The Game: The race is on, and no moves are off-limits – bump your competitors off the road (and into apparently highly volatile vegetation that causes them to explode), or jump over them and any other obstacles that get in your way, including areas of water that cover the road. If you survive the race, you live on to the next round – at least until you run out of cars. (M Network, 1983)
Memories: One of a very few arcade licenses snagged by Mattel for the Intellivision and for the M Network line of games for the Atari 2600 and other platforms, Bump ‘N’ Jump has a bumpy ride as it jumps to the relatively underpowered Atari.
As always with M Network’s games for the 2600, there’s a strangely Intellivision-esque quality to the graphics in this game. A lot of the detail is lost, but the essentials of the game are still in place. You do your level best to bump your competitors off the roadway, and time your high-flying jumps just right to propel yourself over the bodies of water, broken bridges and other obstacles, all in an attempt to stay at the front of the race.
Timing is both crucial and tricky here, moreso than in any other translation of this game that I’ve played. Getting across partially sunken bridges, where you have to jump more than once to get back to solid 
land (and make sure that when/where you come down, there’ll be land there for the next jump), is a pain in this game.
Overall, it’s not a bad translation, just a slightly tricky one to get a handle on at times.
