Johnny Crash Does Texas is the second airborne outing of the titular star. Johnny is not just a ringer for Sid Vicious--he's also a bit of a paradox. Johnny's a traditionalist who believes that, amid more popular and modern extreme sports, the old man-out-of-a-cannon routine still has the power to draw crowds. He's also, however, a revolutionary--not content to simply rocket himself heavenward on a wild, uncontrolled flight. Johnny's new outing brings lots of cool stuff to bear, including new tricks, an in-flight radar, and a sweet combo system. This adventure is also set in rural Texas, replete with crowds of friendly cowboys and a joyless hegemony of oil barons. The action only benefits from the story's hilarious intrigue, making Johnny Crash Does Texas an improvement over its predecessor in every way, and not just because Johnny wears a cowboy hat.
If you missed the first Johnny Crash, set amid a sprawling cityscape, you might not be familiar with the towheaded terror. Johnny performs incredible stunts by launching himself from a cannon, traveling horizontally, and then colliding into stuff. The action is controlled with a single button, used to initially set the angle of Johnny's ascent and then to make him flap his arms to gain altitude whenever you should so desire.
Each time you flap, however, an energy meter is drained, hastening your eventual fall. Who knew that a game about cannon stunts could embody the intrinsic link between the expenditure of energy and one's eventual demise? Johnny's passion for altitude burns like the purest phlogiston. It propels him to celestial heights, but also threatens to consume him, leaving only moribund ash and ember. On second thought, Johnny Crash is just fun, pure and simple, and it doesn't have any lofty aspirations--apart, of course, from those of Johnny himself.
Johnny's task is to make a name for himself in the Lone Star State, and he does this by performing stunts of successive difficulty. In each cannon flight, he'll have to execute a specific maneuver in conjunction with some feature of the landscape or atmosphere. Thankfully, this time around, a navigational system helps you locate these objects, which range from planes to oil derricks to steers' behinds. Cowboys cheer him, and oil barons jeer him. Johnny doesn't care, because he knows he's tops.
Once Johnny performs a stunt, it's then part of his repertoire and it can be used in all future flights as a score-boosting mechanism. Three of these moves are particularly important in sustaining long flights. Johnny can catch a ride on a vulture, saving his energy; he can ride a tornado, launching him well into the stratosphere; and he can charge himself up with a lightning blast, replenishing his energy meter. These, or any other stunts, can be chained together to form score-multiplying combos. This is a new feature in Johnny Does Texas, and it's a welcome addition, as it forces players to plan out their flights in order to achieve top scores.
Graphically, Johnny Crash is still fast and cartoonish, but more-varied backgrounds have been included this time. Whenever Johnny collides with a trick item--like a vulture or a hot air balloon--a hand-drawn screen will pop up, depicting a manic Johnny throwing up "the horns," or something equally rad. Johnny's look is of great quality and it fits the game perfectly (by the standards of the Nokia 6620).
Johnny's sound is equally zany. The rocking score of the last game has been replaced with some slightly more down-home tunes. Mournful guitar wails and a swing beat play throughout the menu screens, while Johnny's in-flight tunes sound like Boogie Woogie combined with surf music. Could that symbolize the culture clash at play here? Again, probably not. The music is in there because it's totally kicking; in fact, it's some of the very best in a mobile game.
Johnny Crash is one of mobile's few mascot candidates, and he would probably serve in that role admirably. Indeed, his youthful insouciance and dramatic flair make him quite the spectacle. Johnny Crash Does Texas' considerable additions--namely, its combo system, navigation system, and colorful setting--represent marked improvements over the storied star's last adventure, and they help make it one of the very best and most unique games for mobile. Even after completing the scrapbook, or story mode, you'll want to replay levels dozens of times to improve your score. Excepting its predecessor, Johnny Crash Does Texas is the only mobile game to feature a safety warning at its outset, and that should be reason enough to make the download.
