Our
next whale, Alley Cat, is one of the best known computer games of the
early 80's, though perhaps better known for its 1984 PC port than the
Atari original. That's the version I played in the early 2000's, thanks
to its wide distribution as freeware and surprisingly good compatibility
with Windows XP era systems.
Its designer, Bill Williams, created two games prior in 1982, both for Atari computers; Salmon Run
through the Atari Program Exchange, and Necromancer through Synapse
Software, who would later publish Alley Cat and Commodore ports of both
earlier titles.
Synapse
Software was, in its heyday of 1981 to 1984, the largest third party
publisher of Atari computer software, originally focusing on databases,
but soon expanded into computer games.
They published two games in 1981. One, Dodge Racer, is a clone of Sega's Head-On, and of no interest to me. The other, Protector,
seems like a blend of Defender and Scramble, and was originally
published by Crystalware, but republished by Synapse after a bit of
playtesting, debugging, and polish. This holds a bit more interest to
me, but the link to Alley Cat seems too tenuous to require inclusion in a
retrospective leading up to it.
Synapse
released several games in 1982, and the most well known of them appears
to be Shamus, by a considerable margin. This game, which contains
little sleuthing but plenty of shooting and is very obviously inspired
by Beserk, is the title I've selected to play as an introduction to the
company.
Just
like in Berzerk, you run around a maze full of robots who are trying to
kill you. The walls are deadly to touch, you attack in eight directions
(by throwing "electro-shivs"), robots have a tendency to shoot or crash
into each other, and if you tarry too long, an invulnerable, wall-passing opponent
spawns and chases you, though unlike Evil Otto he can be stunned.
Where
it differs, though, is that Shamus' maze is hand designed and has an
absolute endpoint. Colored keys and locks mean a lot of backtracking,
and the robots, which come in five different varieties, respawn whenever
you enter a room. With 128 rooms spread over four color-coded zones,
each one designating a higher difficulty level than the previous, with
faster, more aggressive robots, a full playthrough takes over half an
hour. It took me several nights to beat Shamus, but each time I made it
farther and farther in, filling out more of my map. At least that was
until I reached the Red Zone, where things were frantic, and here I made
a single save state about halfway through. It was just enough to reach
the lair of the villainous Shadow and toss an electro-shiv through his
yellow keister.
The game then restarts on a higher difficulty, but I'm cool. Novice mode was hard enough.
Some observations:
The
maps are orthogonal but non-Euclidean. Going down, left, right, and up
does not guarantee you will end up in the same place you started.
Trizbort was therefore ideal for mapping things out.
Unfortunately,
there's no pause button from what I can tell. Making a map while
playing on real hardware must be incredibly annoying! Even if you kill
everything else in the room, The Shadow will eventually enter and chase
you around, and in the later zones he doesn't take long at all.
Robots
are more random than in Berzerk, but less suicidal. Tricking them into
colliding with each other, or shooting each other, or walking into walls
is very difficult. However, killing one robot often takes out another
one or two in proximity to its explosion.
Once you kill the
last robot in the room, Shamus's walking speed increases tremendously.
This is very handy for traversing empty corridors quickly, but the
sudden acceleration got me killed by accidentally walking into walls
more often than I'd have liked.
Shamus is pretty generous with
extra lives, which exist as pickups that look like potions, and are
granted after collecting enough points, and sometimes randomly when
collecting mystery tokens. But you'll need them.
Robot spawns are semi-random, but each room is fairly consistent in how heavily populated it is.
Sometimes
robots spawn very close to where you enter and you just have to retreat
because there's no chance of dodging their fire. Sometimes they kill
you before you even get a chance to retreat.
When The Shadow
enters a room, any collectibles will vanish until you exit the room and
return. This is especially annoying when the room contains a key or
keyhole; those will also vanish until you exit and return, and you need
them to beat the game. Sometimes you just can't rush your way through a
heavily defended room, and you run out of time.
The rooms where
you find the keys are semi-random. It seems like for each key, there's
between 1 and 3 rooms where it might be found. The potential key rooms
that don't contain keys will have extra lives instead.
GAB rating: Good.
It's a bit too difficult and too long, but Shamus is overall a good
take on the Berserk formula, and feels better suited to the home
experience with the addition of a structured game world and end goal.
It's crying for a pause button though - thank heaven for emulation!
Technosoft, like many Japanese developers outside of the big third
party names, is a bit of an enigma. Despite owning a Sega Genesis back
in the day, I hadn't heard of them at all until 2015 or so, and when I
did hear their games discussed, it was usually within Sega fan circles,
discussing their efforts during the early years of the Genesis, before
the SNES posed serious competition. In-depth discussion of games from
the years before are rare, thanks to their unavailability outside Japan.
Thunder Force is, no doubt, their best known series; a shmup
originating on 8-bit Japanese computers, years before finding mainstream
success on the Genesis. This series alone isn't what compels me to look
at it. The genre doesn't particularly interest me - occasionally
there's one that stands out enough for me to want to play it, but most
of the time they seem samey, and I've seen Thunder Force get praised
much more for its soundtrack than for transcending the genre's gameplay
conventions.
The impetus for this retrospective, in fact, has nothing to do with
any Thunder Force game. 1989's Herzog Zwei is universally name-dropped
as a crucial predecessor to the RTS genre, sometimes even claimed as the
first RTS game ever, but rarely discussed with much substance. Its
predecessor, Herzog, doesn't even get mentioned very much. Those games
are years away, but I plan to play them both eventually. In the
meantime, if I cover one game by a company, then I tend to play some of
the games that led up to it, and hence I am now playing the two earliest
known games by Technosoft, then called Tecno-Soft.
Game 271: Snake & Snake
From
its title and screenshots, you might think this is a Snake-type game,
but it really doesn't bear much resemblance to anything in that family.
The principal gameplay loop is killing rival snakes, and this is done
primarily by eating them; at first by whittling them down to size with
your acid spit, and as you grow big enough to eat them full-sized, by
chasing them down and avoiding their spit (and the deadly UFO).
Mobygames
lists releases on three platforms, none that I've emulated before; NEC
PC-8000, Sharp MZ-80K/700/800/1500, and Sharp MZ-80B/2000/2500. The only
copy I found was a cassette image for the Sharp MZ-700; a home-oriented
machine featuring a Z80 processor, 64KB of RAM, and text-based graphics
reminiscent of the Commodore PET, except in color. It's a weird
mishmash of specs and abilities that overall seems outdated by the
standards of 1982, but exceeds earlier computers in certain ways.
Strangely, it lacks BASIC ROM found in virtually every other computer of
the 8-bit era, and requires the user to load it into RAM from a
cassette.
Snake & Snake, fortunately, does not require BASIC.
Upon loading the game, you may read instructions, which are written in something approximating English:
Here's what it all means:
The goal of the game is to kill enemy snakes.
When you touch a snake's head, if its body is longer than you,
it will eat you. If its body is the same length or shorter, you will
eat it.
Food periodically spawns in the middle of the screen. Eat it to grow longer.
Spit poison on enemy snakes to shorten their bodies. They can do the same to you.
Red snakes are longer than you. Blue snakes are shorter than you. Yellow snakes are the same length as you.
Each time you kill an enemy snake, reinforcements spawn from a random corner. This continues until the "TEKI" count runs out.
The game ends after beating level 10.
A timer on the bottom of the screen depicts a snake advancing
toward a stick figure. It resets whenever you kill an enemy snake. If it
makes it all the way, your snake will shorten.
The UFO will pursue you forever, even through walls, and can't
be killed. It will destroy you on contact with your head, but will
destroy enemies as well.
And that just about sums things up. Snake & Snake controls a bit
awkwardly, not like Snake-style games where you move automatically and
have to time button presses to turn, but you directly control your
snake's head, and the body, which is largely for show, follows.
Collision with walls and snakes' bodies are not deadly. The whole thing
just feels very jumpy and imprecise, as you move instantly with each
keypress.
The key to victory, I found, was to never pass up a chance to eat
food, luring away the UFO first if necessary, and to be really careful
not to die. You don't lose any length when advancing levels, so if you
can lengthen yourself to the point where newly spawned snakes are
shorter, you can just eat them aggressively, backing off only when food
spawns, or when you start to get dangerously short from too many poison
spitwads, or when the UFO gets too close.
Die, though, and you're reset to the initial starting length, and
vulnerable. Returning to your former glory on the later, more difficult
stages is no simple task.
Beat level ten and you're rewarded with a message.
GAB rating: Below Average. Snake & Snake isn't horrid, but it's simplistic and pretty rough-feeling, like a BASIC title, only faster than most.
Game 272: Thunder Force
Tsuuuunda foooorsu!
The
first game in Technosoft's most famous franchise originated on the
Sharp X1, a disruptive successor to the MZ series. Though it never
achieved the domestic popularity of NEC's PC-88 line, which Thunder
Force was ported to a year later, it's still considered to be one of the
"big three" Japanese-exclusive 8-bit microcomputers, and made Sharp an
important player in the industry.
The
X1 was simple enough to emulate in MAME. Like the MZ, it lacks BASIC,
but the "IPL" firmware program can automatically boot from tapes in the
cassette drive, which is something I've never seen before. It even
rewinds the tape automatically once loaded!
The game is hot garbage, barely playable. It's clearly inspired by
Xevious with its look and feel and dual weapon system, although the
gameplay is structured more like Bosconian, with 8-way scrolling and a
goal of destroying enemy bases.
The first and most obvious problem is that the game moves way too
fast for its poor framerate to keep up. That wouldn't in itself be a
game killer - Snake & Snake's action quickly devolved into barely
readable chaos, but it was forgiving enough that one could cope. Thunder
Force isn't forgiving; on brand for the genre, one hit kills you. The
bullets often blend in with the terrain, and low framerate robs your
eyes of crucial temporal information.
Then there's the issue of
your bombs. There's an on-screen reticle like in Xevious, but it isn't completely accurate. Your bombs appear to land only a
few pixels away from your nose, and judging precisely where is
difficult. I had better success in hitting targets by mashing the button
whenever I got close, and even that wasn't too reliable.
The goal
of each stage is to locate "shield bases," which is done by
systematically destroying every ground target until they reveal small
blue dots, which you must bomb with impossible precision.
This
isn't fun or interesting, and wouldn't be even if the game otherwise
handled flawlessly. The bases, though positioned randomly, seem to only
appear in a select few locations which don't change level to
level, so if you were stuck playing this game for months without any
alternatives or anything better to do, you could finish each
previously-mastered level relatively quickly. A 6 1/2 hour longplay on
Youtube plays through 100 levels, and even in that one, the player
commits suicide upon reaching level 101.
Once you bomb all the
shield bases, the level transitions into a trippy outer space setting,
and you've got to find and destroy a target to advance to the next
level.
I haven't been able to pass the second level, and I don't want to keep trying.
GAB rating: Bad.
Thunder Force had to start somewhere, but retrospective reviews tend to
gloss over this one. The Thunder Force Gold Pack for Sega Saturn
doesn't even include it. I'm sure the real reason for its western
obscurity is its exclusivity to Japanese microcomputers, but it looks
bad and plays worse, and doesn't really seem worth discovering,
especially as its creator wasn't even involved in its sequels.
A
1984 floppy-based re-release has tweaked graphics, with bigger bullet
sprites that stand out better, and if I'm not mistaken, the bombs' hitboxes are
more forgiving. You get ten lives rather than four, and in this version I
was able to reach the third level on my first and only try. It's an
improvement, but not nearly enough to get my recommendation.
Tecno-Soft
would release two more games in 1984; Plazma Line, a space flight game
with primitive 3D polygonal graphics, and a backgammon game. After that,
Kotori Yoshimura, the creator of both Thunder Force and Plazma Line,
left the company to found Arsys Software, and Tecno-Soft's output ceases to be until 1988, when they rebranded as Technosoft and
self-published Feedback, Herzog, and Thunder Force II for the new
generation of home computers. Soon after, they became a console-focused
developer with a strong partnership with Sega. But that's something for
quite a bit later.
Add "bartender" to the long list of jobs that I'm definitely not qualified for.
Midway's
Tapper, originally intended for bars and featuring authentic Budweiser
tap handles on the control panel, tasks you to serve up mugs of mediocre
beer-flavored carbonated beverage to throngs of testy patrons while
scrambling to catch the empty ones that they slide right back to you.
Most re-releases and retrospective compilations substitute no-name root
beer in place of Bud.
With four different bars to tend, and no
room for errors, Tapper becomes a chaotic juggling act. The main threat
is failing to catch the empty mugs - even one dropped glass (whether an
empty one you failed to catch or a full one that you overzealously slid
down the bar when nobody could catch it) will cost you a life, but at
the same time, failing to sling suds at the customers faster than they
come in means they'll overrun your bar and slide you down it, out the window.
My best attempt got me 50,000 points, but I couldn't pass the rave, or get to the alien space tavern that awaits afterward.
My
general strategy was this - when at a bar, count the number of patrons
waiting for a drink, and serve exactly that many before moving to the
next one. Should one bar look like an impending disaster, rush down the
current one to collect whatever empty mugs I can before zipping to the
new one to deal with it. One technical challenge is that you have to
pull the tap for a fraction of a second to fill the mug - release too
soon and the mug won't be full enough to serve. At least you can't
overfill it.
A thing that makes Tapper so challenging is
evident toward the end of the video - the customers are endless. You
finish a round not by serving all of the customers, but by serving them
all before any more can come! If more come in before you're done, which
has happened just as the last customer on the screen was chugging down a
glass, then it becomes a losing battle as even more will come in just
as you're serving the last of them. Repeat ad nauseum.
One
tool meant to help you out is tips, which customers sometimes leave
behind. Whenever you collect a tip, a show starts, distracting some of
the patrons for a few seconds. In practice, I found this rarely helped.
It takes precious time to run down the bar and collect tips, and during
the show, distracted patrons can't be served, but new ones can enter.
The tips might delay them long enough for you to collect some empty mugs
before they crash on the floor, but I seldom found that the situation
after the show was improved from the situation before it.
ACAM
does feature a real Tapper machine, located in the barroom, naturally,
and the main difference in gameplay experience is the use of the tap
handle controller to pour. It's a bit more demanding than using a
gamepad or keyboard, but does lend the experience a bit of
verisimilitude.
GAB rating: Average. Tapper's just another
arcade game that I'd spend half an hour on at most, hit a wall, and then
move onto something else. There's nothing wrong with it, and the
premise is creative, but I can't see myself playing Tapper again unless
it's on a real machine, and then only for the novelty of playing on its
bar-friendly cabinet.
Baseball might no longer be America's favorite pastime, having conceded that ground to football long ago, but it's still Japan's. And now, thanks to Data Driven Gamer, I've played takes on both sports by video game developers in both countries.
If 10-Yard Fight was an oddly playing counterpart to my post on Computer
Quarterback, then Nintendo's Baseball is a comparatively straightforward
counterpart to Computer Baseball. As one might surmise from the target platforms, developing companies, and even their titles,
one's a hardcore strategy sim where stats dictate everything, and the
other a casual arcade-style game where strategy is minimal and stats
don't even exist, as the teams and players are all identical. This one
does, at least, seem to more or less follow the rules and flow of
baseball, certainly with more accuracy than how 10-Yard Fight portrayed
football.
Baseball is among the first Nintendo games
made specifically for the Famicom. Its launch titles, which I covered a
few months ago, were all ports of their major arcade platformers, and
the year also saw two educational spinoffs, and Othello and Mahjong
cartridges, which may be based on Computer TV Game and Computer Mahjong,
respectively. Only Baseball appears to be a Famicom original, unless we
take the view that this game is just an adaptation of Gunpei Yokoi's Ultra Machine.
As
Baseball supports two players - it would be weird if it didn't - I
played a game with "B." We played the U.S. version, which as far as I
can tell differs from the original Japanese version only by team names,
showing TOP/BOT on the inning display, and by measuring pitches in mph
instead of km/h.
I went with the team "A" and he picked "P." Athletics and Phillies, maybe? The only difference it makes is the uniform colors.
The
core mechanic of Baseball, as in the sport, is the duel between the
pitcher and batter, and everything else is peripheral. You don't even
have any control over the fielders except for passes, and the runners
similarly act on their own, though they can be manually advanced. The
pitcher pitches with the A button, special pitches can be selected by
holding a direction on the d-pad beforehand, and the batter bats with a
well-timed A press.
Once
the ball flies, the runners advance based on the situation -
aggressively when there are two outs, cautiously on grounders, sticking
put on flies, while the fielders go for the ball on their own, sometimes
to a hilariously inept effort. Once someone catches it, it may be
passed to a baseman with the B button, holding the corresponding
direction on the D-pad first (down for home, right for first base,
etc.). Runners may likewise be manually advanced with the B button,
first holding the direction corresponding to their starting base (or
down to advance them all), and may attempt steals by doing this early.
"B"
trounced me thoroughly in an 11-5 game. I'd like to think that I got
unlucky with poor-performing outfielders that I couldn't control, but
fact is, he pitched a better game than me, and my fielders had more
chances to screw up. He was especially fond of "pitching around," and
too often I'd instinctively chase and miss a pitch I had no chance of
hitting, turning a ball into a strike. Consequently, he got more chances
to score, and did.
Here's a montage of the game's worst moments of Keystone Cops grade fielding.
GAB rating: Average.
I'm not a baseball fan, so this game wasn't going to rate very highly
in the first place, but we both enjoyed the game while it lasted. It's
obviously pretty simplistic, lacking stats, pitcher fatigue, or much in
the way of strategy, but nevertheless, Baseball gets surprisingly good
mileage out of its two-button control scheme. It's easy to pick up and
play, offers a modicum of strategic depth, and it gets engaging when the
bases are loaded at two outs. I just don't expect the simplistic fun
would withstand a replay, and surely there have been far better casual
baseball games released in the years since.
Sydney
Development Corp is a relatively obscure Canadian developer, not even
having their own Wikipedia page, and now known mainly for their
collaborations with Sierra On-Line and cartoonist Johnny Hart.
For
this post, which is likely the only time I'll discuss the company at
all, I played their first two games. The first is 1982's Evolution,
a self-published collection of six speciation-themed minigames with
about as much devotion to accuracy as Pokémon. This take on orthogenesis
ties in nicely to the source material of their second and most famous title, published by
Sierra in 1983: B.C.'s Quest for Tires.
Game 267: Evolution
The premise behind Evolution immediately makes me think of Maxis'
2008 title Spore, in which you evolve a single-celled creature into a
complex life form through a series of arcade-style minigames and then
develop a tribal society into a space faring empire. It's obviously far
simpler, and lacks any kind of strategy phase or creature customization,
but there are still enough parallels that I have to wonder if Will
Wright played it back in the day.
Going by Mobygames release dates, Evolution was likely made first on
Apple II, and ported in-house to ColecoVision, Commodore 64, and PC in
1983. I expect the Commodore 64 and ColecoVision ports to be more
capable, but we do originals when possible here.
Starting off, there's a riff on Donkey Kong.
These are all modern species!
Stage one has you control a single-celled organism, scooping up
pellets while avoiding predators in what seems to be inspired by
Pac-Man, though without any maze it more resembles Williams' Bubbles.
Loose controls and sloppy collision detection, two themes we'll see a
lot throughout this post, plague this stage, but overall it's fairly
easy. Pressing the joystick button activates a shield at the cost of
some energy.
Biology nitpick: They didn't even spell "amoeba" right! And
although amoebas diversified hundreds of millions of years ago,
amoeboids only evolved into other amoeboids. Multicellular life has an
entirely different ancestor.
In the next phase you play an amphibian and must catch flies while avoiding fish.
This one's pretty frustrating. Randomly moving flies take some
luck to catch, and this isn't helped by your slow-moving frog and poor
hit detection. Avoiding the fish as they descend is easy enough, but
then you've got to either jump over them or wait for them to surface,
and you can get eaten if you try to jump over one and it suddenly rises
mid-jump.
Biology nitpick: Are we a tadpole or a frog? If this is
underwater, why can't we swim? And how are the flies flying underwater? I
don't think these are supposed to be diving flies.
Stage 3 is rodents, in a Dig Dug-like game.
Digging slows you down, but if you can carve out a stable loop then
it's pretty easy to not get eaten by the snakes as you just run around
and collect cheese until the level ends. In a pinch, you can leave up to
three mouse droppings, which are fatal to snakes.
Biology nitpick: If humans haven't evolved yet, how can there be cheese?
Next there's a Frogger inspired game of building a beaver's dam.
This is probably the best minigame. It's basic, but it works. The
alligators' movements are hard to predict, sometimes some of them follow
your latitude, sometimes they move randomly, and sometimes they move in
patterns. You can't count on manipulating their paths to create
openings, so you've got to slip between them while you can.
Biology nitpick: It's pretty uncommon for alligators to prey on beavers. Lucky thing for the beavers, because gators swim much faster.
In stage five, you control a gorilla and throw rocks at monkeys trying to steal your stash of oranges.
Once
again, poor collision detection makes this frustrating. But you've only
got to nail five monkeys to end this round, so at least it's over fast.
Biology nitpick: Oranges are indigenous to the Indochinese Peninsula. Before human cultivation, native monkeys ate oranges, but gorillas didn't.
Finally, there's the human stage, a Berzerk-inspired shoot'em up where mutants threaten to kill the human race.
This
is the second best game, and though the controls are choppy and the
gameplay slow, the collision detection is shockingly good compared to
what came before it.
Biology nitpick:
Mutation is integral to Darwinian evolution. "Mutants" wouldn't so much
murder the human race with lasers as they would outcompete and outlive
us and become the game's next phase.
Kill all the mutants and you're rewarded with a beeper rendition of Gonna Fly Now and an ending cinematic.
Then you are returned to the amoeba phase and repeat the whole process on a harder difficulty.
GAB rating: Bad. I was never a huge fan of these minigame
compilations. Sometimes they manage to be more than the sum of their
parts, but this isn't one of them, and these parts range from poor to
barely tolerable.
Game 268: B.C.'s Quest for Tires
A video game adaptation of Johnny Hart's long running comic strip B.C., this is best described as an early runner platformer in which you neither play as B.C. nor are you searching for tires.
B.C.
was simultaneously released for Atari computers and ColecoVision, and
shortly after released for the Apple II, Commodore 64, and IBM PC. In my
post about Venture, an anonymous commenter mentioned that ColecoVision
is likely the original target platform, as the Atari and Commodore
versions are credited to Sierra's Chuck Benton (the author of Softporn
Adventure!), rather than a Sydney Development employee. This is the
version I'll be playing.
Gameplay
is reminiscent of Irem's Moon Patrol, but with a bigger focus on set
pieces. As caveman Thor, you ride your stone unicycle through nine
distinct stages, dodging and jumping over hazards until you reach Cute
Chick, who's being held inside a cave by a dinosaur.
It
features four difficulty levels, typical of ColecoVision games, but the
best I could do was to beat level 2, which is in the above video.
The
first stage just has you hopping over pits and rocks. You can control
your speed, and the faster you go, the farther you jump, which you can
extend by moving mid-jump. 40 seems like a good balance; go slower and
the timing is stricter, go faster and the time you've got to react is
shorter. You do need to jump sooner than you think; the pits in
particular are wider than they look.
Next
you have to duck under branches and jump over logs. I hate this part -
the branches don't even look like they're part of the foreground and
it's hard to tell exactly where the hitboxes are and where you need to
duck to pass them, and the logs are almost invisible to my
color-deficient eyes. I don't know if they pose a difficulty to true
trichromats, but I have to focus on the grass really hard to even notice them, which is impossible when there are lots of branches.
The
third challenge is Fat Broad, who will try to club you as you cross her
turtle bridge. This is pretty easy on difficulty level 2, as the second
turtle never submerges. You can just wait there until it's safe to jump
to the third.
Next
you cycle uphill a volcano, jumping over pits and rocks, just like
before, only uphill, and with the occasional rolling rock.
At
the top of the volcano, there's more stuff to jump over, but you also
need to chase Dooky Bird and match his speed so you can catch a ride
over the mouth. You don't want to be going too fast as you enter this
stage, as Dooky Bird will come in faster than you.
Going
downhill, I found that sometimes moving laterally mid-air works, but
sometimes it doesn't, so it's best not to try. The pits are deceptively
wide here; get anywhere near the edge of one and you die. Jump early
instead. Keep your speed up here, not just because it makes jumping over
the pits easier, but you'll need the speed to make the leap at the end.
I
got robbed of a life here because the game buffered my jump input as it
transitioned to the chasm, making me jump way too early. At least this
is the funniest death animation in the game.
Beware falling rocks! The trick here is to slow down. The slower you ride, the slower the rocks fall.
Another
turtle bridge, this time guarded by a happy dinosaur. This time, the
turtles sink, but the dinosaur isn't as much of a problem as Fat Broad.
Finally,
you race through a cave, jumping over stalagmites and ducking under
stalactites. It's very easy, and Cute Chick waits for you at the end.
The
game then repeats on the next difficulty, where obstacles are more
frequent and your minimum speed is higher, but I couldn't get past Fat
Broad on this level. Here, the second turtle does sink, and after several failed attempts to get through, I gave up.
GAB rating: Below Average.
It's an improvement over Evolution, but I didn't have a good time. The
controls and collision detection are inconsistent, the graphics are
ugly, and like that other ColecoVision whale Smurf Rescue, there's just
so little to see here - there's more variety and challenge, but it still
only takes five minutes to see everything.
In 1984, Sydney Development had their most productive year, releasing the following:
River Raid, ported to ColecoVision
B.C. II: Grog's Revenge
WizType & WizMath, based on Hart's Wizard of Id comic strip, also released through Sierra
The Dam Busters, initially for Coleco's ill-fated Adam personal computer, then ported to ColecoVision and other platforms
Afterward,
in 1985, they released their last two games, Desert Fox and Fight
Night, both of which were initially published for the Commodore 64 in
the UK by U.S. Gold. Sydney Development just sort of disappears from
history after this point.
Designers Rick Banks and MaryLou
O'Rourke joined (founded?) development house Artech Studios in 1986,
whose first game was Killed Until Dead, and Banks has many credits to
his name with Artech, but O'Rourke's rap sheet just stops there.
In 1983, a joint
venture between ASCII Corporation and Microsoft published a standard
architecture for 8-bit Japanese home computers, which had such a fractured market and confusing mess of incompatible models that it made the cutthroat stateside market look straightforward. Dubbed MSX and featuring
the same CPU and video hardware used in ColecoVision, over 20 manufacturers,
including Mitsubishi, Sony, and Fujitsu, had their own MSX-compatible
machines. It didn't exactly succeed in becoming the national
standard, and barely made a dent in NEC's dominating market share, but thanks to a
strong degree of consistency and compatibility across models in its own
series, and to prolific work on the system by arcade juggernaut (and
future third party console force) Konami, the MSX enjoys some worldwide
fame even as the NEC computers and the many games that they played
remain internationally obscure. Incidentally, the MSX is much simpler to
emulate, and its library friendlier to English-reading audiences.
Antarctic
Adventure is one of Konami's first MSX-compatible computer games, and
despite the ingame 1984 copyright date, is cited as a 1983 release by
both Mobygames and Wikipedia. I played the original Japanese version, as
the level set appears to be different from the European version, and everything I need to read is
in English here anyway.
This
feels a lot like Sega's Turbo from 1981, but slower paced (never mind
that your penguin waddles across Antarctica's coast at 17km per second),
and less abrupt feeling with its graphical transitions. Instead of
dodging erratic drivers, you dodge stationary holes in the ice.
Antarctic
Adventure looks really nice for a computer game of its era, with a
somewhat convincing 3D perspective and a well animated penguin, but two
gameplay problems hurt it. First, it's repetitive, even for an
arcade-style game. You have holes. You have crevasses, which always
spawn in front of you, usually forcing you to jump over them. You can
collect flags and mackerels for points. You have those damned seals that
always pop out of holes at the last second before you slam into them at
mach 50. That's it - there's only so much you can do with this toolset.
And the whole time, you're listening to a 30-second muzak clip on
infinite repeat.
Second, much like
in Turbo, crashes feel unavoidable. Even though the pits and crevasses
are stationary, the draw distance is poor enough and hitboxes sketchy
enough to be a problem at any decent speed. Too often, the penguin would
stumble over hole that looked to be nowhere near his feet, or be forced
to jump over a crevasse at full speed, only to land in another that
popped-in before there was time to adjust speed, or to smack into a seal
that popped-out mid jump when it was too late to change course. You
could always run slower, but you'd have to be moving pretty slowly to
ensure that you can react to everything, so I found it better to run at
top speed most of the time.
At the
very least, the time limit is pretty generous, and despite bumping into
things all the time, I had little trouble clearing the first nine
levels. The final level, though, is a beast, twice as long as any other,
and dense with hazards. Finishing that one took several tries and I had
to mostly abandon the point-scoring pickups, which usually spawned too
far out of my way. Real mastery of the game, one suspects, would involve
memorizing each course, knowing exactly when and where you'd need to
slow down and exactly how much, and where to position yourself so that
you can dodge or jump every hazard and collect every flag and fish.
GAB rating: Average.
Antarctic Adventure is an inoffensive, pleasant looking bit of
arcade-style fun, and only overstays its welcome a little, but like
many arcade games, the lasting value isn't there. After beating the
tenth level, the game loops back to stage 1, and after accomplishing
this (and recording the video of it correctly) I just didn't feel like
playing any more.
I was a little surprised when my post on Computer Quarterback, an
inscrutably abstract two-player Apple II simulation of a sport I have
zero interest in and almost as little knowledge about, sustained
well above average reader interest.
So now, here's
a football arcade game with direct player control and some very weird
interpretations on the sport's rules. There is only offense, only one
receiver is available for passing plays, your dash is more like a
relaxed walking speed at barely a yard and a half per second,
interceptions are penalized with yardage loss, scoring a touchdown beats
the "level," the clock is all but guaranteed to run out well before you
hit the end zone, and once it does, you've got to gain ten yards every
single down or lose the game.
The
above video cuts out the first two levels which represent high-school
defenders and isn't very interesting to watch (or play). Subsequent
levels represent a college team, professional team, and finally a Super
Bowl team.
Each "level" starts with the kickoff and first return run, where your team moves in a tight, unshakable formation.
This
already feels weird and I don't even follow football. Everything's just
so... slow, and the play mechanics are odd. Your team moves in perfect
synchronicity, following the quarterback's lead, and to keep the
defenders off him you've got to jostle around the whole team so that
individual players block the pursuers, incapacitating both for a few
precious seconds.
Should one catch up to you, wiggling the
joystick will shake him off, but getting caught by two or more players
will end your run, and because the defense always moves faster than your
own pokey gait, you're certain to get mobbed eventually. The computer
loves doing comically long "Superman" tackles, which can't be shaken
off, and being tagged four times will also result in an instant tackle.
You'll
want to gain as much yardage as you can here, obviously, but thanks to
the way 10-Yard Fight works, performing poorly can completely ruin you.
On the college level's second half, you effectively get 30 seconds of
running time, and after that runs out, just one unsuccessful play can
mean game over. Every ten yards you don't gain here is a fight that
you'll have to win later on.
The
plays are quite basic. Your only strategy option is where to position
your receiver, who runs across the field until the snap. Forward passes
are pretty risky; even when there's an open zone, defenders move
erratically and can close the gap and intercept faster than you might
think, which will cost you a disastrous 20 yards. The safest choice is
usually to do a lateral pass and run as far as you can with it, though
as time starts to run out, you may need to play things not so safely.
Pass
or throw, though, there are no long yardages plays. You run slower than
a typical New Yorker walks, and even if you break through the lines,
you will get dogpiled.
Score a touchdown and you'll earn thousands of points and get a "kick or run" bonus game, with a chance to score another 1000.
Kicking is easy. Running seems impossible.
Then
the cycle repeats, but it becomes harder, and crucially, the running
time becomes pretty stringent, each round giving you fewer seconds than
the round before it.
One peculiarity that shows up on the harder
rounds, owing to the time limit, is that sometimes it's beneficial to
scuttle a play, giving up a few seconds so that you can retry with more
favorable conditions. For instance, suppose it's 1st & 10, and there
are six seconds left on the clock. If you go for the play, it's do or
die; your time will run out, and then you either make your ten yards or
you lose the game. Or you could deliberately try to get tackled before
time runs out, maybe gain a few yards, and then have a second chance to
gain the rest of them, hopefully against an easier defense formation.
I made it to the "pro" league, where you get 25 seconds in the first half and 20 in the second.
GAB rating: Below Average.
10-Yard Fight is weird, slow, shallow, primitive, and not a whole lot
of fun. The defense is erratic, sometimes changing its directions
mid-charge instead of going for an easy tackle, and my best plays felt
more like they exploited strange AI behavior than that I employed good
skill or strategy. I almost want to rate this "bad," and yet I found
myself strangely compelled to replay it and figure out how to not
completely suck at it, which must say something considering I don't even like football.
10-Yard
Fight had a 1984 re-release called "Vs. 10-Yard Fight," which despite
the name has nothing to do with Nintendo's VS. System, and allows a
second player to control one of the defenders while properly alternating
offense and defense. An NES port in 1985, based on the Vs. version,
somewhat expanded defensive options, and being the system's first
football title is likely the most widely played version of the game.
I
am curious if 10-Yard Fight might have influenced the later, and much
more fondly remembered Tecmo Bowl series. From what I've seen of it, it
seems very plausible that 10-Yard Fight walked, so to speak, so that
Tecmo Bowl could run.
Arcade games always lose something in translation to the home
experience. The days of watered-down NES ports are long behind us, but
even today's cycle-accurate emulation can't replicate the feel of being
at a physical machine with controls and cabinet artwork designed
specifically for the experience of playing one game.
This
holds especially true for games like Bally Midway's Spy Hunter, where
the controls are unique and the control panel is integral to the
gameplay. The machine features:
A steering yoke with four triggers in its handles
A button in the center of the yoke which lights up when its function is available
A pressure sensitive throttle footpedal
A two-gear shifter stick
An LED dashboard displaying your armaments
The
yoke is poorly simulated by a gamepad, let alone a keyboard, so in
preparation not just for Spy Hunter, but for the driving games to come, I
bought a USB steering wheel. It won't work well with all driving
games - a lot of the early ones like Night Driver, Turbo, and Pole
Position use free wheels that measure turning speed rather than distance
turned, but for Spy Hunter, whose steering yoke drives a potentiometer,
this is a reasonable approximation. The wheel has face buttons which
can be mapped to the triggers and center button, and the accelerator
pedal is, well, an accelerator pedal. Spy Hunter's weapon dashboard is
simply displayed as a HUD overlay in MAME - not quite as
attention-grabbing as the real thing, but functional enough.
There's
just one non-straightforward thing to configure here, which is a common
issue to several driving games in MAME. The shift stick here is a
toggle switch, either low gear or high gear, with no neutral position.
MAME, by default, maps this to a toggle button, which you tap to toggle
between the gears. This is fine for most people, but if you've got a
wheel with a stick shift as I do, this isn't ideal.
To change
this, load the game, and then (temporarily) map the Gear Shift control
to something you'll recognize easily, like the 'G' key. Quit MAME, then
go to MAME's cfg directory and edit the "spyhunt.cfg" file. Look for the
XML element that controls Gear Shift, which you might only be able to
identify by the keymap you just assigned.
Then
you can load the game again, and remap Gear Shift to one of your gears,
so that you can naturally shift up and down. In my case, I picked 4,
and now gear 4 means "high" and neutral (or any other gear) means "low."
If
you want the inverse, so that neutral means "high" and your mapped
input means "low," just edit the cfg file again and add the word NOT to the
input element.
Spy
Hunter basically wants to be every James Bond car chase scene in video
game form, and reportedly even played a synthetic version of the Bond
theme in an early build, only to be replaced with Henry Mancini's Peter
Gunn theme when they couldn't get a license.
As
a muscle car-driving spy hunter - or are you a spy being hunted? - your
mission is to simply survive as long as possible, driving down series
of roads full of hostile drivers. Armed only with a pair of
forward-firing machine guns, these will be adequate for the first few
seconds of play in which you'll likely only encounter hostile cars from
behind who are easily taken out. Only black cars should be shot at;
anyone else is a civilian and will cost you points. Eventually you'll
pass by a van and may call it for support by pressing a flashing button -
enter the van and you'll get a new weapon, either an oil slick or smoke
screen for dealing with enemies behind you, or anti-air homing missiles
for shooting down helicopters.
Around
the same time as getting your first weapon - likely earlier unless you
get lucky, your enemies will get deadlier, and start spawning behind
you, following in pursuit. "Switchblade" cars with slashing hubcap
mechanisms straight out of Goldfinger will blow out your tires. Armored
vans impervious to your gunfire will ram you off the road, or into
traffic, or sometimes just total your car by merely connecting.
Shotgun-toting enforcers in limousines will attempt to pull up beside
you and shoot a 12-gauge hole through your radiator, or wait for you on
the shoulders. Sometimes a blast instantly destroys you, sometimes it
does nothing, and I'm not sure if it's possible to determine what causes
it.
Among the least enviable
situations is when any of these are hot on your tail without an oil
slick or smoke screen in your arsenal, as trying to get them to pass you
is extremely risky, and going fast enough to outrun them without
fatally slamming into something ahead of you is quite difficult. The
best tactic seems to be to switch into high gear and using the throttle
to regulate your speed, keeping ahead of them but not getting out of
control, which is easier said than done even with a steering wheel and
pedal setup, and probably not feasible without one.
What's
even more difficult is when hostiles are both behind you and in front
of you. It's no good to just barely keep ahead of the pursuit - the foes
ahead of you will close in. You've got to shoot them if possible and
dodge their wreck at high speed, or throttle up and try to pass them.
Nor is it any simple task to pull into a weapons van while several
switchblades and armored vans are on your tail.
Owing
to the unforgiving difficulty (and high price - a game costs two tokens
by default), Spy Hunter has a grace period of 110 seconds in which you
have infinite lives, and only after this time expires is it possible to
get a game over. Unfortunately, this doesn't do much to help if you
can't survive that long to begin with, as losing your car means losing
all of your weapons except for the limitedly useful machine guns,
robbing you of your best chance of surviving long enough to get a
rear-firing weapon. Especially infuriating is when, right after pulling
back onto the road from losing a life or collecting a weapon, a random
vehicle just comes in out of nowhere and crashes into you. Deliberately
staying on the shoulder until speed picks up can somewhat offset this
risk, but it doesn't always work.
My
best attempt scored over 50,000 points and made it to a motorboat
section, a gameplay mode not seen in the demo loop. Here, your car turns
into a gunboat and you have to deal with helicopters and sea mine
layers. This part, in theory, seems like it should be easier going, as
there's less enemy variety, and the helicopters are less deadly as their
bombs don't leave any dangerous potholes in the river, but it's also
pretty monotonous and gets boring once the novelty wears off.
GAB rating: Average.
On the plus side, Spy Hunter looks nice, with its realistically
proportioned and animated sprites, the control scheme is novel, and its
high concept is well realized. But the difficulty factor is more
frustrating than challenging, and success and failure often feels
dependent on luck. Blowing up because a car just randomly came out of
nowhere is irritating, as is being forced into car chases without having
any suitable weapons at hand. It's also, honestly, quite a repetitive
experience, with most of the possible scenarios playing out in a five
minute session.
Spy Hunter had a sequel
in 1987 which by all accounts was terrible and will not be covered or
otherwise acknowledged in this blog. A reboot series began in 2001,
followed by another reboot in 2006, and another in 2012. The most widely
played rendition, though, was probably an NES port developed by SunSoft
the same year as its maligned arcade sequel.
It was almost the start of the 1983 phase of Data Driven Gamer when
we covered the first games of Automated Simulations. By 1981, its
co-founder Jon Freeman had developed a slew of BASIC games that had
principally targeted the TRS-80 but also found ports to Apple, Atari,
and Commodore computers - the D&D-inspired Dunjonquest series of
dungeon crawlers, a multitude of spinoffs, the StarQuest series, and
movie monster simulator Crush, Crumble, & Chomp! By 1981, Freeman
quit, having grown tired of the limitations of BASIC and unable to
convince his partner to see things his way.
Freeman and his wife
Anne Westfall, an Automated Simulations programmer, founded "Free Fall
Associates" in 1982 and co-produced Tax Dodge, a Pac-Man inspired
arcade-style game for Atari computers that took advantage of its
comparatively advanced graphics, sound, and speed, being coded in
machine language instead of the interpreted BASIC code that propelled
those lumbering simulations of their earlier years. Ironically,
Automated Simulations would soon after head in a similar direction
without Freeman's involvement, also focusing on arcade-style games in
machine language for Atari computers, such as 1983's seminal Jumpman.
As
for Free Fall, Tax Dodge was a flop, and they found themselves in the
same place that several other stories of 1983 have ended up - Electronic
Arts. Joined by designer and fellow Automated Simulations alumnus Paul
Reiche III, they developed their first games for EA, starting with the
one that would become their most famous title of all, Archon.
This post covers those first two games by Free Fall Associates.
Game 262: Tax Dodge
Jon
Freeman wasn't shy about inserting his neoconservative views into his
work. StarQuest: Rescue at Rigel was a thinly veiled metaphor for the
Iran hostage crisis, where the "High Tollah" have taken prisoners and
you play a space commando and perform a daring, guns blazing rescue
mission. In its follow-up Star Warrior,
the backstory launches into a weird lecture on the virtues of
anarcho-libertarianism. Through the monster biographies of Crush Crumble
and Chomp, he's eager to tell you what he thinks about constituted government, gay rights activists, and the Knicks.
Tax
Dodge, then, makes its politics the entire theme of the game, but the
metaphor is a silly bit of fluff as you navigate a maze of earnings,
deductions, accountants, inflation, audits, and tax havens while chased
by black-hatted IRS agents who will take your money if they catch you.
Every fiscal year gives you an earnings quota, and if you don't bring
enough gains to your tax shelter by April 15th, you lose. Supposedly
this was meant to be a critique on overly complicated U.S. tax codes,
but the metaphor doesn't hold up to much scrutiny. Merely paying taxes
in this game is dead simple compared to real life - all you need to do
is have money, and the IRS comes and takes it. It's tax avoidance
that the game makes complicated, and contrary to its intentions, comes
across more as a satire of convoluted, how-is-this-even-legal schemes
available to moneyed individuals than it does of the tax code itself.
Tax
Dodge features true 4-way scrolling, which wasn't even common in arcade
games by 1982. Jr. Pac-Man, released the following year, only had
horizontal scrolling. Running into offscreen taxmen is a seemingly
unavoidable problem. Thankfully, they only take some of your
money, and will not be able to take any more until they return to the
IRS building on the maze, and you can bump into them a few times and
still win the level.
Unfortunately, there's only one maze layout
which repeats infinitely. Which isn't to say that every stage plays
exactly the same - there are a variety of level gimmicks that rotate
level for level. I couldn't find a manual, so I'm not sure what they all
do, but ones that I saw include:
Deductions
act as a buffer. They won't count toward your money quota, but if you
have any, the IRS will take these from you before they take your
earnings.
Inflation costs you money as you run across it.
Red tape slows down everyone crossing it.
The
accountant costs you some money and turns you into a ghost for some
reason. This state will protect you from a single taxman encounter.
Tax court costs you money whenever you run through it. I'm not really sure if it does anything else.
The lawyer charges you a one-time fee and then lights up, like the accountant. I don't know if it does anything good.
Audits
pop-up around the IRS building from time to time, and stay there for a
little while, costing you money if you pass through them.
The Constitution appears in some levels, but I have no idea what it does here or what it's supposed to mean in context. Freeman is familiar with Article I Section 8 and the Sixteenth Amendment, right?
COURT also appears sometimes in place of the Tax Court and like red tape, it slows you down.
Tax
havens are safe spots where you can rest without any risk of being
caught by the taxmen, but you can't stay there forever as the clock
keeps ticking.
The
game starts getting pretty difficult around level 4, which is where my
video above starts. I made it to level 8 in my best attempt.
GAB rating: Average.
It's okay, I guess, but there's no reason I'd want to play this over
Pac-Man, which was competently ported to Atari computers the same year.
The changes to the formula don't really make it better, and ultimately
this just feels like a Pac-Man reskin despite Freeman's ambition to be
more.
Tax Dodge didn't bring in quite as much taxable income
as Freeman had hoped. He blamed Atari's younger crowd for not "getting"
it, but I don't buy it. Tax Dodge isn't especially complex or deep, it's
just got a lot of shallow but obscure little rules. I think so much
more could have been done with the theme too - why not implement tax
brackets, so that the higher your earnings, the more they take? How
about preferential rates on capital gains? Where's my Roth IRA? Never
mind tax havens, how about a spot on the map for Deutsche Bank? I'd like
to see offshore investments, charitable donation credits, profit
shifting, and maybe a two-player mode where you can partner with Ms. Tax
Dodge and pursue split-income subsidies and those sweet, sweet
dependency credits. If you're going to insist Tax Dodge is more than
just a Pac-Man clone, at least try to make me think like a tax dodger!
It's
a little hard to believe that this game, a hybrid of chess-inspired
strategy and competitive arcade action, represents the culmination of
experience behind the voluminous Dunjonquest series and its related
titles. Examined as an Electronic Arts launch title, it fits right in,
with its fair complexities, production values, and immediate
accessibility, but viewed as a terminus on Jon Freeman's thread, how did
we get from Crush, Crumble, and Chomp to this?
Archon plays a
bit like a simplified chess variant - very simplified - with the twist
that when one piece attacks, the board transitions to an arena, where
they fight it out in a twitchy action minigame.
Victory
goes to the first player to have pieces on all five "power points,"
indicated by the blinking eyes, though your main avenues of achieving
this mostly involve eliminating pieces until it's clear who the winner
will be.
Pieces don't have the complex rules of chess; you
have flyers who can go anywhere on the board within their range, and
walkers who can't go through other pieces but are otherwise only
restricted by range. Chess-like strategy, which Freeman dismisses as
"dull," doesn't work here. You can't really "control" the board when so
many pieces can basically go anywhere they please.
The strategy comes from three factors.
First,
and perhaps most importantly, light pieces have advantage on white
spaces, and dark pieces have advantages on black spaces. The green
spaces, on which three of the five power points are located, cycle
between light and dark, shifting a shade every time both players move,
and the closer the color is to pure white or black, the stronger the
power differential. At full white, a light piece may be able to one-shot
a dark piece, and sustain up to three hits in return.
Second,
each piece has different combat abilities and attributes, and they're
asymmetrical for the most part. Your tough, slow-moving, rock-throwing
golem might be powerful against banshees, but moving it off a white
square to attack one on a neutral power point might leave it vulnerable
to counterattack from a fast and deadly basilisk.
Third, each side
has a powerful spellcasting unit, which guards a power point on a
friendly-colored square, who may in lieu of moving, cast one of seven
game state-altering spells. Each may be cast only once per game, and
these spells may not affect units on power points (not even "heal"), nor
may the "teleport" spell teleport a unit onto one.
I played a few rounds with "R," with me as light and him as dark.
We had some fun,
but didn't find a lot of lasting appeal. The strategy doesn't run quite
as deep as it seems. For instance, we learned to never move your
shapeshifter onto a non-powered square that changes color, and if your
opponent does, cast Imprison and attack it with a knight once the color
flips to white. Magic can only do so much, and for the most part is
easily
undone with more magic; one unit taken out with a cheap summon elemental
spell? Revive it. Did they cast Shift Time in a gambit to keep the
middle power points friendly? Cast Shift Time again and now the
advantage is yours.
Ultimately, whoever can fight better is
the one who wins the game. Three of the power points are in the middle
and on shifting tiles, which makes them difficult to hold. Two of them
are on opposite sides and and guarded by powerful spellcasters on
squares with full affinity, which makes them difficult to take. You
either win by eliminating so many units that you can't be stopped, or
you win by occupying the middle power points and landing a sneak attack
on the enemy spellcaster, which requires being the better fighter anyway
as they'll have full color affinity on their side. Or you win if the
other player doesn't know what they're doing and leaves their own power
point unattended.
Gameplay against the computer is
frustrating, as it's jittery and has impossibly fast reflexes, but also
tends to degrade as the game goes on. Defensive play is extremely
effective, because it plays dumb at the strategic level. Just buy your
time, get your good units onto friendly spaces as quickly as possible,
and weather out its initial barrage of magic-aided attacks. The computer
will be drawn to the neutral power points like a moth to flame and
crucially keep them there even after the luminosity shifts, and
that's when you attack and retreat. The main risk is the possibility of
losing your spellcaster and power point to a powerful unit while all of
the other power points are occupied, resulting in an immediate game over
for you, but the computer doesn't do that often, and when it does, you
always have the full advantage of your color on that square.
GAB rating: Above average.
I remember liking this game better,
but on closer examination, the strategy portion is disappointingly thin.
Victory really goes to whoever fights better. Defensive play, where you
move as many pieces as possible onto friendly, stable-colored squares
and keep them there until you can attack at an advantage, is so
effective that aggression can only beat it if the aggressor is much more
skilled, in which case they'd win anyway. Mutual aggression can be
interesting, but again, strategy plays little role in determining who
performs better, and whoever can take out their opponent's spellcaster
first, or whoever eliminates more of their opponent's good pieces while
they're on wrong color, will probably win the game.
It also
seems like the dark side just has better pieces. The dragon is simply
more powerful than the djinni, whose only comparative advantage is
slightly shorter attack interval, barely significant compared to the
dragon's far more damaging fire breath and bigger HP bar. The basilisk greatly
out-damages the unicorn, making it a much more effective in its role as a glass
cannon despite the lower HP. Banshees kind of suck, but the light counterpart's phoenix isn't
a whole lot better, immobile in its attack and vulnerable for a
split-second afterward, and the dark's shapeshifter has the incredibly
useful and unique trait of healing itself after each fight, making it
basically invulnerable on friendly colors.
I propose that Archon could have been improved with a victory points-like system where each player gains "mana" or some other idiosyncratic quantum for each unit on a power point each turn. A player who has captured four power points gains four times as much as a player with only one. Filling a mana bar would count as an alternate victory condition. I believe this tweak would prevent stalemate conditions by forcing defensive players to contend for the power points, encourage strategic play somewhat, and on top of that, the AI wouldn't even need to be changed since it already goes for them when it has no chance of capturing all five.
Archon remains Free
Fall's most well-known game, and only whale, so this is an end point of a
retrospective that I started nearly a year ago with Automated
Simulations' Starfleet Orion. The same year as Archon, they would also
release, through Electronic Arts, Murder on the Zinderneuf, a
Clue-inspired murder mystery adventure game, and the following year,
Archon II: Adept. Their final commercial games were Swords of Twilight, an Amiga
action RPG, and a DOS remake of Archon. Freeman and Westfall's post DOS-era credits consist entirely of online card games played through the now defunct Prodigy GameTV service. Free Fall still appears to exist, but
their website hasn't been updated since 2008.
Although
Archon is an end point for the purposes of this blog, and the last time
I'll look at anything involving Jon Freeman, co-designer Paul Reiche III
went on to have a decades-long career, and currently works at Toys for
Bob, taking up the reins of the Skylanders and Spyro the Dragon
franchises. Notably, he would be the lead designer for Star Control, a
game that might be described as Archon in space.
I've
been dreading this game. I find space physics fascinating, but my grasp on how masses
transition from falling downward towards the earth to falling sideways
around it is shaky at best. The prospect of having to learn actual
orbital mechanics to play a game, made with NASA's consultation no less,
has been bit intimidating.
I've also been quite intrigued, in
a way that I wouldn't have been if this were a 48KB computer game.
We've seen a simplistic and yet barely playable flight simulator crammed
into 16KB on the Apple II. Space flight is inordinately more
complicated, and Activision did this with half the program size, and
only 128 bytes of RAM! And how are all those shuttle controls condensed
into a one-button joystick plus the half-dozen console switches? How is
any of this possible?
The short, incomplete
answer is that there isn't that much simulation. It's mostly just
following instructions - and with a manual 32 pages thick, there's no
shortage of those - and errors result in fuel loss or mission aborting
depending on severity. It isn't possible, for instance, to launch your
rocket into the ground. It's still a very impressive technical
achievement given the system's limitations, but I don't think I learned
much about how spaceflight works by playing it.
There are six phases to the shuttle mission, and controls vary for each:
Launch
Stabilize orbit
Dock with the satellite
De-orbit
Re-entry
Final approach and landing
There are three game modes of incrementing difficulty:
Autosimulator
- A demo mode where you don't need to touch any controls and can just
watch the computer play the game for you. Partial manual controls
override is possible in certain phases, but failure is impossible as far
as I can tell.
Simulator - You have full control, but unlimited
fuel. Fault tolerance is moderate - certain screwups will abort the
mission, but others will just alert you to the problem and let you carry
on in spite of it.
STS 101 - Full control, limited fuel, and
all abort conditions are in effect. On a successful landing you are
ranked based on how well you performed in the docking phase and how much
fuel remains.
After spending a few hours coming to grips with everything, which
included reading and re-reading the manual, and trying all of the modes
in order with the manual in hand, I decided to do a "for real" run
where I'd pursue the Mission Specialist rank, which requires docking
with the satellite twice before de-orbiting, and landing safely with
3500 fuel units remaining.
Here's a rundown of the phases.
Prelaunch
Before
launching the shuttle, you must make sure that the primary and backup
engines are shut down, that the cargo doors are closed, and the landing
gear up. These are done by flipping the console deck switches, which
normally control color and difficulty in other games. In MAME, these are
mapped to DIP switches.
Launch
Activate the countdown with the console reset switch.
At MET-15 (aka T minus 15), turn the primary engines on.
At MET-4, the gauge labeled 'C' will start to move.
When it does, you need to activate your thrusters to match by using the joystick button.
At MET-0, the restraining bolts are released and you have liftoff.
You'll
have two new challenges in addition to needing to continually adjust
your thrusters - you have to keep the shuttle centered with the
joystick's horizontal motion, and keep it on the correct trajectory with
the vertical motion. The console aids this, but good luck reading it
during the first 26 miles.
At
the second stage, the primary fuel tank detaches and things get a bit
easier. The shuttle's altitude rises automatically, and its horizontal
position is confusingly controlled by pushing up or down on the
joystick. You really just want to keep the dot on the line by pushing
down to move it to the right as it rises, and sometimes pushing up to
correct oversteer. You'll still need to keep adjusting the shuttle's
thrust and centering. Errors will sound a warning horn but generally
only cost you fuel.
At
205 miles, you shut off the engines. You have a good amount of leeway,
but the more off you are, the more effort (and fuel) you'll need to burn
to adjust.
Stabilizing orbit
Once
your engines are off, the console switches to a sine-wave showing your
orbit and your position along with the satellite's. Stabilizing is
straightforward if you can follow directions.
Turn the engines back on.
Pitch forward to -28°.
Turn the engines off.
Open the cargo bay doors.
The game isn't really
simulating orbital mechanics here. Once you reach an altitude, you're
in the satellite's orbit. There's a simple correlation between pitch and
altitude drift, with -28° granting stability, and you need the engines on to change your pitch.
The
cargo bay doors need to be open to cool the shuttle. Is that how it
actually works in real life? What happens to the cargo when you open
them in space?
Docking
As
I said earlier, this is the most difficult and involving part of the
game. You are now chasing a satellite in a stable orbit, and to dock,
you've got to approach, get very close, match its velocity, altitude, and latitude, and hold steady for two seconds. To attain the rank of
commander, you've got to do this six times before landing, and it gets
more difficult each time, as the shuttle drifts and the satellite
jitters, getting worse with each success.
The
simplest method is by using the RCS engine clusters, available when the
main engines are shut off, and this is more than good enough to dock
with the satellite twice. With them, you may directly adjust the
shuttle's orbital vector relative to the satellite, and as long
as you don't do anything outrageous, the orbit will remain stable.
Turning the engines on activates OMS in which the joystick button fires
the powerful rear thruster, making longer distance maneuvers more
fuel-efficient. You rely on pitch and yaw for direction, but making fine
adjustments is difficult and accidentally destabilizing your orbit is
easy.
With
the RCS engines, altitude is adjusted by holding the joystick button
and repeatedly tapping up or down. As you do this, the console displays
your Z-axis delta, and the goal is to reach zero. Left and right adjust
the Y-axis offset. Up/down without the button held changes your velocity
and shows the X-axis offset (i.e. your distance to the satellite), but
does not show your velocity, which you need to keep at exactly 23.9 once
dX is 0 to match the satellite. The "game select" switch cycles through
the console readouts, including velocity. You'll need to periodically
check all three vectors, as the shuttle drifts and the satellite can
become jumpy.
The
fact that the console only shows one readout at a time is pretty
annoying, and makes this phase fiddlier than it needs to be. You've got
to keep checking your Z and Y deltas for drift, and the quickest way to
do that is by moving on those axes, which changes them and wastes fuel. I
wish you could view all three vector offsets, orbital velocity, and
remaining fuel simultaneously, but you've got to keep cycling through
them to check. Later computer versions would replace the now-unused
thrust gauges with readouts for velocity and altitude, which isn't ideal
but it's better than the original approach.
De-orbit burning
Unlike
other phases, the game doesn't automatically "advance" to the de-orbit
burn upon completion of the previous. It's a procedure you execute when
you're ready for re-entry - ideally done after docking with the
satellite enough times for your desired rank, but before fuel gets too
low.
Wait until the satellite's distance increases to 128.
Correct Z-axis offset to 0.
Set speed to 23.9.
Activate primary engines.
Yaw to -128. This makes your shuttle face backwards as it travels in orbit tail-first.
Pitch to -4°
Ignite engines until your speed reduces to 19.0.
Yaw back to 0, so that the shuttle faces forward again.
The
first three steps have nothing to do with realism; the game simply
doesn't let you de-orbit while close to the satellite. After that,
reversing the shuttle's yaw allows thrust to decelerate, and the proper
pitch ensures that it does not climb or lose altitude.
I
am honestly not sure if this step accomplishes anything apart from
slowing down and putting distance between yourself and the satellite.
Reentry
After
completing the above steps, there are two more steps to complete before
beginning descent, which ensure the shuttle does not burn up on
re-entry.
Pitch to 28°
Close the cargo bay doors.
Soon you'll rapidly lose altitude, and the trajectory console will show your descent course.
Controls
are similar to the launch phase, but without the need to touch your
thrusters. During the T-stage of reentry, extreme heat will disrupt your
vision and instruments, leaving you flying blind for a few seconds.
Final approach
The
last phase is landing the shuttle, and it's much easier than landing in
Flight Simulator. All you have to do is keep the runway centered on the
screen, and adjust the shuttle's pitch to keep its landing trajectory
in the safe range indicated by the console. The readout shows your
distance to the runway, and once it reaches zero, you may deploy the
landing gear, and then simply push the nose down all the way to land.
On mode 3, you receive a rank.
As
I had docked with the satellite twice and landed with just under 4500
fuel, I attained the rank of mission specialist, as planned. The next
rank, pilot, would require docking four times and landing with more fuel
than I managed with just two docks. I'm not really sure how you're
supposed to do that, let alone attain "commander" rank by docking six
times and landing with 7500 fuel, but I'm not interested enough to spend
more time trying to find out.
GAB rating: N/A.
Space Shuttle wasn't exactly a thrill-a-minute or even entertaining in
the conventional sense, but that was never the point. I will reiterate
that, despite what multiple retrospective reviews have said (often
without making a real effort to attain competency), it isn't exactly a
hardcore simulator nor is it immensely technical, and is more about
partially replicating procedures than accurately modeling spaceflight.
It's a niche product for sure, and I'm not sure it holds any appeal
today beyond showing off what Activision's developers could pull off on
the primitive Atari 2600 hardware, but I don't think it makes sense to
rate it on a conventional good-bad scale.
