After some intense combat, Harry, thinking he has won, lets his guard down, allowing the jaguar to get the best of him. The story of The Lost Expedition begins with our hero battling for his life against a demonic jaguar amid a ring of fire. The new Harry is dashing, daring, and, at least in his own mind, quite the lady-killer. This iteration of Harry is certainly not the same faceless, pixelated fellow that we've all come to know over the years-nay, the new Pitfall Harry is quite different. The Lost Expedition does add one slight innovation to the series, in that it opts to give its protagonist a legitimate personality this time around.

Pitfall Harry is back, and this time, he's got attitude. However, this is not to say the game isn't fun on its own merits, and all told, The Lost Expedition still makes for a pretty enjoyable platforming experience all around. The latest adventure of Pitfall Harry, titled Pitfall: The Lost Expedition, is the debut of the series on this generation's hardware, and much like many of its Pitfall predecessors, it doesn't break any manner of new ground. Yet somehow, in a sad twist of irony, most of the subsequent games featuring the Pitfall moniker didn't do anything for the genre, instead serving as little more than lame retreads of previously explored territory. Since Harry's original adventure, many games have built upon the basic platforming concepts found in that game, consistently pushing the envelope of what platforming can be. Without that seminal game, we would have never experienced the trials and tribulations of Pitfall Harry, jumping over pits, climbing up and down ladders, and swinging from vine to vine across the dense jungles-or, at least as dense as the 2600 was capable of rendering. In many ways, the original Pitfall! for the Atari 2600 can be held primarily responsible for inventing the modern platforming genre.

Pitfall the lost expedition