Game 458: Koronis Rift

 

I'll give LucasFilm credit for one thing - their original wave of Atari games might not have all been fantastic, but they've all been original. Even as the third and final game to use the Fractalus engine, Koronis Rift is wildly different from either of the games that came before it; a flight sim, a dungeon crawler, and finally, well, this one's a little hard to pin down.

 

The manual, once again placing more emphasis on backstory than gameplay instructions, explains a familiar scenario. You are a space scavenger, you've been searching the galaxy for scraps of valuable precursor technology, and you've hit the motherlode - the legendary Koronis planetoid, the dumping grounds of the Ancients, whose garbage makes your state-of-the-art science computer look like a ZX80. 

With 20 rifts to explore and loot, you land your surface rover into the nearest one and start searching for caches of their strange technology, all of which is compatible with your rover, and some of which enhances it.

And in about five minutes, the planet's drone defense system blows you and your underpowered rover into space dust.

What the manual doesn't tell you is that you're on a time limit. The game starts seeming like a tank sim, with some pretty convincing movement and acceptable visuals, with a looter shooter element as you need to explore the rift for upgrade modules like better shields and better lasers, but you absolutely do not have time to wander. The drones get powerful fast, and you need to keep up.

The modules and their locations are not randomized, but their purposes are obscure. Each module comes with two symbols and colors with some cryptic meaning to puzzle out - the manual gives some explanation, but it's badly explained, and deliberately incomplete. For instance, it will tell you that the eye icon represents shields, and that power and efficiency are both important stats, but do you want the pink Terran shield with 12% power and 12% efficiency, or the green growthform shield with 11% power and 15% efficiency?

Then, to actually analyze and equip these modules, you've got to wrestle with a horrendously over-engineered interface.

 

PSYTEK, your onboard science droid officer, is cute, but makes the simple act of comparing two modules a laggy, frustrating experience. You've got to move stuff from the rover to the conveyor belt. You've got to activate the belt to bring the thing in front of him. Selecting "Analysis" begins an overlong animation of PSYTEK punching numbers into the computer before he eventually comes up with the power:efficiency ratio of the selected module, but it also might do nothing, because this screen tends to drop inputs and lags when it doesn't, giving you no immediate feedback to indicate your command was accepted.

Worst of all, when you move a module back into the rover, it's incredibly easy to move it onto an occupied slot by accident, which deletes the module already in it. Forever. This will almost certainly happen if you touch the joystick during the conveying animation before it finishes. If that happens to a module you wanted to keep, then you might as well restart the game, and this has happened to me a lot.

One thing is clear by now - this isn't merely a tank sim looter shooter, but a metapuzzle to be solved through trial and error. You've got to learn where the good stuff is stashed, you've got to learn what it does, and you've got to be efficient about it, and you've got to accept that you're going to die a lot in the process.

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.