Game 438: Spy vs. Spy - The Island Caper

 

The spies are at it again! Mutually shot down over a volcanic island, only one of them can complete the mission - to recover a lost missile - and escape by submarine, leaving the other marooned.

As the missile comes in three parts and they are scattered around the island, there's a good chance the other guy will locate one or two of them, and you'll need to find a way to relieve him of it. Booby traps are the way to go, but this time, they must be crafted from materials recovered on site - vines, sharp sticks, coconuts, and jet fuel.

As with the first game, I played a few rounds of the original Commodore 64 version (via VICE) with "R," and found The Island Caper a general improvement from the first game, though not without some issues. It's certainly a less confusing game - this time there's no question about whether you possess the missile parts or not, though you still need the manual to clarify some of the finer control points - the one-button, context-sensitive interface has different actions for "bury," "drop," and "put away," and some of the traps can be complicated to set up, especially snares and punji pits.

There are seven islands to play on, in ascending order of size and complexity, but the largest still felt a bit too small, so all of the recorded matches were on it. I play white, "R" plays black. I won most of the matches, but the last one ends in a dramatic volcanic eruption stalemate.

 

The spies are tougher than before, with long health bars and health regeneration, but this time, dead means dead. The island's natural hazards, quicksand and sharks, are more damaging than almost anything your foe can do to you.

 

Combat is crap, and that's actually a good thing, because it encourages using traps! It takes forever to kill your opponent with a cane, and it's not too hard for a losing opponent to evade and regenerate. Even if you find a gun, you'll probably run out of bullets before your foe dies, unless he was low on health to begin with. Booby traps, on the other hand, don't always kill, but they do always cause your opponent to drop what they were carrying. And if you can grab it and flee, you're well on your way to victory. If you can correctly guess which side of the island the submarine is moored at.

It's a better designed game than the first one, but it's still a bit limiting. In most games, both spies are going to locate at least one missile part - then what? You could track him down and kill him in combat, but the game really doesn't want you to do that except as a last resort. You could bury your missile pieces and place a bunch of traps and wait, but if both spies do that, then you're deadlocked until one of you breaks, and whoever does that will have to contend with their own traps. Finding a gun can turn the tide in favor of aggression, but it's not a foolproof strategy - the gun is rarely enough to kill, it tends to jam, being full of sand and all, there's no way to draw it when the enemy is already in sight, and searching for it gives your opponent plenty of opportunity to trap your critical path. Or swipe your missile parts.

Incidentally, the AI is horrid and not worth playing against. At level 5, it is essentially impossible to beat in direct combat, but too stupid to maneuver around your corpse after it kills you. I won by letting it collect and assemble the missile and waiting by the beach with a napalm trap, which it triggered, letting me grab the missile and flee to the submarine, and freedom.

GAB rating: Above average. Better than the first, no question, but it needed to be a little bit deeper in order to really accomplish what it was going for.

Game 437: Rush'n Attack

A green beret's got to have a plan to kill everyone he meets. My Ka-Bar is enough to cut through nearly everything the Red Army can throw at me - huskies, grenadiers, snipers, RPG troops, and even artillery. But the one thing you're never prepared for? Those karate-kicking commies who learned how to jump over my knife arm and kick me in the face.

Rush'n Attack, known outside the U.S. as Green Beret, is often seen as a predecessor to Konami's Contra, and there are some strong similarities - you're a one-man army advancing through four side-scrolling stages of increasing difficulty, taking on countless enemies who can kill you in one hit but behave deterministically, emphasizing pattern memorization in order to make progress. Unlike Contra, though, weapons are scarce and temporary, forcing you to fight mainly with a knife, the enemies respawn aggressively and from all directions, and the act of jumping is an inertial commitment - you can forget about somersaulting through a hail of bullets while raining some death of your own from above. It actually plays much more like an earlier whale - Kung-Fu Master - which an anonymous commenter mentioned at the time I had played it.

 

Thankfully, Rush'n Attack is a lot more forgiving than its apparent inspiration despite the one-hit kills. Your knife is a good weapon - it's fast and has terrific range, and when you're surrounded you can often survive by wiggling the joystick and mashing the stab button a lot. Strict timing is not necessary. Enemies with ranged attacks have long delays between shots, ensuring you have a fair chance to rush'n attack them. Black enemies yield powerful, screen-clearing weapons, and the tricky parts where you'll want to use them are consistent. The game isn't by any means easy - I died multiple times on every stage until I learned enough to survive, but the difficulty feels reasonable and fair. Up until the fourth and final stage. Checkpoints are ample in every stage, but spare lives and opportunities to earn more of them aren't, and there are no continues.

In the below video, I use a single save state just before reaching stage four on a single life, so that I wouldn't have to keep replaying the first three. Even with this save state, completing level four took me just as many attempts as reaching it did.

 

 

 

Stage 1 is pretty easy once you've grasped the controls. Brown soldiers happily run headlong into your knife one-by-one. Machine-gunners spawn from the left but aren't too trigger-happy yet; best when you see one to turn around and stab before he gets a chance to shoot you in the back. Caution is better than reckless aggression, now and always. Black powerup-bearing enemies are ample but largely unnecessary.

 

A mortar-launching soldier guards the stage midpoint, and acts as an areal-denial weapon; the mortar has a fixed range, but launches in a parabolic arc that will hit you if you try to just walk over him. Luckily it takes him several seconds to reload - better learn how to dodge the shot and stab his face, because this is the easiest mortar guy you'll ever face.

Soon after, there's missile trucks, which you'll need to climb up on in order to avoid the land mines below. Rush'n Attack often gives you two or more paths separated by ladders, and more often than not, the upper path is safer.

At the end, a truckful of soldiers mobs you, including a jump-kicker or two, who will certainly end your life if you aren't ready.

But I was ready.

Next there's the harbor.

 

For the most part this is more of the same. Machine-gunners are quicker to shoot at you now, and you'll face rocket launchers too, but you can duck under them no problem - the only maybe tricky part is stabbing runners from both directions while prone. Jump-kickers show up every now and then, and some even parachute in from above, but they're not common yet. Land mines will force you to take higher levels, but this is generally safer anyway.

Advance carefully, being sure to push forward only when you know you can deal with whatever might be ahead, and you'll be fine. There is an invisible time limit, revealed only by an alert when you're cutting it close, but I only saw this alert once.

At the end, you face packs of dogs, who will probably kill you the first time or two, but once you know their pattern, you can't lose.

 

Stage 3 - the bridge - is much harder.

Right from the start you have to deal with a battery of zone-denying mortars while being rushed from all directions, including the dreaded karate commies. Black enemies drop grenade pickups, which are powerful but trickier to use than flamethrowers or bazookas.

Now, you really do need to save your weapons for the tricky parts. The jump-kicking are good targets - they were responsible for the majority of my deaths, as it's easy to forget to jump-stab them when there's so much chaos, and even when you do, jumping here is a momentum commitment that can get you killed on the descent.

You can also bait them into jumping early, but this is risky if anyone's pursuing you.

The boss here is a squad of autogyros. If you brought a spare bazooka, this is a piece of cake. If not, good luck.

Finally, Rush'n Attack pulls out the stops with its last stage - the army base. Nearly twice as long as any stage before it and stuffed with every variety of soldier and every possible combination, you'd better have a full complement of spare lives and a bit of luck.

You're safer on the mid-level, usually.

Two mortars - a good place for a grenade.

Did I mention grenades are powerful?

Sometimes the higher level isn't safer.

 

Oh, that's not fair!

Stand and I eat a bullet. Stay prone and I eat a boot.

Landmines and mortars guard the prison wall. You don't have many opportunities to advance.

Bazooka beats mortar. Easily.

 

The final boss here is a flamethrower unit, and compared to the grueling stage that they terminate, they are not too bad.

The first time I even reached them, I had one spare life left, and died almost immediately.

But on my second try, when I knew what was coming, I beat them easily.

Then it loops back to the first stage with a harder difficulty setting, where I didn't last long. But I'm satisfied.

GAB rating: Good. I was a little surprised, but I liked this one! It's not Konami's most ambitious game to date - that would be Gradius - but Rush'n Attack balances the challenging-but-fair design ethos and feels good to play, and manages to not feel overly monotonous either thanks to varied stage design and enemy attack patterns. I've heard it described as a proto-Contra, which isn't totally wrong, but sells the game short - the experience was enjoyable in its own right and didn't just make me wish I was playing Contra instead.