In Aaargh! Condor, you play as a man who really hates a large bird.

There’s a condor flying around, and in about 10 seconds, it’s gonna steal a dude. According to one of the only contemporary reviews of Aaargh! Condor – a name that I will repeat as many times as possible in this short post – the dude is actually a damsel in distress, but it’s irrelevant. You’ve gotta kill that condor.

At the top of a hill, there is a spear. Hazards litter the road to the top. You’ve got snakes, porcupines, fires, falling condor eggs, a strange man who shoot arrows at you, and something that looks like a pair of eyeballs sticking out of the ground. Once you dodge all of them and climb to the top, you hurl the spear off the hill at the condor. If you kill it, another condor appears, and you do it again. Aaargh, condor!

Aaargh, condor!

Aaargh! Condor goes extremely quickly. You only get a fraction of a second to react to the hazards, especially the arrow man, who comes out of nowhere. The challenge depends half on reaction time and half on memorizing when something will jump out. You get points for dodging attacks too, so you can run up a decent score even if you let the damsel get eaten.

This has to be one of the most inane premises for a game like this, and god help me, I wanted to keep trying to get that condor. It was almost a compulsive reaction. Aaargh! Condor wastes absolutely no time between the start of the game and fighting a huge bird. And then fighting another huge bird. Aaargh! Condor!