Game 429: Fighter Pilot

 

Digital Integration's succinctly-named Fighter Pilot is without a doubt the most fully-featured combat flight sim I've covered as of yet. Not since SubLogic's Flight Simulator have I seen one that features takeoff, landing, plausible flying mechanics, air-to-air combat, and seamless transition between them all. And that game's combat was an afterthought, and everything else besides so rough that it makes Fighter Pilot look like Falcon 4.0.

Flight Simulator. This is a dogfight!

Fighter Pilot loses FS1's scenery, but at least you can read the damn instruments.

 

You definitely want to use a joystick to play - the keyboard yoke controls are clumsily mapped to the 5,6,7,8 number row cluster. Either way, you will need to learn to cope with some awkward input polling - light taps do nothing, but long presses send you spinning wildly. Given the frequent need to make precise adjustments for minor course correction or to level out, you'll need to get comfortable with the exacting timing that you need to push the stick just long enough to register as input, and no longer.

The manual is restricted to six pages of cassette liner notes, which are well written and use their space economically, but sparse on actual flying technique, particularly when it comes to landing. It took a good deal of trial and error to work out viable techniques on my own, and in the end I didn't quite feel like I was doing things right

Fighter Pilot offers four scenarios:

• Landing practice - Start airborne, and land on the runway.
• Flying training - Start on a runway, takeoff, and land.
• Air-to-air combat practice - Start airborne and engage a drone.
• Air-to-air combat - The complete package. Start on a runway, takeoff, engage hostiles, and land before fuel runs out.
  

There are four difficulty settings, which as far as I can tell only effect air-to-air combat by increasing the enemies' shooting accuracy, but does not affect their flight skill. There are also two independent difficulty-increasing options; blind landing, which encases the ground in fog and forces you to approach and land guided with instruments alone, and cross-winds, which affect your speed and lateral drift. No thank you!

I did complete each scenario in order, as the first three scenarios are practice for the fourth - landing is definitely something you want to get a good handle on before trying a combat mission.

 

Landing practice

 

Begin five miles from a runway, already oriented for a center-line landing, at 1700 feet. As long as crosswinds are not enabled, you will not need to perform any course correction, and this is not too difficult once you have a good glide-slope technique. If you do have crosswinds then I have no idea how you can possibly manage to compensate with these controls that manage to be too sensitive and not sensitive enough at the same time.

My technique is to immediately lower the flaps, which dramatically reduces speed and increases lift, then raise thrust to just below 7.5 notches, and raise the nose until VSI shows a descent of about 12 ft/s - you might not be able to hit this exactly. ILS is important but limited in usefulness - it seems to be calibrated to a fixed glidepath and won't be much help if you deviate too much from it. But it will help with making small corrections. Leave thrust alone and gently adjust pitch to correct your glidepath as needed, using 12 ft/s as the baseline descent rate. Once you get close, VSI becomes useless and you'll need to trust your own eyes.

 

On touchdown, kill thrust and slam the brakes. You shouldn't be landing at more than 135kn, and the F-15 can come to a stop from that pretty quickly.

The manual gives some terse notes on how to perform a flaps-up landing (these can be damaged in flight!), but either I'm missing something or the method given just doesn't work. The printed thrust and nose angle causes the Eagle to cruise at 200kn with zero altitude loss, missing the runway completely. Decreasing the thrust even a little bit causes rapid loss of speed and altitude until it stalls and crashes. Decreasing pitch makes it rapidly build speed until it gets fast enough to rip off the landing gear. Still, I did manage to land flaps-up once, by retracting the undercarriage, descending to under 100ft, then approaching at cruising speed and decreasing pitch at the last moment to land, which I suspect is not a safe landing technique in real life.

This is a good first exercise, and with some practice I could land the plane consistently, but it skips the most difficult part of landing - orienting with the runway.

Flying training

 

In this scenario, you must take off from an airbase and land. You have a choice of four airbases to land at, though one of them is nearly impossible to.

Takeoff is easy - you are already oriented line-center on the runway and don't need to taxi, and the F-15 can take off with flaps up just fine. Just increase thrust to full, lift up at 160kn, and don't forget to retract the undercarriage.

Once airborne, you can fly around at your leisure. As long as you don't let the airspeed fall below 130kn, or do something dumb like lower the flaps or undercarriage at high speeds, you're fine. It's not real interesting though - the terrain is almost completely featureless. Even the mountains are not rendered as scenery - they are simply invisible regions marked only on the map that instantly crash you if your altitude isn't high enough.

 

The manual does nothing to explain runway alignment, but the beacons are key. Three of the bases are flanked by beacons which can be selected to show their bearing and distance on radar. The fourth base, Zulu, lacks beacons, and I don't see how you're supposed to land on it. I find you need a good 20-25 miles out from an airbase to be able to stick the landing; it takes time to oriented the plane correctly, and you get closer while making adjustments. Furthermore, bearings are only accurate to the degree, so as you get closer to the base, that 270° reading may well become 271° require further course adjustment.

Flying toward Delta. Note the 274° bearing to beacon 4.

Some correction is needed!

 

At 6m distance, the flight computer becomes available which can help you make your final course adjustments.

471ft north of the runway. Gotta bear left a bit.

 

 Hopefully you don't need to fuss with this too much and wind up flying right over the runway while fighting the somewhat stiff and imprecise controls to align with it!

Air-to-air combat practice

 

This scenario starts you out in the air and close to a drone, which you'll quickly run into and be able to shoot down with your Vulcan - no lock-on missiles here!

After killing the drone, a real fighter spawns, and can be located using the radar for distance and bearing and flight computer for altitude. The map will also show you its position and heading.

Visual range is under one mile, effective weapon range is less than that, and trying to fight head-on is futile; as you'll just scream past each other in the blink of an eye. You've got to get on its tail and stay on it as it tries to shake you, and you'll need to go just fast enough to catch it, but not so much faster that you cannot match its maneuvers. Once in range and in your sights you can gun it down. Instrumentation will not tell you the speed, and is also not precise enough to be useful when it enters visual range; you'll have to rely on your eyes and intuition.

I pull off death from above.

 

After kill, you can land, or you can continue to fight - regular fighters continue to spawn. If you're good, they won't have much of a chance to hit you, but on higher difficulties they may land a hit during the initial split-second flyby. Damage modeling is simplistic; four hits will kill you.

Air-to-air combat

 

This is the total Fighter Pilot experience. Enemy fighters spawn immediately - infinitely but thankfully only one at a time - and they're coming for your airbases. Everything you've practiced in the first three scenarios is used here - take off, hunt and kill as many enemies as your fuel and fuselage integrity allows, and land.

The above video (note - the game has no sound!) demonstrates my best run at air-to-air combat, at the easiest difficulty settings, in which I kill four enemies before landing and very nearly out of fuel. I managed five in one prior run, but botched the landing.

Some luck is involved - fighters will target airbases when you are not engaging them, and you will lose some! If a fighter spawns far from you, and they will, it will almost certainly destroy the nearest airbase long before you can intercept it. Just hope that they don't leave you with the useless Zulu base. Conversely, during one attempt, fighters wouldn't stop spawning close to me (and the only viable airbase), and I ran out of fuel fighting them, unable to land.

GAB rating: Average. I'm impressed by the fullness of this simulation given the early timeframe of its release. In some ways it's more impressive than Microprose's F-15 Strike Eagle of the following year - it runs at a better framerate despite the poorer hardware, simulates takeoff and landing, and the cannon duels are more engaging than F-15's fire-and-forget missile combat, if perhaps anachronistic in the age of jet warfare.

That said, it wasn't especially enjoyable, thanks to the somewhat clumsy controls. They're workable, but just annoying enough that I felt like I was fighting them more than I was engaging with the flight and combat mechanics. Simulations like this have a short shelf life anyway. When the goal, as the liner notes say, is approximate a realistic simulation to the best ability of computing's limitations, the effort quickly becomes irrelevant as technology improves and later sims do it better.

Game 428: Night Gunner

Digital Integration was a minor British developer best known for flight sims like Hind and Apache, and are credited with distribution on several UK budget re-releases. They didn't produce many whales of their own, and their earliest bona fide whale is 1989's F-16 Combat Pilot, but 1985 seemed a good year to introduce the company with Commodore 64 racer Speed King and their backlog up to it.

Their first game, Night Gunner, was originally developed for the ZX81, and like most ZX81 games is a barely playable piece of crap.

It's Star Fire, just with a WWII bomber theme. That makes the third Star Fire clone I've played that was made by a British bedroom programmer in 1982, and this is the worst one yet. To hit your targets you have to tediously nudge them into the center of your screen with painfully unresponsive cursor keys, awkwardly mapped to the 5-6-7-8 keyboard cluster (as it is with a real ZX81 keyboard), and whenever you push them it's not always clear whether the input was accepted or not.

I'd just move onto the next one, except that the ZX Spectrum version of the same game appears to be substantially different.

Alas, it's still not a side-scrolling shmup where you play as a flying wizard.

You will definitely want to emulate a joystick - the keyboard layout makes no sense even by ZX Spectrum standards.

 

It's still much like Star Fire, though this time the crosshairs move instead of your point of view, and it's all the better for it, even with more responsive controls than in the ZX81 original.

 

You still need to hit your targets dead-center, and now you have to lead them as well, but at least you have rapid-fire. Ammo is finite but I never ran out of it. Perhaps it becomes an issue on later missions. 

On the higher difficulty levels, your plane takes damage FAST, and this affects the plane's speed and handling. It's usually not even worth trying to shoot down the defenseless blimps, because you really don't want to let the fighters stay alive for a moment longer than necessary.

Once the plane reaches its destination, you switch to bombing mode.

Somehow the bombing is at day.

 

Here, there's no reason not to slow down to minimum velocity. You can't hit all of the targets, but the more accurately you bomb, the more points you score. The time limit is irrelevant; you'll certainly drop your bombs before time runs out, at either which point you turn around, return to the tailgunner seat, and try to survive the trip home.

Subsequent missions follow the same format - gunning, bombing, gunning - but get more difficult. Enemies get faster and more numerous, bombing targets become mobile ones like tanks and trucks, and sometimes it is a dive-bombing mission, which is far more difficult.

 

Once a targets appears past the horizon, you only have a few seconds before it passes under your firing line. If you aren't already diving when you see it, it's too late - and your altitude drops fast!

The tape liner claims 30 missions, but I couldn't get anywhere near close to that.

GAB rating: Below average. The ZX Spectrum is luxurious compared to the ZX81, but destitute compared to the Atari 800. With functional controls and visuals and some gameplay variety, this is one of the better action games I've played on an ultra-budget micro before, but that isn't saying much; only three such games have managed average or better (3D Starstrike, Gridrunner, Jetpac).

Game 427: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Dr. Jones' expression looks like he got his tenure revoked.

I’ve long considered the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to be underrated. It’s not the best by a longshot – that would be Raiders of the Lost Ark; the sidekicks in Temple are crap, the plot a bit weak, the Kiplingesque pro-imperialist connotations troubling, and there’s almost nothing of redeeming value in the first two headache-inducing acts which consist mainly of a relentless barrage of ridiculous action set pieces, culturally insensitive grossout gags, and Kate Capshaw’s endless whining and screaming.

But when Indy & co finally reach the titular temple and adjoining catacombs where the bulk of the action happens, it gets good. The stunts, the deathtraps, mine carts, lava flows, dynamite explosions and cave-ins exemplify the adventuring spirit of the films almost better than anything else in the entire trilogy. Plus, Thug leader Mola Ram is a way better villain than any of the Nazi bureaucrats that Jones squared off against in the other films. They're in over their soon-to-be-melted heads when it comes to anything magic, but Mola Ram commands magic with the panache of a Mortal Kombat boss. They wear their dinky little totenkopf insignias, Ram wears a giant yak skull headpiece with a smaller skull embedded inside.

Atari's Temple of Doom, like their Star Wars games, thankfully cover only the good parts, and Willie Scott and Short Round are almost nowhere to be seen (or heard). Unlike Atari's chronologically confused Star Wars games, Raiders of the Lost Ark had been adapted earlier as an Atari 2600 game by Howard Scott Warshaw, and from a cursory look may have been more baffling than E.T. This comparatively straightforward action/platformer is certainly better thought of as a standalone adaptation of the film than a sequel to the earlier game, absolving me from having to play it. Last Crusade would, of course, be handled by frequent Atari partner Tiertex, with the coinciding adventure game done by Lucasfilm Games.

My below video is on easy difficulty, which unlike Return of the Jedi will enable every game scene, and it's difficult enough - I can't complete medium without cheats, even when starting with six lives.

 

Difficulty selection is its own level, handled in a manner that makes me think of Quake - not just in how the higher difficulties are gated behind more challenging diegetic actions, but also in setting the stage for the game's gloomy, oppressive atmosphere even before it technically begins.

Regardless of difficulty, the game unfolds over four cycles of three scenes - the catacombs, the mineshaft, and the temple.

In the catacombs, you traverse the treacherous, maze-like paths in search of the children imprisoned here, avoiding traps, pitfalls, and Thugs, who are relentless but usually subdued with a good whip crack. They're also some of the least self-preserving enemies I've ever seen in a video game, routinely walking off ledges and into lava pits, spikes, pulverizers, etc. And the Atari voice synthesizer makes their vaguely offensive chanting sound like the Swedish Chef! Indy's voice doesn't fare much better either, constantly yelping "woah!" and "ayeee!" in a manner that sounds less like Harrison Ford and more like Pitfall Harry Jr.

Rescue the children and you can leave via mine cart.

The mine cart scene is for certain where I lost most of my lives. The cart moves fast, controls aren't always responsive, and limited screen space means danger often pops up quicker than I can react to it. There's always an explosive barrel right at the end of the scene, and you must whip it to blow up the tracks behind you or you will almost certainly be taken out by a pursuing cart, and if there's one close enough behind you this might happen (and has happened) anyway.

Succeed, and you enter the temple.

These stages are pretty simple. The Sankara stone sits on the altar by an unstable platform. Snatch it but time it carefully so that you don't get dumped into the lava, and use your whip to keep the Thugs away (and likely drop them into the lava). Take too long and the wooden bridge burns up, and you'll need to take the long route around. Mola Ram may show up to blast fireballs at you too.

 

But I was right at the top of the screen!

The stages repeat but get increasingly longer, more complicated, and more dangerous. Ram starts showing up during the catacomb stages as well.

The fourth cycle concludes with the bridge scene instead of a final temple.

Whip his fireballs before they get you, but watch your back too - Thugs will attack from behind, and you can't whip in both directions at once. The closer you get, the shorter the intervals between fireballs, until,

 

Alas, fortune and glory is fleeting - one last level remains, and this time death is your only exit.

Golden idols are hidden in this massive bonus stage, but the Thugs are more numerous than ever, the vampire bats small and difficult to hit, and the maharajah and his geographically inappropriate voodoo doll will show up and ruin you as he pleases. Eventually you die, and enshrine your high score for the world to see.

GAB rating: Average. From a look and feel perspective, this is a solid arcade adaptation of Temple of Doom, and captures the film's dark and twisted setting well. From a gameplay perspective, it feels unpolished and frustrating, with off-feeling controls and over-reliance on cheap kills. It's functional, but could have been a lot better.

Games 425-426: TX-1 and Buggy Boy

Coming straight from Hang-On, a motorbike game that plays well with a modern steering wheel setup despite looking nothing like the original controls, we have two motorcar racing games that absolutely do not play well with a modern steering wheel setup despite looking very much like the original controls. Like Pole Position, these games use a free-spinning, non-centering wheel, and MAME simply does not provide a good way of mapping this to a standard racing wheel.

It's too bad, because otherwise I have the perfect setup for these games - uniquely for the time, they employed triple monitors for a panoramic view, and I have a curved ultrawidescreen, which still needs letterboxing to fit the 4:1 aspect ratio, but nevertheless affords me a much bigger field of view than I'd get on a 16:9, or the downright tiny one I'd get on a 4:3 screen. And my spinner equipped control panel, which I had used to an decent effect in Pole Position, wasn't so great here - in Pole Position you can do without analog throttle, but in TX-1, you definitely need it.

The way I wound up playing will sound odd when I describe it, but it kind of works - I set up my racing pedals and stick shift in front of my ultrawide monitor, but not the wheel - I used my mouse to steer instead!

 

Game 425: TX-1

A direct evolution of Namco's Pole Position, on paper, TX-1 seems like it should be even better - you have that triple-monitor setup, higher resolution graphics, more varied scenery, a more realistic driving model, and a longer, more complex course with branching checkpoints and eight possible endpoints all over the world, which I'm certain influenced OutRun's design.

Unfortunately, some of these points work against it. The "more realistic driving model" isn't realistic at all - just punishing. I never made it past three checkpoints.

 

Part of the problem is that while the graphics engine does some fancy pants stuff like tunnels, banked roads, and parallax backgrounds, it, like Pole Position (and Hang-On) relies on scanline trickery to distort the road into curves and bends, and just isn't equipped to render the sort of hairpin turns that it wants to.

 

And so the turns are visually confusing as they twist and warp. Going too fast through a track segment will cause you to lose grip and get tossed to the side and likely wipe out, and I had a consistently difficult time reckoning just how fast I could get away with, so I'd drive on the side of caution, which is a luxury that the strict time limit does not afford you.

But then there's the traffic, which can begin to downright clog the roads after the first checkpoint. The slightest touch means a spinout or fatal collision, their hitboxes are always bigger than they look, and your car just doesn't have the finesse to weave around your opponents during a turn, so I'd drive even more timidly and run out the clock waiting for an opening to speed up and pass.

I've played this game at ACAM too, in all its triple-monitor glory, but never did well there either. I should go back now that I've had some practice.

GAB rating: Average. Certainly a more ambitious game than Pole Position, but technical jank and weird handling keep it from being a better game. Perhaps it gets better if you can overcome the skill hurdle, but I didn't feel terribly motivated to keep trying.

Game 426: Buggy Boy

This one's more famous for its Commodore 64 port than the arcade original, which like TX-1 utilizes a three-screen panoramic view, and has the same PCB and pseudo-3D perspective. I kept my mouse-and-pedal steering setup.

Employing a cartoony visual style and outlandish animations that evoke Hanna-Barbera's Wacky Races, Buggy Boy's builds on TX-1's pseudo-3D wizardry, employing effects that in ways are more impressive than Sega's Super Scaler titles of the same year. Terrain that crests and dips, a camera that tilts up and down with appropriate perspective shift, weather effects, slanted side embankments, ridges, bridges, and so many pseudo-3D sprites, all of them smoothly-scaling with very little artifacting and no sprite flicker or z-fighting whatsoever. There's still some of TX-1's perspective weirdness, especially with sprites that jitter around in the distance before snapping into their proper place on the road as they come into range, and the overall look is a bit plain and unpolished compared to Hang-On, but the graphics engine is doing a whole lot more. If nothing else, Buggy Boy's clean visual style stands out among its pixelated sprite-scaling racing game peers to this day.

Befitting the cartoon aesthetic, Buggy Boy loses some of the harsh pseudo-realism of TX-1's driving model - your off-road vehicle's maximum speed is a lot lower, hairpin turns aren't a thing, and you no longer lose control when you turn too hard - the driving model simply won't allow you to turn more sharply than what your throttle allows.

But don't think Buggy Boy is easier than TX-1. Oh, no. If anything, it's harder, because these off-road tracks are cluttered with stationary obstacles arranged in ways that the Battletoads would struggle to swerve around. And that's before rival buggy drivers enter the scene!

Just... how are you supposed to hit that checkpoint?

In the above video, I tour all five of Buggy Boy's courses in a single sitting, and do not come anywhere close to completing any of them, though I do manage to snag a high score in the first and easiest off-road circuit. There's some sort of flag-based scoring mechanic that I never really took the time to try to understand; collect five in a certain color order and a jingle plays for a little while which probably signals a bonus or a multiplier. Score optimization is a distraction from the main goal of beating the clock, which is plenty harsh already.

GAB rating: Average. Buggy Boy has a good amount of novelty, but I enjoyed slightly less than TX-1, which I didn't enjoy that much to begin with.

Games 423-424: Champion Boxing & Hang-On

Sega's legendary designer Yu Suzuki's wrote his first game for Sega's not-so-legendary SG-1000 console, a contemporary of the Famicom with the graphical prowess of the ColecoVision. Retrospectives tend to consider the later Master System as Sega's true answer to the Famicom, and reduce the SG-1000's role to its forebear if it is even acknowledged at all, and truth be told, I don't see myself exploring the SG-1000 library much either. No whales originated on it, but this ancestor is a rare opportunity to emulate it.

Game 423: Champion Boxing

"B" and I played a few matches in MAME and recorded our last and probably most exciting one, in which he plays the taller boxer and wins by decision.

 

The game is a bit simplistic, but overall it's not bad! The controls have a strange design choice where button 1 punches and button 2 cycles between punch types (jab, straight, uppercut), but they're fast and responsive, and the animations are fluid and readable. Action tends to oscillate between attack and defense; land a hit and you're in a good position to follow up with another, but you've got to mix up your punches with high and low blows to keep him guessing how to block. Block successfully and your next blow will come out faster than his, making the ideal opportunity for a counter-offensive. Or, if you just can't seem to block your opponent's string of punches, you can back off and leave him swinging at air, forcing him to come to you while you take a breather. The strategy isn't by any means deep, but it's something.

GAB rating: Above average. Like Urban Champion but better, I enjoyed this sparring match more than I expected to.

Game 424: Hang-On

Sega's arcade ventures are well known for being early adopters of pseudo-3D and eventually 3D technologies, often relying on bespoke, pricey hardware, but some of their earliest attempts don't hold up terribly well. Turbo, for instance, powered by the sprite-scaling VCO Object board, plays awkwardly and looks primitive compared to Namco's Pole Position from just a few months later, and Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom looks flashy but is otherwise a chaotic mess.

Enter the famous Super Scaler board, or at least a progenitor to it - a 16-chip, dual-CPU beast designed for one purpose - to one-up Pole Position (itself a monster of a PCB). Truth be told, considering Hang-On is three years younger, the improvement is almost underwhelming, but it goes to show how much arcade technology stagnated in the interim years between 1982 and 1985. But make no mistake, it succeeds at this goal; Hang-On's 3D perspective is just as convincing as Pole Position's, but runs smoother, speedier, and is much more colorful than anything before it, and the technology would only get better.

Photo by SegaRetro

Nearly as important to the graphics technology are the cabinet externals, which feature analog bike handlebars for steering, a twist throttle, and braking lever. The deluxe ride-on model, shaped like one of the ingame motorcycles, goes even further for immersion and is controlled by tilting the assembly with your whole body weight - an impressive feature all but impractical to emulate! ACAM of New Hampshire has such a model, but it remains inoperable, sadly.

To emulate this as best as I could, I brought out my Logitech steering wheel and pedals, which probably allows easier control than the real thing did. My wheel would steer, my gas pedal would throttle, but I mapped one of the paddle shifters to the brakes. You need analog throttle, but you don't really need analog braking.

And, it works! It works quite well - this is easily the nicest-feeling arcade racing game I've covered yet - much is because unlike Turbo and Pole Position which use free-spinning, centerless wheels, I can comfortably map Hang-On's steering to a standard wheel, but the action feels responsive, sufficiently weighty, and fast. Sliding through a hairpin turn at just the right speed so that you don't understeer and drive off the road feels great, and even better if you pass another biker or two mid-turn.

Granted, this is still the Turbo-mode of gameplay and pseudo-3D physics, where the road is flat, turning is an illusion, and rival bikers are mere obstacles to be passed rather than true opponents. But a good illusion goes a long way in an arcade racer, and this is the best illusion of turning yet.

Hang-On is intensely unforgiving - you cannot afford a single accident if you hope to get through to the end, and even if you never crash or bump into another rider and spend most of your ride at maximum throttle, you can still lose because you took turns too cautiously, or even because a road segment was congested with bikers and forced you to wait for an opportunity to pass. Luck, in the form of the bikers and when you encounter them, plays a role - they can be easy to pass, risky to pass, or impossible depending on when you reach them, how many there are, and whether they're off to the sides or actively changing lanes at the time. Many of my attempts were doomed by a rival bumping me off the road and into a rose bush or a signpost as I futilely tried to pass him.

I'd say it took me at least 30 tries to get through the entire course for the first time, and I made it twice - the second time is shown in the recording. A crash flings you from the bike which dramatically explodes in the background and effectively costs you eleven seconds - five to recover, and six to get back up to speed - and both of my successful runs were accident-free and finished with fewer than ten seconds remaining.

Both runs also involved a hidden secret; one that requires me to describe the runs as "accident-free" rather than "crash-free." During the fourth leg of the race, you'll eventually see a Sega logo on the left curb, followed by H-A-N-G-O-N letters. Crash into the 'G,' which is rather easy to accidentally swerve around instead of into, and you'll put twenty seconds back on the clock. Without exploiting this secret, both of my successes would have been failures.

GAB rating: Good. Hang-On is a Sega milestone, marking the start of their long-reigning position at the forefront of the coin-op scene's cutting edge. While the driving isn't obviously more advanced than Turbo, or even Atari's Night Driver, presentation and feel makes it fun.

Game 422: Summer Games II

 

Epyx's VIC-pushing, Olympics license-dodging killer app returns with another set of eight events.

The formula is still the same. Practice individual events as much as you like, then compete in one, all of them in sequence, or a selection. You can even add events from the first Summer Games disk into the lineup, for a total of 16 events!

It took a while to organize a session, but I got "D" and "B" to join me for a repeat - once again we sampled all of Summer Games II's events through practice, and then played our favorite events in competition, but didn't bother replaying the old ones from the first game.

Unfortunately, only three of the eight events made the cut, and one of them just barely. At least the recording worked fine this time.

 

Loading seemed to be much faster than in the first Summer Games, anyway, taking just a few seconds per event. I have no idea if this is due to improved code or a difference in emulation settings.

The first event, and one that made it to competition, is the triple jump.

Conceptually it's hard to imagine this being much simpler. There is no button bashing - you automatically sprint to the fault line, and then you press RIGHT on the joystick to jump. Press RIGHT a second time as soon as you land from the first jump to spring into the second jump, and press LEFT upon landing from that to push off into the third and final jump, and press UP to maximize your airtime. The more precisely you time your inputs in sync with the optimal timing, the farther you'll jump.

Competition mode gives everyone three chances and only the longest jump counts. Unfortunately, "B" and "D" both choked here despite practicing earlier and couldn't stick a single jump, consistently tripping themselves on the third one.

Event 2 is rowing. I was once an okay rower in real life!

 

Alternate pushing left and right on the stick to row - it's not about waggling at maximum speed, but about maintaining rhythm, as seen in the animating sprites. You want your oar strokes to be complete, not rapid.

In competition two players will race each other, and a third races the computer, but the final rankings are determined only by time, much to the irritation of "D" who beat the computer by over three seconds but still came in last.

The third and final event that we played in competition was the javelin throw, which was easily "D"'s favorite event.

 

We've seen this one before in Activision Decathlon, Microsoft Decathlon, and Track & Field, and it's the same formula; tap the button to build speed, hold LEFT before reaching the fault line to begin the throw, and release at the optimal angle to launch. Angle matters more than speed here.

From here on out, the games get worse, with one exception.

The equestrian event is baffling. It helps somewhat to think of the joystick as controlling the rider, not the horse, but that doesn't make it less frustrating when the horse refuses jumps and all you can do is wonder why. Pressing RIGHT at a precise time will make the horse jump over obstacles, but the correct timing is difficult to read, and an incorrect one gets you a refusal, forcing you to back up. Though occasionally it would instantly launch itself from a standstill over the obstacle at horse warp speed instead.

Also, the monochromatic horse is crudely drawn and animated compared to the humans. Not only does it look out of place here, like it belongs in an Atari VCS game, but better animation could have improved gameplay by giving more visual feedback on the horse's gait, cues for the jump timing, etc.

I got okay with solo practice, but it takes rote memorization to know where the obstacles are, how far apart they are, and how wide they are, which informs when to speed up, slow down, and the jump timing, which never felt intuitive.

Event #5 is the high jump.

It's another baffler! We've seen this one in Activision and Microsoft Decathlon, but in those two, you ran toward the launch head-on, while here you run perpendicular to it and sort of push off at a sharp 90 degree angle. Real high jumpers run in a J-shaped pattern to let them lift off with one foot, which seems to be what Epyx is trying to simulate, but it just comes across as awkward.

Controls are badly explained in the manual, and technique isn't explained at all. You move up and down the track widthwise by pushing the joystick up and down, but it's hard to do that while also tapping it right to build speed, and it's not clear at all what the purpose is.

The actual jump seems like it has to be initiated way before you reach the mat, otherwise you don't even jump and just run past it. And most of the time we just crashed into the bar no matter how low it was set. Pressing UP is supposed to perform a mid-jump hip lift so that your feet don't hit the bar while your back sails over it, but the game won't tell you if you're doing this correctly or not unless there's some subtle animation cue that I'm just not seeing.

 

Event #6 is fencing.

 

Once again, this one was just too complicated for the one-button controls, which are at least adequately explained by the manual, but fencing technique isn't and we pretty much got by on practice flailing our foils around.

When the button isn't pressed, you are in a defensive posture - up and down angle your foil up and down, and a parry is performed by matching your opponent's angle and sweeping left to right as they strike.

When the button is pressed, you are in an attack posture - up and down execute strikes, left and right move you across the piste.

None of us really got a grasp on how to fence properly. Parrying, in particular, seems way too complicated to be worth the risk; mistime it, or guess wrong about whether your opponent is going to strike high or low, and you take a hit. I don't think any of us managed to do this successfully once.

I did some solo practice afterward, and beat the computer on its highest difficulty doing nothing but repeating lunge strikes. Most of the time this resulted in a score-nullifying mutual hit, but a few of them landed, and the computer opponent didn't land a single point on me. So eventually I won.

Competition mode has you face other players instead of the computer, but we didn't bother. "B" thought this had the potential to be one of the better games with enough practice, but the learning curve still seems too steep to be worth it.

Event #7 is cycling.

 

Rotate the joystick clockwise to pedal. I very quickly had traumatic flashbacks to Mario Party.

This one is pure finger pain on a d-pad, which is the only option on D's preferred controller. Note, though, that you aren't trying to spin as fast as possible, but are trying to match the pace shown on-screen by a rotating arrow. With an analog stick, it's easy to spin too fast, which brings your pace to a screeching halt.

The analog stick definitely feels better overall, but it isn't great. So we skipped this in competition too.

The final event, kayaking, is easily my personal favorite, but "B" and "D" both found it frustrating.

It's a downstream slalom event with 15 buoy pairs, two of which must be paddled through in reverse, and one upstream.

Keeping control over the kayak is already a challenge, even before you have to fight the currents and the rocks, but it doesn't feel obtuse or unresponsive. Granted, having the kayak shift into random directions when you inevitably bump into things can be pretty annoying, but I took it as a challenge to do better.

 

Overall, I rank the events like so:

1. Kayaking. One of the more substantial games, with a good balance between responsive and challenging controls.
2. Javelin. Simple, but polished and satisfying.
3. Rowing. Shallower than the javelin event.
   
4. Equestrian. Doable with practice, but pretty confusing.
5. Triple jump. A bit lame, to be honest.
6. Cycling. Please don't make me spin the joystick in circles. Ever.
7. Fencing. I don't get it.
8. High jump. I really don't get it.
    

GAB rating: Below average. Summer Games II is more of the same, and the variety of events is better, but the ratio of good events to bad is worse. The javelin event was the only one enjoyed by all, and it's not even my favorite version of it.

Game 421: Wheeler Dealer$

 

I tried. I really tried. Wheeler Dealer$, Dan/Danielle Bunten Berry's first commercial game (and thorough commercial flop) is actually playable now after years of being presumed lost, having reportedly sold only 50 copies and never been preserved through pirate compilation disks like so many other first-generation Apple II games.

In a way, the game anticipates future Bunten titles. The bidding and economics of M.U.L.E. The business management of Cartels and Cutthroats. The minimalist control schemes of Computer Quarterback and Cytron Masters. The complex behind-the-scenes mathematical modeling and competitive multiplayer focus of them all. All of these aspects had been alluded to based on sparse descriptions of the game, and having played it a bit I can appreciate it all the better.

If only it weren't so impenetrable!

Despite reducing the controls down to a single button per player, this game is far more Cartels and Cutthroats than M.U.L.E., and no copies of the manual exist that I know of.

At least the custom peripheral can be simulated without too much difficulty. You'll want to emulate an Apple II+ via MAME, make sure that a file "apple2p.ini" has been generated, and insert this text into it:

#
# SLOT DEVICES
#
gameio paddles


 

After that, map your gamepad buttons (you only need one button per pad) to the "Paddle Analog Dec" inputs.

 

You also need each paddles' "auto-centering speed" to be set to about 100. And then you can play! The button serves three purposes - raising bids, confirming prompts, and answering questions (press to cycle between answers, keep up to lock-in your selection).

I played a bit with "B" and "D," first a practice run to grasp the controls, and then a real one recorded below, but we collectively gave up after two rounds.

 

The first phase of the round is bidding.

Four companies - Datacope, Kirke Electric, Mann-Made Inc, and Medfac Industry have their IPO's and stocks begin at the low price of $4 per share, sold in blocks of 2,000 shares. The industry sectors are unimportant here - all companies begin with the same assets and can be presumed to be in mutual non-competition, though the companies' fortunes can drastically change with time and chance, and director decisions.

If two players run out of cash before the bidding ends, the third can scoop up whatever they want from what's left on the floor for peanuts, knowing they cannot be outbid.

Next, you have business decisions to make.

For each of the four companies, the director - typically the player with the largest share - gets to play. Decisions include borrowing cash, buying/selling factories, and investing in marketing to increase product demand. Remember - it's the company borrowing and spending cash, not you! The one-button interface works surprisingly well here; though it means all investment decisions go in one direction - once you've told the computer you want to borrow $10,000, you can make it go higher by pressing the button more, but there's no way to make it lower!

Without a manual, it's dang near impossible to determine whether your decisions are good or not. Presumably you want to get production and demand levels to be about the same - after all, if the company's worth goes up, your shares do too, and if it goes bankrupt, then your shares become more valuable as toilet paper. But then, maybe you want to prop up its value and then squeeze it all out before unloading your depleted shares onto a hapless investor. Business is war!

An end-of-year summary follows, with random events a la M.U.L.E., but with no clear indication of who's ahead.

 

A lot can happen here. During our unrecorded test round, B's company went bankrupt for unexplained reasons, gaining me some liquidation funds as an investor and him a fine from the FTC. And two of my brand new factories got firebombed by union activists! This time, though, all that happened is that me and 'B' got opportunities for a bit of insider trading, but I am not sure how you capitalize on this.

Round 2 begins with the option to sell stocks.

 

We don't, but we do all borrow cash at the new prime lending rate, which we then spend on more stock shares, and then manage our respective companies some more.

End of turn 2.

I don't understand much of this. At least tell me who's winning!

After turn 2, we decided this wasn't getting anywhere and quit.

No GAB rating - it's impossible to rate without any inkling of what we're doing, which is unlikely to ever happen without a manual. As it stands, this is a neat little glimpse at the beginning of Bunten's career, but none of us had any fun playing it at face value.

Personally, I don't hate the concept. On the face of it, this could be sort of a step between the dry and dense Cartels and Cutthroats and the subliminal design of M.U.L.E., even though it predates both of them. The control design is indeed clever - perhaps too reductive; I think it could have used two buttons instead of one - but what's here makes this game about stock speculation almost accessible, and certainly more so than C&C did with its spreadsheet-like approach.

But the problem, apart from no manual (which is a massive problem!) is that the information I want isn't readily available, and much of the information that is available is confusingly terse. How am I supposed to judge whether a company is worth $4 per share or $400? The bidding screen doesn't even tell you how much money you have left, or things like how many stocks you own or how many are left.

I'm still glad that we tried, and that we had a chance to try. This obscure and obtuse computer game is an important part of Bunten Berry's legacy.

Game 420: VS. Wrecking Crew

Commenter Alexey Romanov alerted me to that the original version of Nintendo's Wrecking Crew was likely not the 1985 Famicom game that I spent the better part of five weeks covering, but rather an arcade release for Nintendo's VS. System series, which may have been released in Japan as early as August 1984, though not in North America until 1986. I generally assume that, regardless of release dates, which are often unreliable, the VS. System games are enhanced conversions of games designed for the Famicom. But this time, the arcade game probably came out first. It plays substantially differently, being less of a puzzle game and more of a Mario Bros-style competitive action game, but feels more cohesively designed and provides context for some of Wrecking Crew '85's stranger design choices.

I played a few rounds with my friend "B," as this version is designed for simultaneous two-player action. Even in solo mode, you'll have an AI partner controlling Luigi (or Mario). There was some difficulty in configuring the controls, as MAME has mappings for four players, not two, and is inconsistent about how player 2 gets mapped to them.

 

Photo by Game Machine

 

The horizontal split-screen view in the video above is an emulation anachronism; an authentic cabinet features dueling consoles. This kind of setup is very difficult to emulate in MAME, and impossible to capture in a Youtube video, but has a spatial purpose - it creates the appearance that Mario and Luigi are working on opposite sides of the demolition zone.

Your rival's view of the level is mirrored left-to-right, and you'll see him working in the background, just as he'll see you in his background, unable to directly interact but capable of "accidentally" smacking you with his hammer or wrecking ladders out from underneath you, just as Spike could in the NES version. The doors, an underutilized feature in the NES version, are present in every stage here, and don't just send enemy wrenches to the other side of the arena - they send enemy wrenches to Luigi's side of the arena, where they become his problem to deal with. Even the constant nuisance of fireballs make more sense here, where the additional pressure is necessary to keep your feet moving and the coinage flowing, and the arena-style single-screen level design makes it far less likely that you'll get unfairly fireballed into a dead-end.

And, well, it's pretty familiar territory. You run around the level, avoiding wrenches, hatchets, and fireballs, using ladders to ascend stories. The action is always confined to a single screen, and floors are always contiguous, eliminating much of the puzzle aspect, but this isn't to say gameplay is bereft of strategy; you have to destroy all of the gray ladders, and each one you wreck is a possible escape opportunity denied to the future you, so think before kicking out your own ladders too soon. Dynamite appears in some stages, and unlike in the NES game, you have to set it off, which can score you big bonus points from chain reactions if done right, but also opens up all the doors at once which can screw you up, or turn the tables on Luigi.

Vs. Wrecking Crew offers unlimited continues in two-player mode and we both used several, but got bored and quit around level 13.

GAB rating: Average. Neither version of Wrecking Crew is fantastic, but this arcade version is more consistent and has the appeal of two-player co-op / competition. Still, I got bored of it much quicker than I got bored of the NES version. At least I stopped playing this one when I got bored rather than trying to press on and finish 100 levels.