As I begin writing this, Digital Antiquarian had just about a week ago published an extremely unpunctual article on 1983's Lode Runner (of which Miner
is a prototype) despite having stopped covering that era almost eight
years ago. Coincidence, or did Jimmy Maher scan my whaling log for
backlog material and then beat me to the punch? Probably coincidence,
but it's fun to speculate.
After Maher's typically
well-sourced and riveting account of its development, there's no point
to describe the game's history in detail again, but here's a short
version. James Bratsanos, a student of UW, developed a game Suicide
on his Commodore PET in c1980-1981, based on a friend's second-hand
description of an arcade game that he never played. The next year, he
rewrote it on the university's VAX-11 computers as Kong. It is
described it as a monochrome ASCII game about navigating a 2D maze of
platforms and ladders, collecting gold, being chased by monsters, and
digging holes to trap them. Fellow student Doug Smith closely remade
that game on his Apple II as Miner, and submitted a copy to
Broderbund, who rejected it for publication. Smith made an improved
second version, with color graphics and sound. It was accepted, and
reworked into a third version, released commercially as Lode Runner to
avoid confusion with the similarly titled Miner 2049er which was by then available on the Apple II.
Bratsanos
has said in interviews that the arcade game described to him was Donkey
Kong, but Jimmy Maher believes it more likely that his friend described
Universal's Space Panic, that he renamed his game Kong when
Nintendo's smash hit landed in the summer of 1981, and years later
misremembered the actual order of events, falsely conflating the memory
of Donkey Kong's success into Suicide's genesis. Neither Suicide nor
Kong exist any longer as far as I know, but they represent the earliest
germ of Lode Runner, and given its much stronger similarities to Space
Panic than Donkey Kong, I concur with Maher's interpretation.
Interestingly, Broderbund had previously published Apple Panic, an
unauthorized port of Space Panic.
Smith's original version of
Miner appears to be lost, like Bratsanos' game that inspired it, but the
second version that got Broderbund's attention is available on Asimov.
And I will cover it as an ancestor.
I've
never played the original Lode Runner before, but I had played a demo
of the Windows sequel. I quickly found that in this prototype, all of
the basic elements are already here. Climb ladders, dig to the left and
right to trap monsters, collect all of the gold on the level, and escape
once you do.
It's
reminiscent of Space Panic on a superficial level - you run through a
stage made out of bricks and ladders while being chased by monsters, and
can dig pits to trap them or descend yourself, but the differences all
work in Miner's favor.
Space Panic was sunk by unreliable controls and random monster behavior
that made it a crapshoot to complete your task of killing them. Here
monsters behave deterministically, though not always sensibly. The
result is monsters that chase you a lot more aggressively, at least when
they can figure out a path, and therefore can be reliably lured into
your traps with proper planning and execution
On that note,
the goal isn't even to trap the monsters, but to get the gold. If you
can't trap the monsters, you can probably evade them instead. That said,
they can collect gold too, and when this happens you'll need to trap
them to get it back.
The level design is much more varied,
more puzzle-oriented, and more interesting. Digging is just as much a
tool for navigating the levels as it is a tool for trapping monsters.
The fact that you can't dig straight down makes it often necessary to
plan several moves ahead or risk digging yourself into a corner from
which you can't get out.
Not the least most
important difference is that the controls are vastly better than Space
Panic's, and the tile-based level design and controls absolve you of the
pixel-precision that Space Panic demanded. The controls aren't by any
means perfect, and you'll definitely want to use joystick mode over
keyboard, as the twitchy keyboard movement scheme can easily send you
sprinting right past ladders and ledges with a single key tap. Even on
joystick mode, I died several times because the game dropped lightly
tapped directional inputs, or registered a push longer than intended and
moved me two spaces when I only meant to move one, but it's still much
better than Space Panic, and it's also generous enough with bonus lives
that you can afford the occasional deadly mishap.
Level 03 is the unbeatable one, owing to both a bug and some level design errors.
First,
there is a bug that makes it impossible to grab some of the gold. The
two leftmost pieces and the two in the center can only be reached by
dropping onto the floating platforms from the hangbars above.
Unfortunately, landing on the gold from these bars causes it to
disappear without awarding points or credit for collecting it, making
the level unwinnable. This can be fixed by raising the corresponding
bars up a tile.
Second, after collecting the gold on the rightmost
platform, it is impossible to reach the ladder to the right, or to
return to any of the platforms on the left. This is fixed by extending
the ladder's length downward.
Miner does have a level editor on
the disk, but it lacks any preview function, and it's much easier just
to extract the level file in text format, tweak it in Notepad, and put
it back on the disk. This is what I did.
Revised stage
There
are 20 levels in total, beginning with level 00, and when you reach 20,
it loops back to the design of level 01, though the counter keeps
increasing.
I made it to level 20 on my second real attempt and
recorded the playthrough. During the latter half I am beating levels 12
through 19 for my first time, so I make a lot of mistakes that aren't
edited out or undone with save states. I'd still earned enough bonus
lives from the previous levels that I could reach level 20 with a
surplus - this game isn't all that hard. The resulting playthrough video
is a bit more authentic than most, as you can see me struggle with
unfamiliar puzzles and layouts and fail repeatedly as I gradually figure
things out, rather than demonstrate obtained proficiency from start to finish.
GAB rating: Above Average. Miner needs a bit of polish in the controls and graphics department, but the planted seeds of a winner are already evident. Kong
and Smith's original prototype modeled after it may be lost, but it's
easy to see why Broderbund took immediate interest in snatching this one
up and fine-tuning it into a commercial-quality product.
Up next
is Lode Runner, and I must admit I'm a bit apprehensive. Miner's 20
levels already feel like they exhaust the gameplay possibilities that
the engine allows. Lode Runner, as far as I know, introduces no new
gameplay mechanics, it merely tightens up the existing ones, and this is
supposed to sustain itself for 150 levels? I've been pleasantly
surprised before, but the notion of enduring this much Lode Runner
sounds exhausting. We'll see in the new year.
Why did Taito think we would want to play a game about elevators?
Elevators are the opposite of action. The term elevator music is used as a metaphor for anything boring and uninteresting. Sales
performance, nonetheless, proved they were right.
You
play Agent Otto, a guy who looks like a silver fox in the title screen
but an ordinary shlub ingame, which would be perfect for a secret agent,
but unfortunately for him, everywhere he goes is infested with
fedora-wearing counter-agents who want to kill him. Your mission is to
infiltrate a 30-story tower by entering from the roof, descend to the
basement, stealing all of the intelligence along the way, all of it kept
in rooms marked with red doors, and escape in the getaway car parked in
the basement's garage.
Your main method of descent is an overly
complicated network of ridiculously unsafe elevators. Some floors have
stairs, but for the most part you'll be riding lifts down the shafts.
Counter-agents will shoot you on sight, but their bullets can be easily
ducked under, or somewhat less easily jumped over, and they aren't so
good at evading your return fire. In later levels they'll learn how to
go prone, which will evade even your crouching shots, but eventually
they'll stand up, or you can shoot them while descending. Trying to
guess whether they'll aim low or high can be a problem sometimes; most
of the time it's high, but you can't easily jump from a crouching
position. You also can't crouch on the elevators, but you can change
direction as they shoot at you.
An oft-noted tactic is shooting
the lights out, but I'm not really sure what this accomplishes. You'll
still get shot at in the dark.
I cleared three buildings and scored 32,550 points before getting bored.
GAB rating: Above Average. Elevator Action is a
bit slow paced, repetitive, and primitive looking, but quite playable
and there's a bit more depth here than it seems. There's just not much
longevity.
What
if Pac-Man was axonometric 3D, had a completely forgettable cartoon
bear antagonist, and kitchen sink design that threw as much crazy
nonsense as the designers could cram into its PROM instead of polishing a
handful of elements to perfection?
I've
played Crystal Castles at ACAM, and the cabinet is a sight to behold,
with its striking M.C. Escher-inspired artwork all over; the sides, the
front, the speakers, and the control panel, where a glowing red Atari
trackball sits in right in the middle, standing out from the icy cool
design. This, of course, is lost playing on an emulator.
The game
is set over 36 castles divided into nine levels, plus one final level
consisting of a single castle. You control Bentley Bear with the
trackball for movement, which feels oversensitive and slippery at first,
but it's crucial for survival later on when enemies move incredibly
fast.
Enemies include:
Gem
eaters, the most common enemy. They don't seem to have a movement
pattern, though when they start eating gems, they'll tend to gather them
in a straight line. They never move very fast, but their random
movements and numbers make them troublesome for the entire game, as
places you need to be tend to be patrolled by roaming gem eaters who get
in the way but also don't finish eating all of the gems in the pockets
they block off, forcing you to get around them. They can be killed and
their ranks thinned by touching them while they eat, but starting around
level 3 they eat so fast that this is nearly impossible to pull off
unless you anticipate this.
Trees move fast, eventually
ridiculously so, but always make a beeline for you. With clever
maneuvering they can be trapped in corners while you work at clearing
the parts of the stage that's safe from them. Trees destroy gems,
absolving you of the need to collect them.
Whereever there's
honey, there will soon be bees, which behave like trees except that
they buzz off eventually, but they'll be back. Collecting the honey
slows their return, and should be a priority in most levels.
Crystal
balls also behave like trees, except they have a momentum to their
roll, possibly foreshadowing Marble Madness of the next year. Trees and
bees will instantly hone in on your position, while crystal balls can't
change their direction so immediately, which can make manipulating their
behavior more difficult, but also allow strategies that wouldn't work
otherwise. They also destroy gems.
Berthilda the Witch is
set up as Bentley Bear's nemesis but actually one of the least dangerous
opponents, moving slowly and randomly. She can be killed by collecting
the magic hat and touching her before the magic runs out, which it
always does far too soon. Said magic hat has a very nasty surprise in
the penultimate castle.
Ghosts and zombies also move slowly and
randomly but they can't be killed. Coaxing them away from their corners
to get at the gems near their feet can be a problem.
Unusually
for a golden age arcade game, Crystal Castles has a definite ending and
doesn't loop once you beat the final bastard of a level. It also has
continues of a sort; three secret warp zones to skip most of the
castles, and the locations are revealed when you reach the level that
the warp skips to. The third and final warp goes to level 7-1. Good luck
beating the last 13 castles one one set of lives - I needed save states
to pull this off, almost on a per-level basis, though I might have been
able to beat the game without saves on 8-4 onward if the final castle
weren't clown pants ridiculous.
All 37 castles aren't unique, though. In fact, there are only
16, and levels 5 through 9 consist almost entirely of repeats, the sole
exception an "Impossible Staircase" stage in level 9.
GAB rating: Average.
To answer my own rhetorical question posed at the start, it would be
overbloated and would wear out its welcome shortly after you've seen its
whole bag of tricks.
As for Bentley Bear, Atari would put him on furlough until 1995, when he'd be revived as the mascot for Atari Karts.
Stare into his eyes hard enough and you can see Sam Tramiel's dead dreams.
Coming straight from one game about murder to another, the Portopia
Serial Murder Case is a "priority ancestor," a Japanese computer
adventure game with more historical importance than international fame.
Never officially released outside of Japan, it was well received, ported
to numerous platforms including the Famicom where it sold 700,000
copies. Its success put Enix, Chunsoft, and its designer Yuji Horii into
the spotlight, and they would go on to produce the Dragon Quest series,
and Horii would play a key role in Chrono Trigger's dream team of
designers. It helped codify the visual novel subgenre,
inspired Nintendo's Famicom Detective Club series, appears to have directly influenced a series of Hudson Soft adventures including Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom and the NES ports of ICOM's MacVenture series, and has been
cited by Hideo Kojima as a major influence on his work, who included the
game's loader program as a playable cassette tape in 2015's Metal Gear Solid V.
Portopia was briefly revived in 2001 and again in 2005 as mobile
phone remakes, and in 2010 the Famicom version unofficially translated
to English.
Love Match Tennis, screenshot by Giantbomb
Portopia's publisher, Enix, began its business in 1982 as a computer
game publisher by holding a contest open to hobbyist programmers.
Despite having a strong home computer market, with popular products by
NEC, Fujitsu, Sharp, ASCII Corp, Sord Computer Corp, and imports from
Apple and IBM, the computer game industry stagnated. Mobygames, though
it probably significantly underdocuments the regional library, only has
14 original Japanese computer games from 1982 and earlier. Other
ventures in this era include ports of Avalon Hill's BASIC wargames,
translations of Zork & Zork II, ports of six Namco arcade games to
the Sord M5, and ports of four Konami arcade games to various computers.
Enix's founder, Yasuhiro Fukushima, hoped his contest would attract
attention, and despite having no programming experience himself, make
him a player in the sparse field.
In February 1983, Enix announced the winners of the contest, and
released them to quick commercial success. Two of them are of concern to
Data Driven Gamer. The first was Love Match Tennis, written by Yuji
Horii, then a freelance writer. Unfortunately, I can't find any copies
of this game to play, and suspect that none exist on the Internet.
There is footage on Youtube, so the game isn't necessarily lost, but
copies are certainly rare.
The second, Door Door, was created by prodigious amateur programmer
Koichi Nakamura, who previously coded unofficial ports of popular arcade
games for his PC-8001 computer, and would go on to found Chunsoft,
and maintains business relations with Horii and Enix to this day.
Game 225: Door Door
Even by video game standards, this is an odd concept.
Defeat aliens by... closing doors on them? Couldn't they just not enter
the doors if they wanted to beat you?
I really don't understand how to win at this game. You've got
to herd the aliens and get them to follow you into a door, relatively
close to one another, while going in the direction of the door's hinge
so that you can trap them all in one quick slam. Herding them's quite a
trick, because the only consistent behavior I can see is that if they
come across an open door from the open side of it, they'll always enter. But you must herd them anyway,
because if you trap them one by one, the last survivor will go into
warp speed and kill you quickly. And you have to do this pretty fast,
because the aliens will reach a brisk jogging pace and outrun you before long anyway.
You can jump over the aliens, but the successful timing window is
ridiculously small and even when it works, it doesn't really look like
it did. Starting on the second level there will be tiny, difficult to
see spikes on the floor which look like you could hop over them if you
can even see them, but I kept landing right on them every single time.
The ladders also require pixel-precise alignment before you can climb
them, and far too often I got caught while struggling to ascend a
ladder while being just barely off from the correct climbing position.
As a side note, the audio sounded like the chip was malfunctioning.
Tweaking the settings made it sound less horrible, but I could never get
it to sound right. Maybe this is just an emulation or configuration
problem. I don't know.
Here's a video if you want to see me failing at Door Door over and
over again to a soundtrack that sounds as if someone tried to play a
simple ditty on a broken 56K modem.
GAB rating: Bad. Door Door did not challenge
me. It annoyed me. It controls badly, and for a game where it's
absolutely crucial that you are able to manipulate the monster behavior
just to survive, this task seems completely impossible. Monsters would
sometimes climb ladders instead of following me right into a door trap.
They'd sometimes ignore ladders that I was counting on them to climb.
They'd sometimes leave the door traps much sooner than anticipated and
kill me right when I was about to close it. And according to
Wikipedia there are 50 looping levels? Oy vey.
Despite my dislike
for this game almost 40 years later, Door Door was a success, and
spawned ports to every major Japanese home computer system, as well as a
sequel Door Door MkII which formed the basis of the even more popular Famicom port.
Game 226: The Portopia Serial Murder Case
Wikipedia
states that Portopia was originally developed in BASIC for the NEC
PC-6001 microcomputer, one of four different NEC personal computer
system lines available at that time. I'd like
to play the original version, especially since there doesn't seem to be
any footage of it at all on Youtube, and even screenshots are scarce,
but the language barrier isn't surmountable in such a text-heavy game.
I'll have to settle for the fan-translated Famicom version, which I expect isn't exactly the same game.
I
did, at least, manage to get it working in a "PC6001VX" emulator, and
viewed the intro scene, which was cut from the Famicom port. Thanks to
Redditor ringopicker for translating this!
Boss!! I am your subordinate, Yasuhiko Mano. Please call me Yasu. Okay, I
am going to explain the case in question. Kouzou Yamakawa is the one
who was killed. He was the president of a money lending company.
Kouzou's secretary, Fumie Sawaki, was the one who found his body first.
She was concerned about Kouzou not showing up at work, so she visited
his home and found him dead. Fumie describes that scene as the
following:
(Fumie:) When I arrived, the door to the study was locked. So I asked the manager
of the building, Komiya-san, to come and bust the door open. When I
entered the room, the president was there... but when I checked the
door, there was a key in the lock from the inside. Komiya-san also
noticed this and hurriedly went to check the windows. He said, "This
might be suicide since it's a locked room." And then we called the
police.
(Back to Yasu talking:) Komiya was saying the same thing so Fumie seems
to be telling the truth. Now, what is the truth behind this case...?
Boss!! I'm going to load the main program. Press the return key when you
are ready to record/run the tape.
Yasu: "This is the area where the incident occurred." [Interview around]
[Go to the crime scene] ... please order me around like this. Boss?
That's
as far as I can reasonably go. There were some Japanese adventures that
accepted input in English, but this one requires you to enter commands
in kana. We can already see that this is a text adventure with graphics
much along the lines of Sierra's Hi-Res Adventures, and the drawing
style and aesthetic even looks very similar to The Wizard and the
Princess, except for Yasu's tiny head looking at you from the bottom-center
of the screen.
From
here on, I switch to the 1985 Famicom port, translated by DvD
Translations, and for the first time in this blog, I load an NES
emulator.
The
manual, translated on their website, recaps the cut intro. There's a
little more detective noir flavor here, and more information. Most
notably, Yasu tells us that Kouzou ran a predatory lending company,
and sometimes drove his insolvent debtors to suicide with his vicious ways of collecting.
As a console conversion, the parser interface is gone, and instead you have number of stock actions selectable from a menu:
Move
Ask
Investigate someone
Show item
Look for someone
Call out
Arrest
Investigate thing
Evidence
Hit
Take
Theorize
Dial phone
Close case
This interface had already been partially implemented in the
Sharp and Fujitsu ports of Portopia, and two other games that Horii
had written by this time of the Famicom port.
Most of these actions will open a
sub-menu asking you what object or person to perform the action on, but
"Investigate thing" and "Hit" instead change the cursor to a magnifying
glass or hammer, which must be tapped on something on the screen, which
sort of anticipates Sierra's icon-driven point & click adventures.
We're also told there will be a maze at some point. Yay.
From questioning the locals and asking Yasu to research the suspects, I learned these clues:
The
locals say that struggling grocer named Mr. Hirata had not been seen
since the day of the murder. He was significantly in debt to Kouzou.
Kouzou's
only relative was a nephew named Toshi, who lives by the harbor,
unemployed. Toshi has a criminal record, and often sought money from his
uncle.
Fumie worked for Kouzou fresh out of junior college, and had been employed for two years before discovering his body.
Komiya
has no relatives and lives at Kouzou's mansion as a security guard, and
has been there for five years. This appears to differ from the original
version, where Fumie tells us he is the building manager.
Next I went to Kouzou's mansion.
All of the windows are locked from the inside.
The lock on his study door is old-fashioned, and can be locked by key from either side, only while the door is closed, but it is impossible to insert a key into both sides at once.
The
body is not present, but the autopsy report states time of death at 9pm on
the 17th, from a knife stab to the neck, still in his right hand's grip.
A matchbox in his study says "Pal 117-3149." Dialing this number reaches the Pal hostess club, who denies knowing Kouzou, but gives an address.
A painting in the living room conceals a button, which opens up a trapdoor in the study, leading to the maze.
This
maze is Horii's tribute to Wizardry, with its orthogonal walls, one-way
passages that slam behind you from a direction, and messages, including
a sly reference.
I
mapped it out, and for my efforts I found a safe, but no way to open it
or any other way out, so I returned to the living room. Searching the
bookshelf produced a key that opened the safe, and inside I found a
stack of IOU notes. From these, I learned Mr. Hirata owed 3 million yen,
and also that Kouzou had made payments to a Mr. Kawamura. Investigating
him was not yet made an option.
A map of the maze.
Next I went to the harbor to try to meet Toshi.
Toshi wasn't home, but I could enter his apartment, where a note by the telephone was written in cipher.
Dialing *15 on his phone connected us to some shady sounding people. Yasu took charge and asked them to meet us by the harbor.
The
boat here goes to Awajishima Island, but there was nothing relevant
there yet. I returned to the mainland and went to Shinkaichi to check out the Pal
hostess club.
There
was little useful here, though. The barkeep had nothing
interesting to say, and visiting the strip club next door made Yasu very happy but
the only bit of information here was the name Okoi on the sign,
suggesting some importance.
I went to the police station, where a
report came in, that Mr. Hirata's teenage daughter Yukiko informed us
that he might be in Kyoto.
One by one, I summoned every potential suspect and witness to the precinct for interrogation.
Komiya
had no alibi, but denied wrongdoing, and said nothing else. A swift
punch to his head and he admitted to sneaking out on the night of the
murder for a drink, which Yasu confirmed. On further questioning he
mentioned hearing shouting under the mansion.
Fumie was at English class that night, and Yasu confirmed this.
Toshi,
surprisingly, answered. He claimed to be at his apartment,
which Yasu could not confirm. Showing him the package alarmed him, and he
lied about the note when shown it. So I hit him and he confessed he was
buying drugs that night. I arrested him for dealing, but this ruled him
out as a murder suspect.
Yukiko was at home, which Yasu didn't feel was even worth verifying.
From there I went to Kyoto, but not much was explorable, and Mr. Hirata was nowhere to be seen.
I
was stuck, and revisited each location, without discovering anything
useful. So I turned to a walkthrough, and I had missed something - a
ring at the doorstep, which you find my searching the lower-right corner
of the door.
Why would you even think to look there?
At the station, Toshi recognized it and said he gave it to Yukiko, but she vehemently denied this.
I
still didn't seem to be getting anywhere, or able to get any more
information anywhere else, but after returning to the police station,
there was another call from Yukiko, saying that she found a number in
her father's jacket pocket. I called this number, but it wasn't in
service.
Then it occurred to me, I might need to dial an area code
first. It's been a long time since I had to think about area codes. So I hit Google - Kyoto's area code is 075, and prefacing this
before the rest of the number reached the Teradaya Inn, where the
concierge confirmed that Mr. Hirata had stayed, and then went to Amitabha
Peak.
Incidentally, calling the number as-is from Kyoto also works without needing the area code. It's a small detail, but I like it.
I went to Amitabha Peak and found him.
Yasu wanted to close the case, but this couldn't be the end, right?
Investigating
the grass near his body found a suicide note lamenting his debt, but
it did not confess to Kouzou's murder. And after returning to the police
station, an autopsy revealed his death occurred earlier on the same day. The
witnesses available had some new dialog, but no new information.
I
had to turn to the walkthrough again. Now you need to have Yasu
investigate Yukiko's alibi. Before Hirata's death, he won't do this.
Yasu found a neighbor
report that Yukiko was seen going out that night. So I questioned her further, and
she admitted to visiting Kouzou to ask for more money, to pay back
some other moneylenders who were even worse!
I needed the walkthrough
again. I had to find was a photo of Kouzou, hidden not
inside his drawer, which I had checked the first time, but just slightly
to the right of it.
But it wasn't in the cabinet. What is it with this place and ridiculous invisible pixel hotspots?
The
barkeep at Pal recognized the photo and told me Kouzou had a fight with Mr.
Kawamura. His name suddenly became an option in the Investigate menu
when it hadn't before, but Yasu couldn't find anything.
Now the
walkthrough said there's a lighter in Kouzou's living room, in yet
another hotspot with absolutely nothing to suggest searching there.
You have to search the right foot of the couch.
The
barkeep recognized it as Mr. Kawamura's. And questioning the Shingeki
locals revealed that Okoi was close to him. So I called her to the
precinct for questioning.
Yasu could confirm her alibi. Because of course he could.
Okoi
told me that Mr. Kawamura and Kouzou worked together as con men, but
recently their relationship turned sour and Kawamura turned to
blackmail. Yasu could investigate, and told me he had been convicted of
swindling six times and had bankrupted multiple companies with his
activities.
At this point I knew that when in doubt, just go to
the police station, so I left and came back, and sure enough there was a
tip from Okoi to find him at the Sumire Apartments.
Did she know I'd find him like this?
Once again, Yasu pleaded with me to end the case. I knew better.
Back
at the police station, Okoi told me that Kawamura and Kouzou and
defrauded a company in Sumoto called Sawaki Industries. And reminded me
that Fumie's last name is Sawaki. She couldn't be found for questioning,
so off I went, where the locals had interesting things to say.
Local scuttlebutt was that her parents both committed suicide and her brother, distinguished by a birthmark, vanished.
Back
at the police station again (sigh), a map had been discovered at
Kawamura's apartment and sent over as evidence. This contained
directions to an undiscovered secret in the maze, but part of it had
been torn off. What directions remained led me to the central area which
had a path going around a walled-off area, so I hit each wall segment
here and eventually found a hollow one, which I could walk into, finding
a secret area.
After
trying every other command, "Call Out," which had previously only been
used to summon suspects to the precinct, caused Yasu to shout, which
opened a secret compartment with a hidden diary inside. Maybe this
puzzle makes more sense in Japanese? Is there a word for "summon" that
also means "shout?" Here it seems like forced wordplay.
The diary
revealed that Kouzou hired Fumie to make up for ruining her family, and
meant to leave some of his fortune to her and her brother. As if that
made up for losing their parents, though Yasu suggested that Fumie's
brother might think so.
I had to look at the walkthrough one last
time, and learned that at the police station, you can take a suspect's
photo or strip-search them by using the Take command. This hadn't been
necessary yet, so I didn't know it was possible until now. And you must
strip-search Yasu!
Yasu
confesses that he killed Kouzou and Kawamura. He locked the door from
the outside, and had Fumie slip the key into the inside of the door once
Komiya broke it open.
There's no
footage of the PC-6001 version, but I did find a twenty minute
playthrough of the PC-8801 version which came out around the same time,
with an English translation. It's a Google Translate job, and presented
in a gimmicky skit format, but it's the best thing available, and gives a
glimpse into what changed in the Famicom verison.
Some differences I observed:
There
are no ridiculous hotspots to search, obviously. You type "investigate
<object>" and Yasu will find whatever happens to be hidden there.
"Find out" works as a general command to have Yasu investigate a
suspect. The Famicom version had a submenu to investigate job, personal
life, or alibi.
On that note, there are no menus. You have to type in the name of the person to investigate, without any list of valid choices.
Inspecting the keyhole in Kouzou's study shows a cross-section diagram of the lock, to
demonstrate that it is impossible to lock or unlock from the outside
when a key is already inserted in the inside lock.
Kouzou's photo is hidden in the bookshelf rather than the cabinet.
The lighter, ring, and safe key aren't found at Kouzou's place. There are also no living room or outside areas.
There's no maze section at all, and therefore no stack of IOUs or diary.
Komiya
admits to stealing Toshi's wallet and hands over a note he found
inside, which is a password for his dealer. The Famicom version added
Toshi's apartment as a location, where a different note is found.
The laundromat, not Yukiko, discovers the phone number in Hirata's jacket. Yukiko isn't even in the PC-88 version.
Yasu can be stripped anywhere.
A
final ending shot shows Yasu and Fumie reunited. Either way, there's no
word concerning their future, as Yasu confessed to two murders and Fumie to tampering with evidence and conspiracy.
GAB rating: Below Average. I enjoyed the opening act,
and the final twist with Yasu was pretty clever, but the overall
experience just kind of fell apart right around the time that my first
round of interrogations failed to turn up anything.
Portopia plays
more like an adventure game than a visual novel. Even so, I wasn't
expecting an Infocom-like mystery game with a dynamic world and
autonomous characters that allows you to really investigate freely and
solve the case on your own, and I didn't get one. Portopia isn't really
about solving the case, but about telling you a story, and its very
short length is padded out by refusing to move things forward until you
find the right trigger action.
Sometimes these actions are related
to the most recent problem that presented itself. Far too often,
though, the case just reaches a dead-end, and then to proceed you must
re-interrogate every suspect on every topic, re-visit every location to
question the locals again, re-visit the police station for new reports,
and re-investigate every alibi, just to find the arbitrary action that
pulls on the next thread in the script. I'll forgive the ridiculous
investigation hotspots that you sometimes need to click on to find
invisible things, which is a problem specific to the Famicom version, but I
still found the experience wearying.
Screenshots by Mobygames
In
1984 and 1985, Horii released two more mystery games, targeting the
PC-88, and adopting the menu system that would later be used in
Portopia's Famicom port. If nothing else, the art style seems to be a
lot more mature. Only the former of the two was ported to the Famicom,
and there do not seem to be fan translations for either, so I won't be
playing them.
His next game, Dragon Quest, targeted the Famicom
and was initially released in 1986. It proved immensely popular,
spawning three sequels on the platform and a series still going strong
today, making Horii a household name in Japan. Its western release,
which took three years to localize, met a much more lukewarm reception,
and many modern players may wonder what the big deal was, but there's no
denying Dragon Quest's international fame. I plan to play and cover
this game eventually.
It's been almost a year since I played Deadline,
Infocom's previous mystery game. This was the first non-Zork game by
the company, and though I found its concept surprisingly well realized -
this was no mere Adventure-style treasure hunt dressed as a detective
novel, but a game about gathering evidence, observing suspects,
and deducing the meaning of clues - I also found its design unfair,
with a single critical path solution, and the clues that
nudge the player into discovering it were scarce and obscure.
The Witness,
not to be confused with the 2016 puzzle adventure of the same name, is
self-rated "standard" difficulty, as opposed to Deadline's "expert," so I started feeling optimistic.
An
instruction manual styled like a 1930's detective magazine serves as
both period flavor and guidance on the rules of this mystery, which are
mostly the same as Deadline's. There's an ingame clock, beginning at 8pm
and ending at 8am, and story events will occur at specific times with
or without your involvement, though time only advances when you perform
actions, including waiting. You can examine evidence, take fingerprints,
and analyze samples. Suspects can be followed, talked to, searched,
questioned on particular subjects, accused, and arrested should you have
evidence proving motive, method, and opportunity. Sergeant Duffy -
apparently a time traveler - returns as your assistant, and this time he
can be asked for hints.
Deadline's
original packaging resembled an evidence sleeve, and contained several
feelies representing evidence gathered during the case's preliminary
investigation. Witness statements and alibis, background checks on each
suspect, fingerprints, lab analyses and toxicity reports, etc. The
Witness doesn't quite measure up here - there isn't any case to
speak of just yet, only a telegram from a client "Freeman Linder"
vaguely alluding to a threat on his life and requesting police
protection. Two other feelies, a matchbook from a "Brass Lantern"
restaurant, and a not suspicious at all looking suicide note by
"Virginia Clayton Linder," represent clues found at the start of the
game.
Lastly,
there's a two-page newspaper dated February 1st 1938 with about 50
articles printed in narrow columns. Two of them concern the Linders, so I
read them for background information.
The
first and more prominent article concerns a charity ball honoring
Freeman Linder, which he did not attend due to the death of his wife. He
is established as a trade company mogul and a philanthropist with a
military background who has spent the majority of his career living in
Asia, nearly estranged from his family. A timeline of his career is as
follows:
1900 - Marine Corps, stationed in China. Fought in the Boxer Rebellion.
1904 - Discharged, returned to LA.
1907 - Returned to Hong Hong, rumored to have worked as a mercenary.
1910 - Returned to LA, married, soon after traveled to Tokyo to join the Imperial Japanese Navy as an engineer.
1922 - Returned to LA. Founded Pacific Trade Associates import/export company. Left for Asia again soon after.
1925
- During a return to LA, founded Asian-American School and Cultural
Center in Los Angeles, which his wife directed during his absences.
The
second article concerns his wife's death by gunshot, and makes no
mention of the suicide note. This article contradicts the former one,
which says she was found dead, by stating she died at the hospital, but I
can't think of any explanation for this except oversight by the
writers. The article notes her involvement in charity work, both in her
husband's Asian America-centered projects and national charity under the
FDR administration. Her surviving relatives include her husband, their
daughter Monica, and two sisters who live on opposite coasts.
Starting
the game proper, we arrive by taxi on the Linders' driveway, possessing
the telegram, a revolver, handcuffs, and the Brass Lantern matchbook,
which was found on the curb. The game notes that we've read Mrs.
Linder's suicide note and the newspaper article on the family - was that
really all the police file contained? No doubt it's all connected to
this mysterious threat on Linder's life, but for now, that's not what
we're here for.
I
approached the front gate and rang the doorbell, which summoned a man
named Phong who brought me to the living room with Freeman and Monica.
Freeman, after gulping down a whiskey and soda, took me to his office,
where he explained that his wife's lover, Ralph Stiles, sent him a
threatening note.
I
questioned him on some subjects - Ralph, Phong, Monica, his wife, the
note, and the matchbook, which prompted an involuntary flinch as he told
me that Phong sometimes goes there but he never has. Monica came in at
around 8:30 to tell us she was going to the movies with "Terry."
I
couldn't think of what else to talk about, but Linder objected when I
tried to leave his office. Shortly after 9:00pm, he shouted "Stiles!" at
a figure outside. I was shot dead, and the game chided me for not
staying seated.
Restarting,
I did a bit of exploring before entering the house, to form a better
Trizbort map. Here, only cardinal "NESW" directions are recognized, so
there's no need to bother with NE, up, down, or that nonsense, and
mapping is all the easier for it. To the east of the driveway entrance
is a side yard leading to a path outside Linder's office, and a backyard
outside Monica's bedroom, with a Japanese rock garden to the north.
A
garage off the driveway houses an MG sports car and a Bentley, and a
locked workshop is attached. At 8:40, the MG left the garage, which we
know at this point is Monica going to the movies. At 9:00, someone
entered the property. I saw him knock on the office door, where a tall
man - Linder I assume, handed him some money. Sergeant Duffy appeared
soon after, ready to assist.
Having explored the outside as much as I could, I tried to enter the house, but
Phong told me that Linder no longer needed my services and denied me
entrance.
The
game was probably lost, but I waited out the time limit to see what
would happen. At 11:00, Monica returned, briefly entered the workshop,
and then went into the house through the garage door, locking the door
behind her. After midnight, a bell rang. Nothing further occurred until
8:00 in the morning, when the chief pulled me off the case. In the
epilogue, Stiles was found dead on the beach, holding a cheap handgun.
A timeline of the ingame events so far:
~2037 - Monica leaves in the MG.
2052 - Lights go on in Linder's office.
2100 - Stiles enters through back gate.
2101 - Stiles knocks on Linder's office door and receives money.
2102 - Stiles exits through back gate.
2106 - Sgt. Duffy appears.
~2258 - Monica pulls into the garage, leaves a ticket stub on the ground, and enters the workshop, locking the door behind her.
2314 - Monica exits the workshop.
2315 - Monica enters the house.
~0004 - A bell rings in the distance.
0120 - Lights out.
0622 - Dawn breaks.
0647 - Sunrise.
0800 - Deadline.
I
restarted, and replayed the prologue. After entering the living room, I
rudely explored and Trizborted out the house while Linder had his
drink. A hallway connects the rooms of the one-story house. On the
north-east side are Freeman and Monica's bedrooms, which share a master
bathroom. On the northwest is a dining room, kitchen, and Phong's
bedroom, with a small private bathroom attached. The south end has the
office, garage, and a small storage closet.
Soon, Linder
summoned me to the office, and this time I sat down and stayed seated
until 9:03, when Stiles approached. This time Linder was the one who got
shot. When Duffy appeared, he told me he apprehended Stiles and brought
him to the living room for questioning.
Free to explore the house and investigate, I noted these clues:
Phong carries house keys which open the various doors in and out of the house, and the door to the workshop.
There's
a grandfather clock inside the office. It can't be opened with Phong's
keys, but examining the keyhole reveals gunpowder residue.
The
cracked window, examined, reveals some putty and an exposed wire. Lab
analysis found traces of cordite, suggesting some kind of plastic
explosive.
Footprints outside the office match Stiles' muddy wing-tip shoes.
Stiles
when questioned claims he was offered money to leave town. He denies
writing the note, and when shown the matchbook, says that the phone
number scrawled on the inside was his own, and that Linder must have
written it down there when they met at the restaurant.
Nothing of interest is found on Stiles' person.
Analysis
of the matchbook and note reveals both were written in the same kind of
ink, but I couldn't find a way to ask the lab to compare their
handwriting.
When Monica returns home, after entering the
workshop, she goes to the bathroom, dry heaves, and sobs in her bedroom.
She resists being searched or questioned on most topics, though admits
to feeling relieved by her father's death.
The coroner's
report comes at about 12:42pm, concluding death from a bullet through
the heart, but couldn't find any rifling marks.
Analysis of the
movie ticket showed it had been purchased that night. When asked about
the movie, Monica said it was "Dead End," but I couldn't find a way to
confirm that this was the movie played that night.
Looking at
the books in Monica's room reveals that an "important" one is missing. I
couldn't find a way to follow this thread further.
Absolutely nothing has any fingerprints on it. Not even things I saw people touch.
I
decided to snoop on Monica a bit using save states as time travel,
knowing where she'd be throughout the night. I waited for her in the
workshop, where she played with some wires, and turned ashen-white when
she realized I was watching her. When I hid in the office out of sight,
she entered shortly before midnight, pressed the butler's button, and
then removed something from the clock. I emerged, startling her, and
though she still would not submit to a search, she did confess to
setting up a gun mechanism in the clock when accused of foul play, and
urged me to read a medical report that showed he was dying of stomach
cancer.
At this point, it's possible to arrest Monica, but despite
her confession, the jury will acquit due to a lack of motive.
Genre-awareness tells me that Linder killed his wife and is setting up
Stiles to take the fall for his own death, and all the clues I've seen
so far are consistent with this, but I'd need stronger evidence to close
the case.
Another experiment revealed something interesting, but
not surprising. I restarted and tried pressing the butler's button in
Linder's office, and he, almost in a panic, grabbed my wrist to stop him
from doing this. During his death, I noticed that he reached for the
button himself, then shouted to distract me so I couldn't see him press
it himself. And when I pressed it afterward, a "click" sound came from
the clock. After Monica adjusts the wires, this button summons Phong (as
she had tested herself).
I needed a way to open the clock. Monica
wouldn't let me take her key, but after I handcuffed her to the lounge,
searching her person was easy. This only revealed a
pendulum, relays, and "things," and I found no way to interact with any
of it. I asked Sergeant Duffy for advice but he wasn't much help at all,
only muttering that the clock looked funny and that he found a green
spool in the workshop, and there was, but I couldn't find a way to
interact with it either.
Stuck, I turned to a walkthrough. There were a few bits of evidence I had missed:
A
receipt for two handguns found in Phong's book. Phong says that Monica
bought them under a pseudonym. Monica admits to this, but says they are
for self defense.
A handgun in the mud outside found after
Linder dies. Analysis shows it had been fired recently. Monica claims
Phong planted it to frame Stiles. Neither Phong nor Stiles recognizes
it.
Another handgun found on Monica's person with a sawed-off
barrel, found by searching her a second time. Analysis shows it, too,
had been fired recently.
As
it turns out, though, the crucial bit of information was one I already
had found in an earlier playthrough. When you question Monica about Mr.
Linder before catching her in the office opening the clock, she
admits being relieved that her father is dead. Turns out that's all you
need to establish a convicting motive.
In fact, after Linder's death, you don't even need to leave his office to win the game. This is all you have to do:
Press the butler's button before Monica returns and rewires the mechanism. The clock will click.
Examine the clock.
Analyze the powder once Duffy enters. When this finishes, you have established means.
Wait
for Monica to return. When she enters the office and sees the body, and
ask about her father before she leaves. Now you have motive.
After
she leaves, hide behind the lounge. Wait for her to enter and
incriminate herself, and then stand up. Now you have opportunity.
Arrest her once Duffy returns from the morgue.
That's it. Those actions are all required, only
those actions are required, and every other bit of evidence you might
find is irrelevant. Monica is convicted of murdering her father as
revenge for the death of her mother.
But could that really be it? There was so much evidence suggesting more to it than this. Why was the window wired to explode when Linder pushed the button? Why was he so eager to stop me
from pushing the button? Why did the threatening note from Stiles seem
to be written by Linder himself? Why would he push the button that
triggered his death at the exact moment that Stiles approached? If
Monica was culpable alone, then we could write off the medical report as
a forgery since it couldn't be verified, but there were so many things
pointing to Linder's involvement in a scheme to frame Stiles.
The game assured me, though, that I had reached the proper conclusion. Monica did it, and that's it.
However, there is an epilogue that explains the true outcome, as told by the omniscient author himself.
Linder
knew about his wife's affair, and she in fact did commit suicide.
Linder intended to get revenge by framing Stiles for attempted murder,
and Phong and Monica were both in on it. Monica would rig the butler's
button to fire a shot at him from a gun hidden in the clock and blow up
the window to make it seem like a shot was fired through it. Linder
would summon Stiles to his office at night, and just as he approached,
hit the button to pin it on him. You, the detective, were to witness the
attempt on his life. Phong would plant an identical handgun in the mud
to further implicate Stiles. Monica, however, who blamed her father for
pushing her mother to suicide, aimed the gun at where his heart would
be, and left everything else according to the original plan, causing
Stiles to be framed for an actual murder instead of an attempted one.
This
plan, frankly, is really dumb, and as my partner puts it, has more
holes than a colander. How could Linder be sure the bullet from the
clock wouldn't kill him? How could Monica be sure the bullet from the
clock would kill him? The heart's a small target and people move.
An autopsy should have also revealed that the entrance wound was in his
back, and therefore could not have been fired through the window.
Ballistics would find that the bullet didn't match the gun planted on
Stiles, and find the lack of rifling marks altogether suspicious. And
the evidence of this scheme - the gunpowder on the keyhole, and the
wires and plastique debris found in the window, are pretty obvious and
indiscreet.
GAB rating: Above Average. The Witness
obviously follows the template of Deadline, and inherits its good
qualities - its full realization of the interactive detective novel with
evidence and snooping around, the independent actors in the story who
walk around and do things both of their own accord and in response to
your actions, and Infocom's best in class parser and decent writing and
worldbuilding, which isn't quite up to par with the best the team had
offered, but still beats out anything by any other developer seen yet.
And Deadline's biggest problem - the obscurity of its solution - is
alleviated. The solution here may be narrow, but no part of it is as
unreasonable as Deadline's. Only establishing motive - achieved by
questioning Monica about her father at just the right time - feels
arbitrary.
But in being reasonable to solve, The Witness goes a
little too far in the other direction and feels kind of trivial. When I
solved the case, it felt like I had played an interactive Two Minute
Mystery. Deadline wasn't exactly a doorstopper, but The Witness makes it
look like The Big Sleep. The clock is a gun, his daughter somewhat
resents him, and she has the key. Case closed, zero pipe problem.
What
really bothers me, though, is how so much evidence indicates a
conspiracy bigger than the patricide we see in the official resolution,
and the game's true conclusion doesn't acknowledge any of it except in a
tacked-on epilogue that explains What Really Happened. Your detective
character never truly solves the mystery, and none of the evidence you
find except for the few pieces that convict Monica serve any purpose
except as a mental exercise for you, the player. Linder's suspicious
behavior, the traces of the bomb in the window, the guns, the receipt
for the guns, all pointless as far as the game is concerned. Even the
matchbook, suicide note, and newspaper that come with the game are
completely irrelevant! It lends the impression of an unfinished game,
where you were supposed to be able to solve the real mystery, but they
just didn't have time or perhaps space to implement this. Deadline gave
you a different ending depending on whether you merely nailed your
suspect on circumstantial evidence or truly busted the case wide open,
so why not this one too?
I discovered on a replay that it is possible to reveal
the conspiracy. And you're punished for it. As I mentioned before, if
you show the muddy gun to Monica after accusing her, she'll finger
Phong. But then I discovered that If you ask Phong about the gunpowder,
he'll reveal the plot and confess his role in it.
If you've met
the conditions necessary to convict Monica, and you are also possessing
the gun receipt (it must be removed from the book for this to work),
then you may arrest both Monica and Phong. Phong confesses to the
frame-up scheme, insists that the intent was never deadly, and Monica
somehow gets a slap on the wrist from a plea deal and avoids a murder
charge. Their in-game confessions are immaterial to the ultimate
outcome. Your supervisor laments that we failed to uncover the full
truth, even though this is the only ending where we absolutely did.
Arghhh!
In spite of my reservations concerning The Witness'
storyline and brevity, I could see myself rating it Good if only it were
a little more complete, and the hierarchy of endings reworked a bit. Convicting Monica as a lone actor should have given you congratulations but prompted you to did a little bit deeper, because the moment I did that and realized this shallow outcome was the "true" solution annoyed me to the point of dissatisfaction. The criteria for convicting both Phong and Monica could have been a little better thought out, but more importantly, should have included one where Monica's full culpability in the plot is proven, and this should have been the true ending.
The year is 1981. Star Wars is a cultural phenomenon, the final film
is in pre-production and under very tight wraps, and although there aren't
any official Star Wars video games yet, the industry is full of
unlicensed imagery.
LucasFilm
must have caught wind of this and determined to show them all how to do
it right, and partnered with Atari (who, let's face it, had made the best
space combat game yet; 1979's Star Raiders) to create the first official Star Wars video
game. An early vector space shooter prototype at Atari called "Warp
Speed" seemed like the perfect candidate for this, and over the next two
years would be reworked into this Star Wars game. Parker Brothers beat
them to the punch with two 2600 titles developed relatively quickly, but
Atari's offering, which came out in May 1983 around the same time as
Return of the Jedi, clearly has more lasting appeal.
The
attack on the Death Star, which is the subject of this game, could be
the single most frequently videogame adapted movie scene of all time.
Mobygames lists five unauthorized adaptations of it from 1978 to 1980
alone, and there are many more generic space shooters that happen to
feature TIE Fighters as enemies. Most are basic shooting galleries from a
first-person perspective, which is probably the closest thing there is
to cinematic immersion at this point. Star Raiders went the extra mile
and presented a fully 3D space sim, but this style came at the cost of
limiting how much action could be on the screen at once, and besides
that, its gameplay was unthinkably complex compared to coin-operated
arcade games of the day.
Atari's Star Wars takes a middle ground
between 3D space sim and static shooting gallery, preserving the first
person perspective and giving you limited control of your X-Wing's
trajectory as it follows a set route to the Death Star, across is
surface, and through the trench at the meridian. A steering yoke
directly controls where your guns aim, but indirectly controls pitch and
yaw just enough to help dodge projectiles and obstacles.
I played
with a flight stick, and noticed ingame drift. As it turns out, the
arcade game's yoke was self-calibrating, which made sense for an arcade
environment where the game would run for hours without being reset, but
for a MAME user this is a bit inconvenient as you will probably close
the game whenever you're done playing, which erases the calibration
data. The remedy is to move the joystick around in circles when starting
the game for the first time, during the wave select screen. Either that
or use a save state when it's calibrated properly and load it whenever starting anew.
The first phase is the approach, where TIE Fighters scramble to
intercept you. The fighters launch slow-moving fireballs which aren't
too hard to shoot down, but it's easy to become overwhelmed when you
have several fireballs coming at you from multiple fighters. Shooting
the nimble fighters themselves is worth 1,000 points each and means less
pressure if you can pull it off - which is no simple feat given their
quick, erratic movement patterns, not to mention how your attention
becomes split between shooting the fighters and their incoming
ordinance.
On later waves, Darth Vader in his prototype Advanced
Starfighter will attack as well. He can't be destroyed, but a hit is
worth 2,000 points and will cause him to spin out of control for a few
seconds.
The second phase is the Death Star surface, which is
skipped during the first wave and isn't fully realized until the third.
Here you must dodge towers while shooting or avoiding fire from them and
the ground turrets. If you can shoot the white tips of all of the
towers - and your X-Wing makes several passes during this phase - it's
worth a cool 50,000 point bonus.
Finally there's the climactic
trench run, where turrets lining the sides shoot more fireballs, and on
later levels you also have to pitch and weave to avoid the bridges that
span it. And then at the end you fire your torpedoes by targeting the
exhaust port and pulling the trigger. Doing this instantly finishes the
wave, so don't worry about the incoming fireballs when the port comes
into view!
Big bonus points - 100,000 from waves 5 and onward -
can be scored by "using the force" by not firing a single shot until the
exhaust port comes into view. This means you've got to dodge both the
fireballs and the bridges, and the only way you can consistently dodge
both is by baiting the turrets into firing low before you pitch high to
avoid a bridge, and vice-versa. It's well worth it, unless your shields
are so low that you don't expect to survive another wave.
Speaking
of which, once I felt I was good enough at this game to survive Wave 5,
I found it was far better to start there than to start any earlier and
work your way there. This is because if you start on Wave 5 and finish
it, you'll receive a one-time 800,000 point bonus, which is far more
than than you could ever hope to score in the first four waves. My best
game scored a little over 1,200,000 points, clearing two Death Stars and
ending during in the trench of the third, so this bonus accounted for
nearly two thirds of my best score.
GAB rating: Good. This
was one of the last vector games ever made, and one of the best. The
technology just lends itself incredibly well to fast 3D action games
with minimalist aesthetics, and it's kind of a shame more weren't made.
The shooting action here is fast, furious, well varied, and both
immersive and fun, though it's a bit difficult for my aging reflexes.
Star Wars sold a very respectable 12,000 units - a far cry from the wild successes of earlier hits like Asteroids and Centipede, but it was becoming clear that the golden age of arcades was reaching its sunset. Within a year, Atari's B-team rushed-out a non-vector Return of the Jedi video while the film was still in the public's eye, while the core Star Wars team developed a proper sequel The Empire Strikes Back. Both were flops - Return of the Jedi was panned as graphically unimpressive, and Empire Strikes Back, being mainly sold as a Star Wars conversion kit, found few buyers willing to change a machine that was still turning a profit.
Star
Wars is good played in MAME, but to get the full experience you've got
to play in the deluxe sit-down cabinet. The feeling of sitting down in
an X-Wing cockpit, the unusual flight yoke, and the look of a genuine
vector monitor, where the enemy shots just glow in a manner that
practically assaults your eyeballs, can't be emulated. I've been
lucky enough to have this experience at the American Classic Arcade
Museum in New Hampshire, where they have Star Wars in both upright and
sit-down formats, and I sure hope they can survive this pandemic without having to sell off pieces like it.
At the peak of their heyday and for many years after, Rare was perhaps the most internationally celebrated British game
developer of all time, thanks in no small part to their lucrative,
multi-generational partnership with Nintendo.
Officially, Rare would have you believe that their history begins
with Jetpac, a 1983 release by their founders Chris & Tim Stamper
for the ZX Spectrum microcomputer. This is the earliest game in the Rare
Replay collection of 2015,
it's included in Donkey Kong 64's minigames, and even
their collected
works compilation of 1988 begins with Jetpac. Jetpac is indeed the
next whale on the list, but any reading on the subject of their history
beyond Rare's own curation shows that it goes back further than that,
though things do get rather murky.
Wikipedia's page on Ultimate Play the Game states, citing a 1983
computer magazine, that they claimed to be "the most experienced arcade
video game design team in Britain," but there are no contemporary lists
of their prior arcade game credits, and what's available lacks veracity.
The article on the Stamper brothers mentions "12 arcade games" but cagily states that most
of them were kept secret and sold to major developers. One of the few
listed there is Gyruss, which I find preposterous.
Digital Antiquarian
writes that in 1979 they began their careers at Associated Leisure,
developing arcade conversion kits for the British market. Their manager,
Norman Parker, convinced them and their friend/co-worker John Lathbury
to join his startup Zilec, which developed games in-house.
The earliest Zilec game emulated by MAME is Vortex, and according to a thread on Spectrum Computing Forums,
the names of John Lathbury and Chris Stamper appear in the ROM code.
Vortex is a crummy Asteroids knock-off with choppy gameplay, lackluster
graphics, and strange controls that require you to hold the fire button
to thrust.
The next, 1981's Enigma II, is a vertical shooter that lift
ideas from a number of other, better contemporaries, most notably
mimicking the look of Phoenix, though it's not without some original
ideas, like having limited vertical control via fuel-burning thrusters.
The Stampers' earliest sourced credit is 1982's The Pit, though
not as its original designers. Electronics shopkeeper and tinkerer Andy
Walker had custom-built a multi-game system which was demoed at trade
shows in London and Miami. The Pit proved its most popular title, but
Walker's system just wasn't suited for mass production, and needed
conversion.
The historical record gets muddy here. The Golden Age Arcade Historian
writes that Walker licensed the game to Centuri and Zilec and suggests
diverging versions; that Centuri rewrote the game to run on their own
boards, while Zilec had the Stampers port it to Galaxian-derived
hardware for English arcades. An interview with Walker published in
Retro Gamer seems to be the source for this. However, MAME shows no
significant differences between the Zilec and Centuri versions, nor
gives any indication that they run on different hardware. A third
version, licensed to Taito for Japanese distribution, likewise appears
identical.
For what it's worth, it's very easy for me to believe that The Pit
uses Galaxian-derived hardware, as it uses Z80 processors, the same
background resolution, and similar tilemap graphics. Centuri's in-house
games of the time, on the other hand, used M6502 processors and had
256x256 bitmap graphics. I believe Walker is mistaken about Centuri's
role; that Zilec developed the extant version (possibly giving the job
to the Stampers), and that Centuri was the U.S. distributor.
Game 220: The Pit
Holy smokes, this is Boulder Dash. Can't be a coincidence.
Digging
and boulder-dropping might have been seen before in Dig Dug and Mr. Do!
(incidentally, Walker claims The Pit influenced both, but personally I
don't find his anecdote credible), but not like this. In those games,
dirt and rocks are tools for destroying your enemies. Here, navigating
the terrain and grabbing the diamonds is your ultimate goal, and the boulders are obstacles to impede your path. There are
enemies, but they mostly wander aimlessly.
You
can "win" without collecting all of the gems, but if you're going for a
high score it's pretty much required; collecting six will double your
bonus, but collecting all seven will triple it. I managed this three
times before the game got too fast to handle.
GAB rating: Above Average.
The Pit, whether the Stampers had anything to do with it or not, is
pretty fun! There's almost an Indiana Jones-like feel in places,
especially the main gem room where disturbing the treasure activates a
deadly arrow trap.
But
there's an almost fatal flaw - the controls are horribly twitchy. Often
times you've got to dig a space with absolutely perfect pixel
precision, and while sometimes you can bump against impassable terrain
features to align yourself, this isn't always a possibility. The worst
example of this is the single-tile bottleneck passage above the acid
pit, which you must exit through to return to your ship, and the
moment you enter this room, the floor begins to drop under your feet,
giving you no time at all to adjust your position to the precise pixel
alignment necessary.
Also, turning around to shoot a pursuing enemy is risky, as you're likely to just fumble into his deadly grasp.
To
be fair, The Pit is otherwise a rather easy game. There's only one
level, with only two possible boulder layouts, and everything is pretty
deterministic. Still, it's frustrating when virtually every death feels
like the fault of the controls.
Also, can I just say, I find the death animations in this game oddly horrific.
Mobygames directly credits Zilec's next game to the Stampers and Lathbury, whose names all appear in the ROM code.
Game 221: Blueprint
If
this isn't the first "Rare" game, it's the first that feels like one,
with its quirky humor, its sentient googly-eyed things, and generally
weird Britishness.
The
Pac-Man inspiration is obvious, but this one's pretty unique as far as
maze games go. There are ten houses, and eight of them have machine
parts that you must bring to the 1:1 scale blueprint to assemble your
contraption. Enter a house that doesn't have a part - either because it
never had one, or because you already took it and forgot - and you get a
bomb, which you've got to dispose of before it explodes and kills you.
Sometimes it's a short-fused red bomb, and depending on how far away you
are from the bomb disposal pit you might not even have a chance to get
rid of it even if you sprint, which depletes from a meter. Sometimes a
monster emerges from the pit and tries to sabotage your machine, which
isn't a big deal as the parts just collapse and you can reassemble it
with too much trouble, but it's better to just catch it and drag it back
to the pit to avoid this altogether. As a non-diegetic time limit, a
monster chases your girlfriend, costing you a try when he catches her,
and occasionally knocks over flower pots which bounce around the level
in a semi-random fashion, killing you on contact.
Once
you assemble the machine, you have to start it up, and then awkwardly
use it to destroy the monster. I could never quite figure out its
controls - it seems to fire tennis balls when it wants, in the direction
it wants, and if they hit the monster, great.
Then
it repeats, with a monster wandering the maze to slow you down and
perhaps make the memorization aspect a bit more difficult.
GAB Rating: Average. There's nothing really wrong with this game, but I didn't find it all that challenging or fun.
The
Stampers' independent studio - Ashby Computers and Graphics Ltd. - did
produce one arcade game, Dingo, which bears their logo, and was licensed
through Jaleco rather than Zilec. This is, to my knowledge, the only
game predating Jetpac that is officially credited to them. I don't care
to play this game in depth - I personally found it simplistic and dull -
but I just wanted to acknowledge its existence.
Game 222: Jetpac
Jetpac
might not actually be the first "Rare" game, but it was the first
that the Stampers produced and distributed independently, and their first to be designed
for the home microcomputers that were quickly taking over Britain. They
targeted the 16KB ZX Spectrum, being cheap and popular, but thanks to
their experience in the regimented arcade industry, they worked with a
professionalism more characteristic of American imports than of the
so-called bedroom programmers who coded the majority of the British
market's homespun computer games on their own budget machines.
The
product is a pretty solid and original arcade-style game that controls
well and clips at a decent speed and frame rate, though the visual
limitations of the popularly priced Spectrum certainly show.
Your
goal is to assemble a shuttle from pieces lying around the stage - we
can see this assembly goal previously in Blueprint - and then fuel it
while avoiding or shooting deadly comets, and collecting any valuables
that might land in your vicinity. Then you blast off to the next planet
to collect more fuel and treasures while deadlier fuzzy aliens attack.
Come to think of it, we've also seen this interstellar looting before in
The Pit.
There
are eight stages per loop, each with a different type of alien threat.
Notably, each of the eight types of aliens have completely different
movement patterns, and need different tactics to avoid. The final and
most difficult type are these googly-eyed frog-like monsters that
pursue you relentlessly, but you're fairly safe from them (and most other
things for that matter) on the upper-right platform. Only stages 1 and 5
require you to assemble the shuttle. There are four shuttle models in
total, and you'll need to go through the game loop twice to see them
all.
Although
it plays like an arcade game of the time, Jetpac plays much more fairly
than most, given that Ultimate already has your money and can't munch
your tenpence any further. It's not completely fair - sometimes
fuel appears on the edges of the screen, where aliens are likely to
spawn without warning, but I managed to loop through the game twice
anyway. Figuring out the safety zones during the more difficult stages
made all the difference.
GAB rating: Good.
Sure, it's ugly and repetitive, and the sound effects all sound like
farts, but you know what? It's original, inoffensive, and I had fun
playing it.
Ultimate
Play the Game continued to focus on the ZX Spectrum as late as 1987,
but their best titles all had releases in 1983 or 1984, and virtually
every list of top games on the platform contains a few of them. Later
titles sold well enough but had lukewarm critical reception. 1988's
"Collected Works" compilation contained 11 of the 13 house-developed
Spectrum games, missing only the well-received Underwurlde, and the not
so well-received Pentagram. There were also a few Commodore exclusives,
which were downright reviled.
Jetpac
remained one of Ultimate's best selling and best reviewed titles of all
time. Though a May release, it continued to topped the Spectrum sales charts by the holiday season. Any
ranking of the games by Ultimate usually have Jetpac or 1984's Knight
Lore at the top, and every list of top games of the platform that I've
ever seen has one or both on it. It sold 300,000 copies - an astounding figure considering the Spectrum itself only reached 500,000 sales in 1983. Jetpac had one immediate sequel - Lunar Jetman on the Spectrum later that year. Years later in 1990, Rare produced Solar Jetman for the NES, and in 2007, a remake Jetpac Refuelled on XBLA.
