Data Driven Gamer: 2025

Thursday, September 25, 2025

Game 457: Sinistar

Of the four original releases by LucasFilm, Koronis Rift is the only one whose lead designer, Noah Falstein, has a Wikipedia page and a pre-LucasFilm career described there. Notably, his juvenilia includes the unfinished simulation Koronis Strike: A Simulation of Mining and Combat in the Asteroid Belt, from which Koronis Rift borrows the left side of the title, and his first game as a lead designer at Williams Electronics borrows the rest of it.

Sinistar's prototype logo looked more... sinister

Two pieces of advice for anyone who wants to play Sinistar. One, use an analog stick - it's unconventional for the genre of multidirectional shooters, but Sinistar had a joystick with three levels of pressure sensitivity, and being a Williams game, expected an accordingly precise level of finesse from you. Second, play the easier AMOA-82 prototype version - it's a little buggier, has some missing animations, and Sinistar will call you a coward for doing it, but you might actually last five minutes. And don't worry - it's just as deadly as any other Williams classic, only much stingier with bonus lives.

Not good!

With its radar view reminiscent of Defender, Sinistar continues the house design of moderately complex, high-intensity shooting action, though there's less going on here overall, with only three types of objects to encounter, plus yourself and Sinistar.

Workers are harmless robots attempting to construct Sinistar; a spooky biomechanical construct. Destroying them delays this somewhat, but you can't possibly destroy them all.
Warriors are bots with pivoting turrets. They initially harass you, but the longer you tarry on in a sector, the more numerous, aggressive, and accurate they become, to the point where they can be more threatening than Sinistar himself.
Planetoids are resource-rich astronomical objects which the workers mine for the materials needed to build Sinistar, or that you need in order to destroy him.

Shooting planetoids releases crystals which you can collect to obtain sinibombs; a homing weapon which destroys Sinistar (sinibombs also destroy my wife, so she tells me). But the workers can steal them to accelerate the construction, and it's tempting to chase them down but this is probably a waste of time. Ultimately, it's a race against the workers to obtain enough sinibombs before they finish building him - it takes 13, but you'll want more than that in case some don't land.

Herein lies the most significant difference between the prototype and commercial versions. In the prototype, the planetoids are far more generous with their crystal output. Time after time in my initial attempts with the final revision, I just couldn't shake off enough crystals to take on Sinistar by the time he announced himself (Beware, I live!). And this is effectively a game over; you can't survive long once he starts hounding you, much less mine crystals under that pressure, and even if you have more lives, Sinistar does not reset his state when you respawn, nor do you replenish sinibombs, and he'll just eat you again within seconds.

I did have a bit more luck by camping close to Sinistar's construction site - workers tend to accumulate en masse there where they present as targets of opportunity, but I still couldn't beat the first zone reliably until I switched to the prototype version. And then in that version, I could never beat the third sector dubbed "Warrior Zone," which features increased spawn rates of, you guessed it, Warriors.

Reportedly, Williams' executives demanded a higher difficulty to increase quarter collections. Somewhere out there, there must be an idealized ROM set that has the feature completeness of the final version but the original difficulty curve intact.

Here's a video of my best attempt on the prototype version, where I score almost 124,000 points.

GAB rating: Average

Sadly, this one ends Williams' perfect run of ivory deck entries. Points for a novel gameplay concept and a very cool-looking and sounding villain, but Sinistar is hard for the wrong reasons. Defender, like its successors, was ruthless but kind of fair about it, and I enjoyed the process of mastering its controls and mechanics until I could get a respectable score. Sinistar is too fast, too fiddly, too zoomed-in to get a sense of what's going on, and too unforgiving. The radar is little use; the way it is positioned, if you're looking at it, you're not looking at the main screen, and something on it will kill you while your attention is diverted. And if you are looking at the main screen, something will zip onto it from offscreen and blast you quicker than anyone can react.

It occurred to me while complaining about Sinistar's tight-fisted approach to bonus lives that it is lacking a certain quality that some of the best arcade games of the golden era had, and earlier Williams games did quite well. There's not very much in the way of secondary, bonus point-scoring objectives! Defender, Stargate, and Robotron had humans to rescue, which was always secondary to destroying your enemies and totally optional in Robotron, but awarded the bulk of your points and was well worth pursuing for the bonus lives it would accrue. Joust had its eggs and bonus rounds with special objectives. But in Sinistar, by far the largest point-award is for destroying Sinistar which is what you're trying to do anyway. And sure, you can farm some extra points by sabotaging the construction zone with some early sinibombs, but it's not worth that much, and probably not worth it past the first zone. I had thought about the possibility of improving Sinistar with easier bonus lives, but with fairly one-dimensional goals (destroy Sinistar for points and progress), what would really be the point? Your main source of points is playing the game to beat the levels, and either you play well enough to gain them faster than you lose them, or more likely, you don't.

Next post we'll be back on the LucasFilm chronology with Falstein's first product for the newly founded team, and their last on the Atari platform.

Saturday, September 20, 2025

Game 456: The Eidolon

Read the manual here:

https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=eidolon

LucasArts might be best known for their classic adventure games, or perhaps for their numerous Star Wars games, but the first wave of releases under the LucasFilm Games label was a series of four pseudo-3D action games for the Atari and other computers. I already played two of them, as they had been created in 1984, though they went unreleased for over a year until LucasFilm secured a publishing deal with Epyx.

The Eidolon, one of the two developed for Epyx in 1985, reuses the Fractalus engine for a very strange first person dungeon crawl. The manual takes the form of a Vernean inventor's journal, chronicling his subterranean travels under the surface of the earth's crust in the titular Eidolon, a powered tunneling vehicle armed with a fireball cannon.

Exploring a strange world, to seek out new life forms, and destroy them!

The journal explains some of the game concepts in-universe, but purposefully leaves a lot of key details out. For instance, there are monsters lurking about these caves which can be destroyed with your cannon, but what the manual doesn't tell you is that the monsters are invulnerable until you get quite close, and you can waste a lot of energy and time shooting at them from outside the kill range before you realize this. And it explains that there are four types of colored fireballs you can fire (destructive red, energizing yellow, freezing blue, and transmogrifying green), but gives me no reason why I'd ever want to bother using anything but red. And indeed, I never discovered any reason to, except for at the end of levels, where you are forced to. More on that later.

Despite using a more advanced iteration of the Fractalus engine, I found Eidolon to be ugly and unpleasant to look at. There's no equivalent of the former game's show-stopping re-entry sequence, and there's not much to look at except monochromatic walls - essentially an inversion of Fractalus' craggy landscape. Fractalus can get away with a bit of abstractness, given you're flying over the landscape and rarely need to be all that spatially aware, but in Eidolon you're navigating a maze, and the spatial demands are much higher than what can be visually communicated.

It took some tries before I quite figured out what The Eidolon is all about, but eventually I got good enough to consistently reach the eighth and final level, but I can't beat it.

Some basics about how the game works - very little of this is explained in the manual:

Each level is a maze, with three regular monsters hiding somewhere in it, plus a dragon.
Find and destroy the dragon to win the level. The C-H gauge helps you find it.
Each regular monster has a colored key card that you can collect after destroying it. A barrage of red fireballs is all you need (once you move in close enough) but easy does it - fireballs drain your batteries quickly and you have little power to spare for overkill.
There are also a number of fireballs just bouncing around the corridors.

Yellow and green fireballs can be scooped up with the space bar for more energy.
Blue fireballs can be collected to freeze time for a few seconds, but you can't hurt enemies during this time.
Red fireballs hurt you, but can be neutralized by shooting them with your own reds. Easier said than done - imprecise graphics and abysmal framerate make it hard to tell if you were successful, and if you fire a second red by accident, well, now you just have a new red fireball to deal with.

The dragon is shielded by an invisible force-field which will be opened by a specifically-colored key card. Later levels require two or three of them.

The dragon fights are chaotic and visually incoherent, but there's a logic to them. Each level's dragon is vulnerable to a specifically colored fireball, and only trial and error can help you find it. The trick is that when you inflict damage, you see sparks fly, but when you don't, it's damn near impossible to tell if it's because you flung the wrong color, or you missed, or it was neutralized by the dragon's own ordinance. But it's not randomized, so you're good once you learn. And if you get low on energy, you can recharge by hanging back and mashing the space bar to absorb the dragon's attacks - only red ones can't be absorbed, and most of the time you'll heal faster than you get hurt.

Here's a video of my best attempt:

There's another aspect to The Eidolon which isn't obvious, and isn't necessary to begin playing, but absolutely crucial to understand if you want any chance of finishing the game. You don't need every key-card to beat most levels. However, unused key-cards carry over level to level, and if you kill every monster on the first four levels, you will have exactly enough key-cards to finish the rest of the game. So do it! Then you may ignore the rest of the non-dragon monsters completely. You're on a tough time limit, and the deeper you delve, the more complicated the mazes, and the nastier the monsters. The less time spent fighting them later on, the better.

The eighth level is dark and confusing to navigate. Floating fireballs do help get your bearing.

And then there's a seven headed dragon at the end. I have no idea how you're supposed to deal with this. I can't manage to destroy a single one of the heads, not even with save states.

What's even going on?

There is footage on Youtube of someone beating the game, and the last fight is roughly three minutes of visual chaos, concluding with a sprite of Nicola Tesla holding a dragon egg.

GAB rating: Bad

Rescue on Fractalus was visually striking but a bit too simplistic. Low difficulty helped make its slow performance bearable, and the look and feel made the experience enjoyable. But The Eidolon is ugly, punishingly sluggish, awkward to control, and needlessly obtuse. Or as "D" put it, "this is lame."

Updates could continue to be slow between now and November, unfortunately. My place of employment tends to go through cycles of idleness, buildup, and crunch, and we're hitting crunch hard thanks to upper management making some wildly optimistic assumptions about the efficiency of vibe coding. You can churn out 75,000 lines of code in a few months without any SME's this way, but the product will be a buggy piece of crap that does maybe 10% of what it's supposed to do, and it turns out the client doesn't want that.

Sunday, August 24, 2025

Deja Vu: Won!

Miss Vickers' combination opens Siegel's wall safe, but no antidote is found there. Just a file marked "Ace's bad checks" and a key to his trunk, where Mrs. Sternwood is indisposed.

I noted, this time, that the cabs are parked on Peoria Street, and you don't need to give the drivers a specific address in order to return. The street name alone will do.

I still needed an antidote, and there was only one other place that it made any sense to find one - Dr. Brody's office. I went back there and realized that it was there the whole time, on an unlocked medicine cabinet. I had seen several vials of drugs on it, but because some vials were on an open stand, and others appeared to be behind a display case, I assumed the case was locked, but it turns out you can just take them. But I need a syringe. And the only syringe I've seen is in Joe Siegel's trash.

I reloaded again. We're on a tight time limit and a budget. I raided the office, grabbing the evidence, the various keys, and the dirty syringe. It's a sequence break, since I shouldn't have the office safe combination yet, but I'm okay with a slightly dirty run.

I also grabbed the map from Siegel's car. I don't want the cops to find that!

Next, I take a cab to Vickers', skipping Siegel's apartment, and take the earring, the key, and diary.

Then to the office complex, where I immediately give myself a bisodiumitis injection. And more time.

I also take the sodium pentothal orders as evidence, and a few samples for myself. If anything else is going to be useful, this is.

Then I enter my office, taking care of the hitman first, and grab the ammo. And the job offer letter.

I revisited some of the deja vu spots to trigger better memories; Joe Siegel ruined Ace's boxing career by fixing fights, and Ace failed to land on his feet as a private eye, accruing a gambling debt and a bounty on his head. He has no memory of kidnapping Mrs. Sternwood, but rather, of being approached by Mr. Sternwood and asked to be the bagman for her ransom. A setup, obviously, which Siegel would have had to be in on, and his hitman must have planted a phony job offer into my abandoned office, and left phony instructions in his car.

It seems there's not much more for me to do, but Ace is still in a very bad spot, even though he has his memory back.

You can end the game by going to the police, but this is a bad move.

Ditching the gun is no good. They'll find it and fry you all the same... unless you lose it in the sewers.

There's some damning evidence on my person, but the game doesn't mention it, or resolve differently if I drown it.

Gotta find more evidence. And Mrs. Sternwood is the key. It seems cruel, but I give her a dose of the truth serum.

A ransom note is found in the mailbox, and I force my way in.

I explore, but the only things I find here of note are an incriminating letter,

And a "blank" notepad.

That old chestnut. Joe's pencil fills in the blanks.

This is enough.

The MacVenture universe's legal system operates on Phoenix Wright rules.

GAB rating: Good

This is easily the most enjoyable adventure I've played in quite a long time, and I chalk much of it up to the quality of its writing, which, free of its 8-bit contemporaries' capacity constraints, is by far the best I've seen this side of Infocom. I can only imagine that Kemco's NES conversion loses a lot in the translation. It invites comparisons to Deadline, which boasts the stronger mystery and character interactions, but Deja Vu is the better adventure overall, with a fairer solution, stronger worldbuilding, and crisp, monochrome graphics that don't just complement the prose and fit the noir-like atmosphere, but are integral to the interface and gameplay.

"D" tried this one too, and enjoyed the writing and humor, though she wished the mystery itself had been stronger. She was particularly impressed by some of its technical sophistication given its age, such as the window-based interface, the clear visuals, and tricks like awareness of the system clock for time-of-day and day-of-the-week.

There are some issues. It's not a long game, nor difficult, and the puzzles mainly amount to following leads until you find the exonerating evidence, which are all convenient records written and/or kept by the perpetrators themselves. The time limit, the backtracking, and the various ways you can get screwed over by bad luck are irritating, and yet because the game is a bit short and easy, I can forgive it, and even appreciate the sense of urgency and danger that it forces on you. The relative lack of conventional puzzles is a merit too; everything you do fits the game's theme and setting, with no silly adventure logic to distract from it. Condor wouldn't build a human dummy out of produce to throw the CIA off his track or wear a cat hair mustache to fool the police, and neither would Ace.

Overall, Deja Vu is a solid, well realized, and well balanced adventure game, with a clear vision, good design chops, and a unique style that owes much more to interactive fiction than King's Quest while still being graphical in a meaningful way. I award it a place in the ivory deck, and a harpoon; a rarity for this genre.

Friday, August 22, 2025

Deja Vu: Dick moves

They're to be expected.

I've finished mapping out the immediately accessible areas, which are partly interconnected by the sewers, the building fire escape, and Joe's secret elevator, and noted a few dangers.

As I learned last time, an alligator patrols the sewers. A bullet takes care of it, but if you don't already have your inventory open and your gun ready when you see the gator, it's too late to do anything.
An unarmed, tattooed mugger appears randomly on the streets. Punching him does nothing, and shooting him in broad daylight seems like a bad idea. I gave him a quarter - he dumped me in the alley behind Joe's bar and took every cent I had.
Another mugger also appears randomly on the streets, and this one has a gun. With no money to offer, punching him, rather amazingly, works, but he shows up again with a black eye (so I gave him another).
The east end of the main street has a police station. Unsurprisingly, you are busted if you go inside, and given a nonstandard game over - they pin the murder of Joe Siegel on you, but your brain turns to mush in jail, you're judged unfit to stand trial, and die in a mental asylum.
Going east from the police station kills you immediately, as pictured above.

I restarted and did a quick run-around of Joe's bar and office, mainly to trigger some memories and grab some valuable items, but I also played the slots in the secret casino - a good investment as $0.75 earned me a $7.50 payout.

Lucky thing you can multi-select all those quarters before moving them.

I save and hit the streets.

Joe's car key doesn't open the trunk or the backseat, but it will open the front seat door, where I find:

A photo of a very large woman, which triggers a deja vu moment.
Siegel's car registration and home address - 1212 West End St.
A street map with some instructions. Some very incriminating instructions.

Is she still in the trunk?

I try popping the hood - and the car explodes. No need to guess what happens when you start the ignition, I'm sure. Reload!

Heading west - there's nothing but trouble going east - I encounter:

A newsstand. The headlines state "Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor," placing today at December 7th 1941. The newsboy advises me that the cops are looking for me - a woman across the street saw me doing something sketchy and tipped them off.
A gun shop has a Luger in stock. I can afford it, but I've already got a piece. A piece that will get me fried, but having a spare won't change that.
Two cabs, one blue and one yellow, are idling on the west end of the street.

A dame approaches.

I punch her out before I can find out what she's got for me.

In her purse is a Saturday night special, a makeup kit, and a $20 bill, which I take. And soon after I meet a bum who wants $20 for a tip - I give it to him and learn that Joey's hit man is waiting for me in "my office."

I enter the blue cab and take it to 934 West Sherman, the pharmacy's address. As it turns out, also my address.

I see the goon through the window and plug him with a .38. But the door's locked and I haven't got the key, and I can't break though the glass and open the door that way. Dr. Brody's office is also locked.

Next I go to 1212 West End St. to check out Siegel's apartment.

I find nothing here except a broad's photograph and an address - 520 S. Kedzie. I go there next.

The door's locked, but I can shoot my way in. This doesn't spook the cab driver at all.

There are a few things in here - a familiar scent of perfume, an earring, an unmarked key, a combination "33-24-36" written on a pad of paper, and a diary with the letters "M.V." embossed on the front, accounting the owner's past relation with Joe Siegel, and an ongoing affair with one John Sternwood.

The key opens Dr. Brody's office. Why does she have a key to this?

Two marked vials are here - one labeled Sodium Bicarbonate, another "SPECIMEN - 11/13 Todd Zipman." The cabinet here is combination-locked, and M.V.'s combination doesn't work, but my last bullet does, and there are many files inside:

Multiple orders of sodium pentothal for Joe Siegel, all handled by Marsha Vickers.
A carbon-copy of the pharmacy bill found in Siegel's office.
Several drug cards, starting with one on sodium bicarbonate. An alkaline gas relief solution. What kind of a pharmacist needs to keep a file to remember what that is?
Biosodiumitis - An antidote to diethanol trimene.
Diethanol trimene - An experimental memory-loss drug.
Sodium pentathol - Lowers inhibitions, and induces unconsciousness and veracious verbosity. Wrong, guys, that's hypnotism... though they do spell it wrong here.
Chemopapain - Pyschoactive euphoric drug.
Medrezine - Nerve gas counteragent.
Ofreeall - Anti-arrhythmic heart medication.
Several deranged memos detailing symptoms of conditions such as "cardiovascular shutdown" (e.g. death).
A copy of an advisory to Mr. Ace Harding, recommending that I quit smoking.

The key also unlocks my own office.

There are spare bullets in the desk, and some notes in the filing cabinet.

"Sugar Shack" has it in for Siegel. Reason unknown.
Some case notes concerning a blackmail against the alderman. Sugar Shack was the culprit, and our evidence put her away for a nickel.
Lastly, a letter from presumably Joe Siegel, asking me to kidnap a wealthy lady.

Evidently I took this job and things didn't go right for either of us. Clearly I have a (very possibly criminal) past history with Siegel, left him for the private eye business, and got into some trouble with the mob. He'd have me do one last, high-risk job to clear my name. But then, why would he want Mrs. Sternwood? More likely that Miss Vickers... or Mr. Sternwood... would want her (and Siegel) out of the way. And Vickers had been supplying the office with Dr. Brody's sodium pentothal, for whatever reason, giving her opportunity to be in on this.

My thinking - both Vickers and Sternwood are behind this. Sternwood, who we know is very wealthy, hired Siegel to kidnap his wife, promising him so much money that he could afford to pay off the mob. I did the job, but someone in their employ shot Siegel, blackjacked and drugged me with the cocktail that Vickers supplied, and hauled me, along with the murder weapon and Siegel's trenchcoat, down to the bathroom to take the fall. Ironically, they could have done nothing, and Sugar Shack, the one fly in the ointment, would have blown up both of them.

I'm still not sure why Vickers had a master key to 934 West Sherman, or why they bothered getting antidote, or who actually shot Siegel, or the point of giving me his coat (or at least putting his stuff in my coat), or why his hitman was after me. Perhaps Siegel intended to double-cross me so that the kidnapping couldn't be linked to him.

But now I'm stuck in a stupid way. I can't return to Joe's Bar because the cab driver needs an address, and I'm not sure what it is! It's just as well - the game warns me that I'm rapidly turning into a vegetative state, and it's not clear that I'm even on the right track to curing this. I suppose the antidote ought to be found in Siegel's office somewhere, but if it's not in his combination safe then I don't know where else it might be.

My Trizbort map:

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Game 455: Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True!!

Buy Deja Vu: MacVenture Series, which includes the original Macintosh and colorized Apple IIgs versions:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/343820/Dj_Vu_MacVenture_Series/

Read the manual here:

https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=dejavu

ICOM Simulations was a small Illinois software house whose credits prior to the launch of the Macintosh include a handful of obscure arcade-style games on the Apple II, IBM PC, and Panasonic JR, and some software conversions to the former two. Deja Vu, their first release to the new Macintosh market, was conceived as an attempt to translate the concept of the text adventure - which had been semi-graphical for years - into a mouse-driven format befitting the platform's ecosystem.

The result is often said to have pioneered the point and click adventure. Personally, I don't see it this way, though they were successful at their goal. It is, ostensibly, a point and click interface, but by design (and in compliance with Apple's guidelines), feels like an extension of the Mac's native interface, and not very game-like, or all that anticipatory of the games by LucasArts and Sierra to come.

Arrangeable windows, nested containers, and drag & drop gestures? Flintstones.

Interestingly, the original manual doesn't describe the plot at all! It's entirely devoted to explaining the interface (and a few gameplay tips), written in a Siegel-esque gangster snarl. If you use a mouse-driven Windows interface on a regular basis, then it's all pretty straightforward, though a few minor peculiarities of the era remain. If you're more used to laptop trackpads, or, heaven forbid, touch-only interfaces, then you're in for a very unaccommodating experience.

I'm emulating a Macintosh rather than playing the Steam version to ensure a more platform-authentic experience, though I'm using Mini vMac rather than MAME, simply because MAME goes one step further for authenticity and also emulates the disk-loading times, which are horrendous on early Mac hardware.

We're alone in a tavern's washroom stall. No memory. Signs of being kidnapped and drugged. And the prose and aesthetic suggest Dashiell Hammet much more than Robert Ludlum.

I take the trenchcoat off the bathroom stall, revealing a .38 snubnose revolver hanging underneath it by a leather holster. Six rounds are chambered, three have been fired.

Inside the trenchcoat, I find:

$1.75 in quarters
A gold-plated lighter monogrammed "J.S."
A pack of Lucky Strikes
A handkerchief, also monogrammed "J.S."
Sunglasses
J.S.'s wallet, containing:

An office key
A key-card embossed "SIEGEL, APT. 1A"
$20

I exit the stall and explore a bit, Trizborting as I go, but as I do, the screen periodically darkens and the game warns me of my rapidly deteriorating state of mind.

The main barroom opens up three ways; upstairs to an office, downstairs to the wine cellar, and out to the street. I search upstairs first.

A poster upstairs gives us some clue about our identity.

Why... does Joe need all that?

The office key opens the inner office to a nasty sight.

A dead body, with three holes in it. I would bet that's where my missing bullets are. The encounter triggers a deja vu moment, but he can't be placed just yet.

There's also a key to a Mercedes-Benz on his person, a wall combination safe, and a desk where I find the building key, a pencil, and a blank sheet of paper. I can't seem to find a way to make the pencil and paper interact, but the window opens to a fire escape, from which the third floor (and street) is accessible.

Someone was drugged and interrogated on the third floor, and I think I know who. There's a syringe in the trash, and in addition to the empty vial of sodium pentothal on the windowsill, there's also an empty vial of diethanol trimene, and a full vial of medrezine, which are not real drugs.

A button calls the elevator, which serves four floors. One is a casino room, with a secret passage in the back, making a circle back to the wine cellar, and a hatch into the sewers - an alligator-infested maze.