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.