Game 468: Paradroid

Apparently, I like robots. The Robot Odyssey was my 1984 GOTY. Berzerk and Robotron are two of my earliest Good ratings. Rebelstar Raiders is one of only two UK-developed titles on my ivory deck. Paradroid is shaping up to be an easy third.

 

Billed as "the ultimate brain drain" and promising a blend of arcade and strategy, Paradroid is like Berzerk but puzzlier. You operate a remote-controlled "influencer device" (this is what I am calling an iPhone tripod from now on), and your goal is to destroy every clanker gone rogue on the 20 decks of the space freighter Paradroid.

Your primary weapon is a pair of laser beams, but this won't be enough. You are the most fragile droid on the ship, and although not all of them are armed, the upper echelon are and will swat you like a fly.

And you only get one life.

Each droid is shown with a three-digit serial number; you, the weakest, are designated 001. The strongest, the command cyborg, 999. The first digit directly corresponds to the droid's class and overall power level; the rest are not inherently meaningful, but you can expect, for instance, that all 615 droids are identical in power and ability, and a 614 will be similarly powerful but differ in abilities to some extent. Incidentally, you can forget about tangling with a 600 series or higher at your entry power level.

Each deck on the Paradroid also generally only contains droids of one or two classes.

To get far, you'll need to use your secondary weapon - a hacking device, which when activated, initiates a minigame when you collide with a victim droid that you wish to commandeer. 

This might look complicated, but Robot Odyssey this ain't. In fact, you don't have enough time to really think things over; you have only a few seconds to try to "flip" the control circuit to your color. And thankfully, you have every advantage. For a start, you decide which side you want - left or right, which in turn decides your color; yellow or purple. One side is often more advantageous than the other, and if you can pick it, then you have a good chance at hijacking a robot who is several levels above you. But if they're about equal, then going after a significantly stronger one is risky.

So how do you determine, in just a few seconds, which side is better? By the number of "dead" pins on each side. No wire connected? Dead pin. Color inverting diode connected? Dead pin. You might not have enough time to count them, but you only need to reckon which one has fewer. Pick the side with fewer dead pins, and you're already off to a great start.

After picking a side, you play by sending pulses down the wires on your side to flip the circuit's segments to your color, while the enemy does the same, and this is your other advantage; the enemy AI seems to be completely random. Stronger robots get more pulses (and in fact might not even have time to use them all) but if you picked the better side and use yours efficiently (don't overthink it but don't waste them either), you'll probably win! Which is good because failure means game over.

Beating a +3 droid on a roughly even board. The droid makes mostly bad moves.

Success destroys the victim robot and causes your influencer device to assume its power, abilities, and serial number. Even better, this power also comes with increased hacking prowess; take over the 247 vending machine bot, and you're in a much better position to hijack the 571 helmsbot, who can probably last long enough to infect the 711 battle droid with yourself, and so forth.

So, is the optimal strategy to work your way up to the 999 and then unload hell on the Paradroid? Not quite. If, while in control of another droid, you should take too many hits or lose a hacking minigame, you revert back to the 001, and if you didn't leave any weaker bots alive, you're screwed. On top of that, a hacked droid will eventually recover, at which point you automatically terminate the host and revert to the 001. The more powerful the droid, the more quickly this happens. 

The 999 droid is found on the bridge and if you can hijack its circuits, is unstoppable... for about 30 seconds.

 

But it has another, not-so-secret ability; access a terminal, and you can view the specs on ALL of the droids in the game, of which there are 24.

Some of these bots seem familiar!

So I took notes on all of them.

Entry	Serial	Class	Height (m)	Weight (kg)	Drive	Brain	Arms	Sensors
1	001	Influence	1	27			Lasers
2	123	Disposal	1.37	85	Tracks			Infrared
3	139	Disposal	1.22	61	Antigrav
4	247	Servant	1.56	78	Antigrav	Neutronic
5	249	Servant	1.63	83	Tripedal	Neutronic
6	296	Servant	1.2	47	Tracks	Neutronic
7	302	Messenger	1.07	23	Antigrav
8	329	Messenger	1.07	31	Wheels
9	420	Maintenance	1.41	57	Tracks	Neutronic
10	476	Maintenance	1.32	42	Antigrav	Neutronic	Lasers	Infrared
11	492	Maintenance	1.48	51	Antigrav	Neutronic
12	516	Crew	1.57	74	Bipedal	Neutronic
13	571	Crew	1.76	62	Bipedal	Neutronic
14	598	Crew	1.72	93	Bipedal	Neutronic
15	614	Sentinel	1.93	121	Bipedal	Neutronic	Rifle	Subsonic
16	615	Sentinel	1.2	29	Antigrav	Neutronic	Lasers	Infrared
17	629	Sentinel	1.09	59	Tracks	Neutronic	Lasers	Subsonic
18	711	Battle	1.93	102	Bipedal	Neutronic	Disruptor	Radar, Ultrasonic
19	742	Battle	1.87	140	Bipedal	Neutronic	Disruptor	Radar
20	751	Battle	1.93	227	Bipedal	Neutronic	Lasers
21	821	Security	1	28	Antigrav	Neutronic	Lasers	Radar, Infrared
22	834	Security	1.1	34	Antigrav	Neutronic	Lasers	Radar
23	883	Security	1.62	79	Wheels	Neutronic	Exterminator	Radar
24	999	Command	1.87	162	Antigrav	Primode	Lasers	Radar, Infrared, Subsonic

I'm not sure what most of these specs actually mean yet, but I do know that a droid's lack of a weapon doesn't mean you lack one after possessing it; it just means they won't shoot you, and you keep your weak 001-grade lasers after you take them. I also know from experience that the Battledroid's disruptors are a screen-clearing weapon that doesn't damage other battle droids or higher, so avoid until you have something immune!

Clearing the Paradroid is going to take some planning ahead, and thankfully, the game provides a map of sorts. Mapping out the droids will be my responsibility.

Games 465-467: Hewson Consultants and the 3D Seiddab trilogy

Whenever I select European computer games for coverage, there's always a bit of arbitrariness. Take Hewson Consultants - a "smaller software company" according to Wikipedia, with a ten year run of fairly consistent quality but not much impact beyond their era of ZX Spectrum and C64 games. Graftgold's Paradroid would be their first whale, and motivates me to retrospect their back catalog.

Hewson Consultants would be kickstarted by the release of the awful ZX80 computer in 1980. Andrew Hewson, an early adopter of this machine, wrote one of its earliest unofficial programming guides, and soon found himself in a position to publish ZX80 and ZX81 software written by his readers.

 

Their earliest titles are, of course, derivative and barely playable.

 

"Puckman" isn't completely horrible, but 5/6/7/8 is a stupid keyboard cluster for 2D movement.

Also on their early catalog are a series of flight simulators credited to pilot and professional air traffic controller Mike Male.

• Pilot (1982), an IFR-only ZX81 civilian flight sim with takeoff, navigation, and landing.
• Nightflite (1982) and Nightflite II (1983) on the ZX Spectrum, offering minimalist cockpit visuals.
• Heathrow Air Traffic Control (1983) on the ZX Spectrum.

 

During these years, Hewson also released the aptly-titled flight simulators Dragonfly and Dragonfly II on the short-lived Dragon computer series. I have absolutely no interest in playing any of these games; I just found it interesting that flight sims make up a significant portion of Hewson's early catalog.

 

What does interest me are the first games by Graftgold's founder Steve Turner, the so-called "Seiddab Trilogy," all initially released on the Spectrum by Hewson and featuring pseudo-3D graphics.

 

Game 465: 3D Space Wars 

Ostensibly a clone of Exidy's Star Fire, but wow, look at all those Seiddabs, moving around pseudo-3D space and scaling up and down in realtime! Granted, it's not nearly as smooth as Star Fire, nor is the 3D effect very convincing, but this has to be a record for sheer number of scaling onscreen sprites in a computer game of this kind.

And honestly, I've played much worse than this. Your ship yaws and pitches with a pleasing rotational inertia which gives the combat a touch of depth beyond mindless twitch shooting. Energy management plays an important role here, too - your fuel diminishes with each shot you fire and each hit you take, and a fueling station (a possible Star Raiders influence?) found on each stage provides your only recharge, typically usable only once.

However, it's still a pretty shallow experience. There's no strategic layer and there are no subsystems to manage; your only controls are axial movement, throttle, and gunnery, and I never saw much point to touching the throttle other than using it to reach the fuel station. The Seiddabs only fire when you can see them, and the best way to minimize your own damage is by targeting them in isolation, using quick sweeps across the viewpoint so that each is on screen as briefly as possible before passing over your laser's kill zone; your forward velocity seems irrelevant.

 

3D Space Wars gets difficult rather quickly, and notably, fuel does not recharge between levels, forcing you to fight efficiently even on the "easy" rounds, or ensure failure later on. I managed to reach the fourth wave once, but I wasn't recording when I did. My best run on record reaches the third round with about half a fuel tank, and ends soon after that.

 

GAB rating: Average. It's competent enough, but there are better games than this.

Game 466: 3D Seiddab Attack

The Seiddabs have invaded earth, and oh wow is this game ugly. An abstract pattern of dots vaguely suggest a city skyline at night, but your main method of navigating will be the on-screen radar. If you can determine which dot on the map represents your tank. There's certainly some Battlezone influence here, but all you can do is aim your gun and rotate when you reach intersections.

To beat the level, you've got to locate and destroy the Seiddab task force leader, who will spawn after you kill a certain number of underlings, and can be recognized by a trail it leaves on the radar view. Missiles are also finite; run out without taking out the leader with your last shot and you die. Sometimes you just have to eat a few hits rather than waste ammo on lackeys. Between leaders, there's a brief bonus round where you shoot down Seiddabs in the countryside, your line-of-fire unobstructed by buildings and your ammo limitless.

Avoiding return fire is usually impossible, but you'll last longer if you can get the shot impacts spread out along the full width of the tank than if you let them concentrate in one spot - one cool visual detail is that chunks of metal get blasted off the tank exterior in realtime based on where they hit. But good luck with that even spread; the shot distribution weighs strongly toward the middle, and you can't even aim at Seiddabs that are too far in your peripheral (or flying too high or low).

I never managed to beat the second round, and I don't feel eager to put in the effort to learn how.

 

GAB rating: Bad. Space Wars was derivative but tolerable. This one's just ugly, confusing, and frustrating.

 

Game 467: 3D Lunattack

The final game in the Seiddab trilogy sees the fight for earth taken to the Seiddabs' lunar base, and it's the weirdest and most ambitious by far. And surprisingly, it's also the best!

Now that I've said that, let's temper our expectations a bit. It's not quite good, and it's not going to shatter any expectations of what can be done on the old Speccy. I'm not itching to play any more of it, either. But it's more original than Space Wars, more playable than Seiddab Attack, and offers smoother, more convincing 3D visuals than either.

Part of this is from improved technology; Lunattack ups the system requirement to the 48KB model, and ditches TRS-80 CoCo compatibility in favor of C64, being the first Hewson game to support the platform, if not to be designed for it. In turn, you get a zippier flight experience than its sluggish predecessors, in which you glide over the cratered surface of the moon, the terrain and ground targets staying in perspective as you bank, turn, and pitch at a silky ~10 frames per second.

Lunattack also utilizes the sparsely supported Currah μSpeech module, currently only emulated by the commercial emulator Spectaculator, and provides some ambiance and audio cues by ingame computer chatter, though it usually sounds like it's malfunctioning (air-e-al mine fi-ield, stïr carefully, the navcom crackles as you enter the aerial minefield zone).

Gameplay-wise, Lunattack reminds me a lot of Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom for its perspective and multiple zones of extraterrestrial dangers, but plays differently enough from it that I don't presume there was direct influence.

Your first goal is to pass through the tank zone, characterized by stationary lunar tanks with slow-firing shells. Your ship's main weapon, a laser turret, takes some getting used to; shots have a delay, but always track the crosshair in motion, meaning that if you aim perfectly, pull the trigger, and jerk the ship away from the target before your shot lands, then your shot is going to miss. Better that you shoot first and then aim before it hits the surface! I've also found that, counterintuitively, the farther away a tank is on the horizon, the easier it is to hit.

One aspect of the controls which I find neat is that the fire trigger is multifunctional and context-sensitive. Aim above the horizon, and instead of lasers, you launch BVR missiles. Aim low, and a HUD indicator points the way to your next objective. Honestly, it's a pretty clever and elegant solution for expanding your ship's capabilities without requiring the use of a keyboard.

Your ship is fragile, but agile. Dodging individual tank fire is pretty easy even though your hurtbox is the entire screen; just swerve away until the shell goes offscreen and you don't get hurt. It's holding still long enough to take them out without getting pummeled in return that's difficult. Fighters occasionally appear too, and their shots are more difficult to avoid, but if you're quick to notice them on radar, you can take them out with missiles before they enter visual range.

 

Next, there's the aerial mine zone, and the mines are not your biggest threat. That would be the mountains themselves, which look like you should be able to fly right over, but you cannot, and unlike the mines, you can't shoot them down either. You just have to fly around them, and since your damage zone is effectively the screen's entire width, this is mega annoying. But eventually you get through - the navigation HUD helps find the way forward faster, but it's certainly irritating when there's no way to go in the correct direction without crashing into a rock.

The third and final zone is full of missile silos, which are functionally the same as tanks, just faster and more damaging. Fighters spawn more aggressively too. Navigate this area, and you'll eventually locate the main Seiddab base, and it will take a few strafing runs to put it out of commission. Do it and you get to play another loop.

GAB rating: Average. Not bad, not great, but a pleasant surprise that surpassed my (low) expectations.