Games 465-467: Hewson Consultants and the 3D Seiddab trilogy

Whenever I select European computer games for coverage, there's always a bit of arbitrariness. Take Hewson Consultants - a "smaller software company" according to Wikipedia, with a ten year run of fairly consistent quality but not much impact beyond their era of ZX Spectrum and C64 games. Graftgold's Paradroid would be their first whale, and motivates me to retrospect their back catalog.

Hewson Consultants would be kickstarted by the release of the awful ZX80 computer in 1980. Andrew Hewson, an early adopter of this machine, wrote one of its earliest unofficial programming guides, and soon found himself in a position to publish ZX80 and ZX81 software written by his readers.

 

Their earliest titles are, of course, derivative and barely playable.

 

"Puckman" isn't completely horrible, but 5/6/7/8 is a stupid keyboard cluster for 2D movement.

Also on their early catalog are a series of flight simulators credited to pilot and professional air traffic controller Mike Male.

• Pilot (1982), an IFR-only ZX81 civilian flight sim with takeoff, navigation, and landing.
• Nightflite (1982) and Nightflite II (1983) on the ZX Spectrum, offering minimalist cockpit visuals.
• Heathrow Air Traffic Control (1983) on the ZX Spectrum.

 

During these years, Hewson also released the aptly-titled flight simulators Dragonfly and Dragonfly II on the short-lived Dragon computer series. I have absolutely no interest in playing any of these games; I just found it interesting that flight sims make up a significant portion of Hewson's early catalog.

 

What does interest me are the first games by Graftgold's founder Steve Turner, the so-called "Seiddab Trilogy," all initially released on the Spectrum by Hewson and featuring pseudo-3D graphics.

 

Game 465: 3D Space Wars 

Ostensibly a clone of Exidy's Star Fire, but wow, look at all those Seiddabs, moving around pseudo-3D space and scaling up and down in realtime! Granted, it's not nearly as smooth as Star Fire, nor is the 3D effect very convincing, but this has to be a record for sheer number of scaling onscreen sprites in a computer game of this kind.

And honestly, I've played much worse than this. Your ship yaws and pitches with a pleasing rotational inertia which gives the combat a touch of depth beyond mindless twitch shooting. Energy management plays an important role here, too - your fuel diminishes with each shot you fire and each hit you take, and a fueling station (a possible Star Raiders influence?) found on each stage provides your only recharge, typically usable only once.

However, it's still a pretty shallow experience. There's no strategic layer and there are no subsystems to manage; your only controls are axial movement, throttle, and gunnery, and I never saw much point to touching the throttle other than using it to reach the fuel station. The Seiddabs only fire when you can see them, and the best way to minimize your own damage is by targeting them in isolation, using quick sweeps across the viewpoint so that each is on screen as briefly as possible before passing over your laser's kill zone; your forward velocity seems irrelevant.

 

3D Space Wars gets difficult rather quickly, and notably, fuel does not recharge between levels, forcing you to fight efficiently even on the "easy" rounds, or ensure failure later on. I managed to reach the fourth wave once, but I wasn't recording when I did. My best run on record reaches the third round with about half a fuel tank, and ends soon after that.

 

GAB rating: Average. It's competent enough, but there are better games than this.

Game 466: 3D Seiddab Attack

The Seiddabs have invaded earth, and oh wow is this game ugly. An abstract pattern of dots vaguely suggest a city skyline at night, but your main method of navigating will be the on-screen radar. If you can determine which dot on the map represents your tank. There's certainly some Battlezone influence here, but all you can do is aim your gun and rotate when you reach intersections.

To beat the level, you've got to locate and destroy the Seiddab task force leader, who will spawn after you kill a certain number of underlings, and can be recognized by a trail it leaves on the radar view. Missiles are also finite; run out without taking out the leader with your last shot and you die. Sometimes you just have to eat a few hits rather than waste ammo on lackeys. Between leaders, there's a brief bonus round where you shoot down Seiddabs in the countryside, your line-of-fire unobstructed by buildings and your ammo limitless.

Avoiding return fire is usually impossible, but you'll last longer if you can get the shot impacts spread out along the full width of the tank than if you let them concentrate in one spot - one cool visual detail is that chunks of metal get blasted off the tank exterior in realtime based on where they hit. But good luck with that even spread; the shot distribution weighs strongly toward the middle, and you can't even aim at Seiddabs that are too far in your peripheral (or flying too high or low).

I never managed to beat the second round, and I don't feel eager to put in the effort to learn how.

 

GAB rating: Bad. Space Wars was derivative but tolerable. This one's just ugly, confusing, and frustrating.

 

Game 467: 3D Lunattack

The final game in the Seiddab trilogy sees the fight for earth taken to the Seiddabs' lunar base, and it's the weirdest and most ambitious by far. And surprisingly, it's also the best!

Now that I've said that, let's temper our expectations a bit. It's not quite good, and it's not going to shatter any expectations of what can be done on the old Speccy. I'm not itching to play any more of it, either. But it's more original than Space Wars, more playable than Seiddab Attack, and offers smoother, more convincing 3D visuals than either.

Part of this is from improved technology; Lunattack ups the system requirement to the 48KB model, and ditches TRS-80 CoCo compatibility in favor of C64, being the first Hewson game to support the platform, if not to be designed for it. In turn, you get a zippier flight experience than its sluggish predecessors, in which you glide over the cratered surface of the moon, the terrain and ground targets staying in perspective as you bank, turn, and pitch at a silky ~10 frames per second.

Lunattack also utilizes the sparsely supported Currah μSpeech module, currently only emulated by the commercial emulator Spectaculator, and provides some ambiance and audio cues by ingame computer chatter, though it usually sounds like it's malfunctioning (air-e-al mine fi-ield, stïr carefully, the navcom crackles as you enter the aerial minefield zone).

Gameplay-wise, Lunattack reminds me a lot of Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom for its perspective and multiple zones of extraterrestrial dangers, but plays differently enough from it that I don't presume there was direct influence.

Your first goal is to pass through the tank zone, characterized by stationary lunar tanks with slow-firing shells. Your ship's main weapon, a laser turret, takes some getting used to; shots have a delay, but always track the crosshair in motion, meaning that if you aim perfectly, pull the trigger, and jerk the ship away from the target before your shot lands, then your shot is going to miss. Better that you shoot first and then aim before it hits the surface! I've also found that, counterintuitively, the farther away a tank is on the horizon, the easier it is to hit.

Your ship is fragile, but agile. Dodging individual tank fire is pretty easy even though your hurtbox is the entire screen; just swerve away until the shell goes offscreen and you don't get hurt. It's holding still long enough to take them out without getting pummeled in return that's difficult. Fighters occasionally appear too, and are more difficult to avoid, but if you're quick to notice them, you can take them out with missiles before they enter visual range.

 

Next, there's the aerial mine zone, and the mines are not your biggest threat. That would be the mountains themselves, which look like you should be able to fly right over, but you cannot, and unlike the mines, you can't shoot them down either. You just have to fly around them, and since your damage zone is effectively the screen's entire width, this is mega annoying. But eventually you get through - the navigation computer, which is activated by moving the cursor all the way to the bottom of the screen, helps find the way forward faster, but it's certainly irritating when there's no way to go in the correct direction without crashing into a rock.

The third and final zone is full of missile silos, which are functionally the same as tanks, just faster and more damaging. Fighters spawn more aggressively too. Navigate this area, and you'll eventually locate the main Seiddab base, and it will take a few strafing runs to put it out of commission. Do it and you get to play another loop.

GAB rating: Average. Not bad, not great, but a pleasant surprise that surpassed my (low) expectations.