Games 433-435: Early Steve Cartwright

I thought I was done with the Atari 2600 forever, but I wasn't thinking about ancestors. Steve Cartwright, author of our next whale Hacker for the Commodore 64, is notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, so I am visiting a selection of his early Atari games at Activision as ancestors.

 

Game 433: Barnstorming

Cartwright's first video game challenges you to complete a stunt course in a single-engine airplane. Fly low to pass through the barns, fly high to pass over the windmills, and generally try to avoid geese, which will slow you down a bit but not as much as a collision with a barn or windmill does. Think Flappy Bird but more forgiving and with more emphasis on speed.

The two difficulty switches affect the flock density and how strict the barn clearances are, though the barns appear the same. In the below video, I have both difficulty switches set to hard and go through all four of the game's courses - a 10-barn course, two 15-barn courses, and a final, randomly generated 25-barn course.

 

 

The first three courses present the same patterns of barns, windmills, and geese each time, and it's fairly easy to memorize them. Despite making a few mistakes, I came pretty close to Flying Ace qualifying times on courses 1 & 3 without all that much effort, and I'm sure I could beat them all and earn their patches if I cared enough to keep trying - and that's with the hard difficulty modifiers. Only the randomly generated course 4 was any challenge, and the manual offers no qualifying time for it anyway.

GAB rating: Below average. It's functional. Just repetitive and boring.

 

Game 434: Megamania

Space Invaders except the invaders are hamburgers, clothes irons, and bowties! So wacky!! And one puppy away from getting sued by Parker Brothers!

Once you get past the silly, surface-level premise, which shouldn't take long since these crappy Atari 2600 sprites don't really look like much of anything at all, Megamania's actually one of the better Space Invaders clones!

Any good Space Invader clone needs something to make it stand out - a silly asset flip isn't nearly enough - and what Megamania offers is aggressive enemies that move in a seemingly unlimited variety of patterns. Said patterns are completely deterministic, unlike the chaotic, frustrating patterns in, say, Phoenix, but are still a challenge to anticipate, especially during subsequent loops where they become more complicated. A wave of hamburgers will move left-to-right, wrapping around, pausing at intervals to throw off your aim and return fire. A wave of radial tires will descend in a zig-zag pattern, forcing you to thin out their ranks before they reach ramming distance and force you into a death corner. Fuzzy dice fall from the sky. And after the eight round, it loops back with even more complicated patterns! I haven't seen any repeating patterns, but I assume they are encoded into the wave number's binary representation - for instance, odd waves always have horizontal patterns, and even waves vertical.

Activision would give an award patch to players who reached 45,000 points, and I made it my goal to reach this under the hardest combination of difficulty switches and game modes, in which your lasers move slowly and are unguided. Surprisingly, I managed this in a few hours of attempts, but just barely.

 

GAB rating: Good. Megamania might not look terribly original at first glance, but it's deceptively deep. With practice, you learn to read and anticipate the aliens' erratic-seeming patterns, and develop a rhythm for dodging and shooting accurately. You learn how to clear chains of descending enemies so that there's breathing room when they enter your space and can move around them and live. This isn't the flashiest, the most exciting, or the most feature-packed action game of its time, but it is one of the most polished and most tightly designed on the Atari 2600, and I give it a place in the ivory deck.

In 1983, Megamania was ported to the Atari 5200 with somewhat better graphics, and Cartwright made three more 2600 games, including Seaquest and Plaque Attack. But I'm only interested in third and final one - Frostbite.

Game 435: Frostbite

You play Frostbite Bailey, a native Alaskan igloo architect, and must cross a river back and forth by jumping across the floating ice blocks, which causes a snow igloo on the north shore to gradually construct itself for some reason. Dangerous wildlife inhabit these waters - crabs, seagulls, and crabs - and must be avoided. Occasionally, tasty fish appear which can be snagged for extra points, but the quickly cooling temperature forces you to work fast or become an ice sculpture.

It sounds awfully similar to Frogger, and it is, but the quicker speed and smaller play area give it a quicker pace, and the overall design is more strategy-focused, in an almost puzzle-like way. The obstacles can be numerous and claustrophobic, and poor planning can get you trapped, but Frostbite Bailey also has some serious air maneuverability and can leap to ice floes nearly half the screen's width away with good timing and execution. Of course you're still dead in the water if anything nasty touches you on landing! On top of that, you can reverse your platform's direction with a button push, which becomes invaluable on the later, more difficult levels.

Your only game options are a pointless 2-player mode, and the option to start the game on wave 5, which adds a polar bear on the north shore to deal with. Activision would award a patch to players who reached 40,000 points, but I made it my goal to obtain the magic fish, which is awarded after 100,000.

I found this easier than Megamania's patch - much of this is thanks to Frostbite's generosity when it comes to extra lives, which are earned every 5,000 points.

GAB rating: Good. Activision produced some of the most technically solid and thematically strong games on Atari 2600, and Frostbite is easily Cartwright's best in this regard. I liked this game better than Frogger, thanks to its hidden depth of strategy, and along with Megamania, promote it to the ivory deck.

Data Driven Gamer will be on break for a few weeks. We will return with Cartwright's C64 whale Hacker, but no earlier than mid-September.

Game 432: 10-Yard Fight (NES)

In 1984, 10-Yard Fight was re-released as "Vs 10-Yard Fight" (no connection to Nintendo's VS System), a cocktail cabinet which added a proper two-player mode lacking from the arcade original, and with this addition the game rules actually resemble football instead of a weird offense-only game where you win the round by scoring a touchdown and lose by running out of time. This version's existence completely slipped my mind until I began writing this post - and I have no intention of going back to revisit it. The intended setup, with two players on either side of the cabinet facing each other, isn't something I can easily replicate anyway.

Irem's 1985 Famicom port retains the two player mode, and adds a few of its own distinctions. That said, it's still very simplistic, and if anything, even slower than the original.

I played and recorded a match with my usual sports games partner "B." In the end he didn't like the game enough for a rematch, so this video is our first and only session. For the first half neither one of us really knows what we're doing, and truth be told I didn't really know what I was doing in the second half either. He absolutely crushed me, 21-0.

 

 

We start with the kickoff, and it plays like before, only now one of the defenders is human-controlled... and if he catches you, there's no shaking him off.

The field is also zoomed-out compared to the original, containing the entire width of the field and eliminating the need for eight-way scrolling. But the players are smaller, suffer from sprite flicker, and everything feels slower.

As before, the plays are chosen for you from a limited set, but the player on defense may choose which of two men to control, and the player on offense will not know which until the ball is in play.

'A' or 'B' picks the player.

Offense strategy works like the arcade game - you position your receiver by waiting as he runs across the field until the snap. But he moves so agonizingly slowly that more often than not I just said screw it and put the ball into play, which rarely went well for me.

"B" was often more patient than I was.

Other than that, there's not much room for strategy. The player-controlled defender can certainly ruin things for you in ways that the dumb AI couldn't, but then again sometimes defense goes horribly wrong as you eat dirt trying to tackle and the rest of your team uselessly shuffles around like a Keystone Kops pickup game.

What are you guys doing?

Overall, though, gaining yardage seems much more difficult - appropriate since in the original arcade game, you'd soon reach a point where failing to gain yardage even once meant an instant game over.

"B" noted one important difference here that I never really cottoned onto. In the original game, you could shake off players by wiggling the joystick after they tag you, but here, it seems more advantageous to wiggle it slightly before they grab you. This doesn't work on human-controlled players, and it doesn't help against a dive, but when done with proper timing against an AI-controlled defender, you'll "dodge" the attack and seemingly teleport ahead of the pack. My failure to grasp this is probably the main reason I didn't score even once.

"B" shows how it's done.

I'd have given this game one more chance to see if I could manage any better, but "B" had enough and I don't blame him. So moving on,

GAB rating: Below average. Resounding 'meh' from both of us. It's limited, slow, and boring, and I'm sure it holds little appeal to players who actually like football. For what it's worth, I slightly preferred the arcade game, "B" slightly preferred the NES game, but neither of us had much fun with either version.

Games 430-431: Full Throttle & Speed King

Completing this early retrospective of Digital Integration we have a two-fer, starting with an obviously important 1984 ancestor to their C64 motorsport hit Speed King.

 

Game 430: Full Throttle

This Full Throttle is listed separately from 1985's Speed King on Mobygames, but other sources, including Wikipedia, describe them as the same game on different platforms - Full Throttle being Micromega's original release on ZX Spectrum, and Speed King the C64 conversion by Digital Integration and subsequent releases by Mastertronic.

Having played both, I'm inclined to agree with Mobygames' list as two different games, though they have several things in common, including the author Mervyn J. Estcourt.

This game looks an awful lot like Sega's Hang-On from the next year, doesn't it? Just uglier with flickering, monochrome sprites and no road scenery.

To my surprise, I found this game quite a bit harder than Hang-On. It seems more forgiving - the controls are pretty responsive, and there's not much penalty for going off the road; your bike just decelerates very quickly, and when you get pushed off-road because you took a turn too fast, you probably wanted to slow down anyway.

What makes it hard is the other bikers! No, you don't take a dramatic spill from your bike when you collide with an opponent. It's perhaps even worse - the computer emits a shrill beep, and your throttle instantly ceases to function. You sloooowly lose your speed until it hits zero, and only then can you accelerate again from a stop, at which point you've probably fallen into last place.

Avoiding a collision with the bikers seems hopeless. The hitboxes are impossible to read, and the constant flickering makes it even worse. When they aren't swerving left and right, they seemingly teleport left and right instead. Turns do not affect their speed or lateral movements - you, on the other hand, will get pushed to the outside of a turn, often into the path of a biker. Slowing down so that you can wait for a better opportunity to pass or for better control during the turns might seem like a good idea, but if you aren't already in last place, slowing down allows your opponents to bump into you from behind.

You can practice courses without the bikers, but it seems pointless. The tracks themselves are not challenging without opponents, and memorizing the course doesn't give much advantage in racing it.

I managed to get first place in the Donington course but it felt like luck; quite often it looked like I was passing right through an opponent's sprite. Once I got to the head of the pack it was easy to stay there.

 

There are ten courses in total but I didn't see the point in playing the rest.

GAB rating: Bad. Full Throttle is overly simplistic and overly punishing of collisions that you aren't given adequate means to avoid.

Game 431: Speed King

 

It's easy to understand why Speed King is often described as a C64 conversion of Full Throttle. You have the same premise, the same game options, eight of the ten tracks are the same or variants (even if Paul Ricard is renamed "France," and, well, look at it.

But this is a very different-feeling racer that leans somewhat into the simulation side, more so than any other racer I've covered yet. Transmission is a manual six-gear setup, with no option to drive automatic. Trying to speed through the course at top gear will consistently lead to disaster as sharp turns come out of nowhere and you'll veer off course at 200mph - or into an opponent in front of you who (unlike you) slowed down in anticipation - and either way take a nasty and costly spill.

 

You'll have to familiarize yourself with each course before you have any chance of coming in any position but last, and learn where each curve is, how fast you should be going before entering, and when to change gears. The game offers tools to help with this - a preview flyby (which to my frequent annoyance will play automatically after about 30 seconds on the main menu), a practice mode to try the course without the nuisance of traffic, and three difficulty levels. The maps, sadly, are unreliable as visual aids - they have some correspondence to the actual layout of turns and straightaways, but you'll need to internalize their inaccuracies - Sweden's final right-angle turn, for instance, comes almost immediately after the one before it, and not after a medium straight as the map suggests.

It's a much more demanding game than Full Throttle, and no less punishing, but this is a net positive; I'd rather fail and feel like it's my fault for sucking at the challenge than fail and feel like it's the game's fault for being broken.

My gripes with Full Throttle's rival bikers are largely taken care of here as well. They don't flicker or warp, they behave sensibly albeit not always predictably, they actually slow down during and before turns, and they cannot ram you from behind, but instead let out an annoyed honk as they harmlessly pass through your sprite to overtake you (you, however, will still crash if you ram into them from behind). Passing your opponents is still pretty difficult; it's always a struggle between the speed needed to overtake them and the maneuverability needed to get around them, and I still crash a lot, but this is an issue of skill and risk assessment. Staying ahead of the pack once you get there is quite easy... on the easiest difficulty setting. Any higher and you will have to keep up a good pace to keep your position.

But I have one new gripe, and it's a big one. There's no way to brake! Ironically, this wouldn't be as severe in a less demanding game like Full Throttle, but there's no simple way to reduce your speed on a 220MPH straightaway so that you don't skid right off the turn at the end of it. Methods of slowing down include:

• Letting up on the gas. Sometimes this is good enough, but it takes awhile to drop to safe levels. If you're driving in top gear, then by the time you see the upcoming turn it's probably too late.
• Downshifting will make you decelerate faster, and is often the more viable method, but repeat downshifts are a clumsy way to manage this, and depending on how sharp the turn is it might still be too late by the time you see it. Decelerating in advance is safer, but it's tricky to assess how close to the turn you really are.
• Riding the curb kills your speed in a hurry, but this is dangerous. It's really easy to unintentionally come to a stop or even spill this way.
  

The lack of brakes combined with the very short viewing distance can make for a lot of frustrating crashes, especially on the higher difficulty settings where you have to go in one of the top two gears to have a chance of passing anyone. At above 180mph or so, by the time you can see something you need to react to, it's probably too late to react to it.

Below is a video where I complete the Sweden course on "Champion" difficulty, the second-highest. Here, I pull into first place early on and stay there, and even momentarily lap some of the bikers at the rear, though it's by no means a perfect sprint. In parts I use the wrong gear and even crash a few times, but still manage to win.

I did try some of the other courses, but not all of them. It just wasn't interesting enough to take up much more of my time.

GAB rating: Below average. This is the most sim-like racer yet, which is an ambition that I admire more than I love. In the end, having gear-shifting but no brakes is a bizarre design choice that hurts the experience.