxes can be wonky sometimes. The dinosaurs in the first world (Prehistoric Plaza) come to mind, but typically bad hitboxes are usually paired with some unsatisfying enemy defeat, like in EVO: Quest for Eden. Here, the weapons sound nice, and any successful "kill" comes with a pop with confetti and loot coming out. Most enemies tend to go up and down in wave patterns as they move toward you, so the best strategy is to get them parallel with you against a wall to open fire.

I put in my notes that the Double-Barreled Gumball Blaster is the best weapon because it's introduced very early on, refills are common, it's fast, and powerful enough to take out most enemies. There are weapons that are faster and more powerful but they're sparse (they'll disappear from your inventory if you run out of ammo...and you can't just keep stockpiling them because they don't come anywhere close to 1000), and a lot of the late-game weapons are simply terrible that you shouldn't waste time with. (Best advice is to see what works and what doesn't).

I've listed this game as being published by Interplay Productions, as they owned MacPlay (which published the game as a boxed commercial product) back in 1995. As MacPlay had been shut down by the time the rights reverted to Pangea, Interplay was majority-acquired by Titus Interactive, and the bankruptcy of the company in 2005 almost killed Interplay for good (it didn't, but it sold off most of the IPs and basically became a white dwarf as far as game developers go).

Player Notes

I really don't have access to a real Mac anymore and a lot of the emulators seemed to have problems with it (it was like it had a memory leak, but only in the emulation), the last time I played it on a genuine Mac was 2010, and I didn't get past one of the levels of Magic Fun House, which involved a maze and arrows that shoot you around. The last level also has warps.

As a result, the game that I played for the review in early 2021 was the Jorio port as discussed, which I rated it as "SOLID" (basically 3/5) partly because it was quite short. There are major gaps in categories of toys to fight (and the choice of worlds is a bit eccentric), there could've been stuff like girls' toys, space toys, military toys, and so on, and some of that stuff WAS developed. The scraps were moved to the last world, "Games Gallery" world, renamed "Bargain Bin" late in development, as that world (the fifth and last one) features sandboxes, UFOs that make you invincible, stuffed dogs, and baby toys scattered about.

My main complaint in the original review is you can't have the original resolution while keeping full screen (surrounded by black) but hey, it's free and it works! Can't complain too much.

Port & Rerelease Notes

For a long time, Power Pete (as Mighty Mike) was available on Pangea's site as a downloadable commercial title. Not only was it it still more than a dollar for each level (not that cheap) but it wasn't compatible with Mac OS X, either (zero futureproofing), and the price never went down. The 2001 re-release had a few changes like updates to the control scheme, the removal of an option that let you play an interlaced version for higher frame rate (if I recall this was specific to certain models of computers/monitors), and letting you beat the game with Medium. You couldn't play the last two worlds with Easy (or the last one with Medium), they were grayed out in the world map (at least they told you that you couldn't beat the game in any mode other than Medium, a favor that not every game did). The port also recolored a background (the level intro, the actual enemy had been redrawn) to show a yellow dinosaur rather than a purple one (the inevitable Barney parody, of course). It would be nice if the Jorio port offered a way to restore the original.

Additional Content

Thanks to a tool called "Mighty Resource Viewer" which I can't seem to find anymore (and with some help from Macintosh Garden members) I was able to get the maps for the world, then I drew in stuff like the keys and bunnies. You can find all that here, though it's not printer-friendly.

Screenshots

Time to make some clowns cry.