Game 326: Free Fall

We're not quite ready for Elite - it turns out there's another ancestor or two to look at - the juvenilia of co-creator Ian Bell.

http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/reversi/index.htm

http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/freefall/index.htm

 

His first game, Reversi, is just what it sounds like.

Running on the BBC Micro, Reversi offers 4-color graphics at 320x256, something comparable to IBM CGA, but with a much more pleasing palette than the ugly RGBI palette typical at the time. However, this mode used 20KB of the 32KB available on the most common "Beeb" configuration, leaving little for anything else. Most graphical games would either run in half the resolution or in monochrome.

Bell's Reversi is bare-bones, giving no play options except your pick of color. There is no two-player mode, and no difficulty options. The AI, though quick, plays a pretty mediocre game - it's competent enough at denying you the corner spots, but utterly fails to take advantage of this. I beat it by an embarrassing margin on my second try despite losing every corner spot.

This is like letting him have the center in Tic-Tac-Toe and winning anyway.

Bell's Reversi isn't interesting enough for me to rate or number. His second game is, but barely, and I almost didn't.

Game 326: Free Fall

Dear lord. What's even going on?

There are, thankfully, ingame instructions, and it's better than nothing, but still not really enough.

These are too many controls for a simple arcade game. Can't beat that text clarity though.

What I gathered is that you jetpack around a zero-gravity arena, one which is continually rotating, though this is not conveyed visually (presumably the "camera" is rotating above in perfect sync), and consequently your movements occur in arcs rather than straight lines. There are aliens that you have to punch and kick, though it's more like you helplessly flail your arms and legs (hey, you try punching in zero gravity), which is lethal but has absolutely pathetic range, doesn't even work half the time, and randomly lags when it does. There are also bombs bouncing around the arena, which in theory you can grab and throw at the aliens, but grabbing them rarely worked, and when it did, throwing them never worked, and they'd just explode in my arms.

Most of the time when I died, I had no idea what even killed me. Other times, it would be a bomb, and while the bombs emit a warning beep when they are about to explode, I often wouldn't know which bomb it was when there were multiples bouncing around the octagon. And I still have no idea what the meter on the right side of the screen means.

GAB rating: Bad. The premise is different, which I can appreciate, but playing it wasn't fun at all, just chaotic and confusing. The pseudo-Newtonian physics model isn't altogether a bad idea, but without responsive controls or reliable way of fighting, this is wasted potential.