Game 377 & 378: Early Tecmo

My last post covered a trio of moderately successful arcade games that steered the direction of Tecmo's early output. Now it's time to cover that output.

Tecmo, now most famous for the Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive series, was initially founded in the 60's as Teikoku Kanzai, a cleaning supply wholesaler. The company later diversified into amusement machines and yacht management, and shortened its name to Tehkan. Their earliest known video games date to 1981, and unlike so many other Japanese studios of the era, did not rip off Breakout and Space Invaders, though they initially collaborated with partners who had been there already.

 

Game 377: Route-16

 

Route-16 was jointly developed by Tehkan and Sun Electronics, and is the earliest credit to the former, released in early 1981. It very much bears the markings of a Sunsoft game of the era - it's highly derivative of a contemporary hit without being an outright clone, it has ideas that are original but not necessarily good, and is plagued by technical jankiness that's at least partly to blame on outdated hardware.

It's difficult to believe that Route-16 wasn't inspired heavily by Namco's Rally-X. You drive around a multi-screen maze, trying to pick up bags of cash while other cars chase you.

Instead of one large, loop-heavy maze with 4-way scrolling, though, Route-16's map is divided into 16 screen-sized mazes which hew closer to conventional graph paper mazes than Pac-Man's do, with a zoomed-out view when you enter the highways between them.

This is immediately reminiscent of Exidy's Venture, which did nearly the exact same thing the same year. Did one influence the other, or is this coincidence?

The effect works less well in Route-16, though - the transition is immediate, but your car never stops moving! Far too often, I'd enter a sub-maze and immediately hit a wall before I could react. This isn't necessarily fatal as your car automatically turns to avoid walls, but it's plenty annoying, and when you have enemy cars in close pursuit you might turn right into them or into an inescapable dead-end.

Putting distance between yourself and them before entering mazes is key to avoiding that, and you have a turbo button which accomplishes exactly that. This is actually one of Route-16's better ideas; turbo gives you breathing room, but also drains fuel ridiculously quickly. You have a lot of it, but the bonus points received for remaining fuel is by far your biggest scoring factor. Deciding whether or not to engage a turbo boost for a bit of security is a constant risk-reward evaluation.

Enemy AI is really, really stupid, and it's not uncommon to see them get hopelessly stuck as you traverse the overworld. I imagine that there are techniques to reliably trap them in their own stupid AI death loops which good players can use to ensure non-interference for sometime, though they tend to miraculously free themselves and mysteriously hone in on your position when you're zoomed-in on another maze and can't see them until they start encircling your local sector.

Some other notes:

• Each level has one or two flags which when collected transform the enemies into moneybags, which then scatter like Pac-Man's ghosts. Unlike in Pac-Man, nabbing them isn't all that important since the points are negligible compared to the potential bonus from remaining fuel; the time and distance this affords you are more important.
• In some rooms, the money bags will turn themselves into oil slicks and back periodically, and it's pretty annoying when one of them switches on you just before collection. Hitting the oil slick awards no points and slows you down for a few seconds.
• One room has a bomb surrounded by four targets. Two targets will randomly defuse the bomb and replace it with a money bag, the other two will arm it. Touching the armed bomb, of course, kills you.
• Some rooms have slow-moving monsters which are more nuisances than threats, but they can become a problem if you also have to deal with cars.
  
• Unlike in Pac-Man, there are a lot of dead-ends in the maze, and sometimes the cash is stashed at the end of a long, winding one. You'll either need to lose your pursuers or use turbo to have a chance of getting the cash and getting out alive. Maybe both.
   

I got a score of 30,000 points on my best run before deciding I'd played enough. The maximum displayable score is 99,999 - flipping this seems quite reasonable.

GAB rating: Average. Route-16 is a bit primitive even for its time, and isn't very well designed, but I don't dislike it. And I can't really explain why not. Being able to work around the game's weirdness and rack up huge bonus points from unspent turbo just feels satisfying despite everything working against this.

Game 378: Pleiades

 

Tehkan's first solo development credit was released through Phoenix's U.S. distributor Centuri, and may have been intended as a Phoenix sequel - Mobygames describes it as such, though I can't find any official confirmation of this.

Either way, Pleiades is certainly reminiscent of Phoenix, being a multi-stage fixed shooter with a Greek mythology-alluding title that also starts with the letter "P." And like Phoenix, there's a lot going on on the screen compared to other games of the time, but it feels cruder, more busy than spectacular.

The first of four rounds has you defend the earth base from an attack by aliens that look like bronze medals. They don't move in especially complex patterns, but they fire pretty aggressively and are tiny targets themselves, requiring frustratingly precise shooting to hit. The stuff around you blows up in smoky explosions as the aliens blast them, and for the most part this is just for show and distraction, though a few friendly installations will fire back. In a clever inversion on Space Invaders, the invaders will sometimes deploy barriers of their own, blocking your shots.

 

Next come the large fliers, just like Phoenix, but these birds haven't got half of the grace that their older cousins possess. Rather resembling F/A-18 Hornets more than phoenixes, you've once again got to land your shots dead center for a kill, and anything else will just cause a temporary engine fire - and they descend so fast that a near miss like that stands a good chance of being followed up by a collision. Collisions are, in fact, a much more serious threat than the slow-moving and infrequent bullets; their wide frames can make dodging impossible.

The third round is the mothership, once again analogous to a Phoenix round, and once again less technically impressive.

There are two ways to take out the mothership - either destroy its support fighters until it self-destructs, or take out all of its engines, which is done by firing a laser into each bay as it opens to release enemies. Either way, the more engines you destroy, the bigger the bonus, with a maximum of 1,600 points per round number (up to 9,600 on round 6!) for total engine destruction, but you must purposefully avoid shooting enemies to achieve this.

The mothership itself does not attack; only its fighter complement does, but taking out its engines is tricky as with each one destroyed, the bays stay open for less and less time, and you might be too distracted trying to dodge enemy fire to get your shots in. Besides that, you have no control over which bays open and when, and that last bay you need to shoot to take out the last engine might stubbornly refuse to open.

 

Finally, you have to land your ship in a crowded runway without colliding into anything already there. Controls are jittery and lateral movement is affected by a Lunar Lander-like inertia, making it tricky to safely squeeze into those tight openings even though nothing is actively trying to kill you.

Flags worth extra points will randomly spawn, usually in risky locations, and landing absolutely dead-center will score you a bonus of 1,000 points per round number.

Then you do it again with greater difficulty parameters.

GAB rating: Average. This still feels like a Sunsoft game, doing for Phoenix what Stratovox did for Space Invaders, what Route-16 did for Rally-X, and what Kangaroo did for Donkey Kong - imitate on a poorer hardware budget, and innovate without improving. It's okay, but Phoenix is better, not to mention far more pleasant to look at and listen to.