Koronis Rift: Won!

The all-important repo-tech bot freezes up on the final rift

 

One gets the impression that Koronis Rift was rushed to meet a deadline (I empathize!). The engine itself is cool stuff, featuring rolling terrain with multiple levels of elevation, multiple levels of parallax depth with dynamic shading to indicate distance, and a 3D perspective that convincingly bumps up and down as you drive through the rifts' endless peaks and valleys, but everything after that is a technical mess.

The most obvious clue are the bugs. Dear lord, the bugs. I've seen:

• Modules disappear from my inventory
• The rover unable to move from its landing zone
• Shields not recharging, despite having ample energy
• The RT Robot get stuck on terrain
• Modules that don't do anything
• The screen become half-filled with corrupt graphic data

 

Most of these bugs can put the game in an unwinnable state, but they can be prevented with a bit of care to avoid their trigger conditions, or if worse comes to worse, using the ingame save/load system.

What can't be avoided is the askew difficulty curve which is completely at odds with the game's premise. 

The apparent intended gameplay loop of Koronis Rift seems to be one where you explore the rifts, fight drones, and collect upgrades for your craft so that you can move on to harder rifts and get even greater rewards, but this just doesn't work out. Drones become deadly within a few minutes of playtime, and get deadlier the longer you play. You do not even have time to clear out the first and easiest rift; the upgrade modules you find there are pretty weak, and the drones will overwhelm you before you have time to find them all.

To get anywhere, you've got to figure out which modules are worth having, you've got to know where to find them, and you've got to have a plan to extract them efficiently, because this is a perpetual arms race between you and Koronis' planetary defense system.

To that end, there are four module upgrades which you absolutely must have. In order of priority:

• A shield module, so that you don't immediately die when shot at. You start with an utterly worthless one.
• A generator, to recharge your shields and weapon energy. Once you have a decent shield and generator, your life expectancy improves dramatically.
• A battery, for more weapon energy.
• A better laser gun. The one you start with is crap but it's better than nothing. But you'll need more firepower to do any real damage against the drones once they start showing up with shields of their own. Any upgrade requires a battery, and the bigger the gun, the bigger the necessary battery.

 

You do okay with the basics.

That's four modules, and there's only six slots for modules, so you've only got two more to play with. The modules also come in a variety of colors which enhance or reduce effectiveness against drones of matching/opposing colors, and the manual recommends keeping a variety of colors, but I can't see how that is feasible when you're already using four out of six available modules just for the essentials!

Some other modules you might find:

• Radar - Waste of a slot. Your normal radar always points toward the closest hulk, but radar modules override this by pointing toward the closest hulk containing a module with the same alien insignia as the radar. Pointless unless you already know exactly what you're looking for.
• ECM - The manual claims that it makes you harder to detect, but I don't think it actually does anything.
• Drive - Improves propulsion speed. I never bothered using it.
• Crosshairs - Locks onto drones of certain colors. Has some usefulness but not all that great; it doesn't lock onto everything, it won't "lead" (and therefore won't let you hit) fast-moving drones, and it has a tendency to hijack your rover controls making you drive or turn when you didn't intend to.
• Inertial dampener - This one's a game changer, but you definitely don't want it activated all the time. Turn it on, and enemy drones slow down, making them sitting ducks as long as they're close enough to shoot. But it's an energy hog, and using it slows down your shield and laser recharge rates. It also doesn't stop the drones from shooting back; in fact, they'll be able to concentrate fire on you until you destroy them (or they move out of range). A powerful weapon, but it can get you killed if you're not careful.
• Detonator - You need to find one to win the game. You can just keep it on the scoutship until you reach the final rift, because it has no other purpose.
• Map module - Displays a minimap. Very rare, very useful, because some of the later maps are quite maze-like and the Fractalus engine isn't terrific for first-person navigation.

 

As a side note, when you are using all six module slots, it's possible to collect and carry a seventh one back to the ship for analysis/equipping, but this is a pretty tedious process that requires multiple trips back and forth to shuffle your inventory around between your rover, scoutship, and RT bot. It's worth it, but it's annoying and could have been avoided with better UI design.

 

Through days of failed attempts and note taking on what can be found where, I eventually discovered a solution. You can't afford to waste a lot of time exploring the early rifts, but you can't just jump to the end and survive on your basic starting kit either. But you can skip a lot more of Koronis than you probably think. 

 

Rift 1 

Even in this early rift, there's not enough time to fully explore and loot its meager powerups, but the things you actually want are fairly close by.

Loot the hulk immediately in front of you for a 15% power shield (better than nothing) and keep going for a 12% power generator. Ahead of you is a radar - do not collect it yet! Keep moving, going around the crest, and you'll discover a battery.

Turn back, grab and ignore the radar, and your compass will now point to the last thing on the rift worth taking - a 6% power laser.

Lift off and fly to Rift 16. Yes, that's right, rift 16.

 

Rift 16

Shields are indicated in the upper-right; each bar absorbs the corresponding laser color

I said it before - your upgrade priorities are shields, generators, batteries, and lasers, in that order, and you find all of them on Rift 1, they're just weak.

You'll find all of these on Rift 16 too, only here, they're far more powerful. And you'll find them in almost the same order. The tricky part is surviving long enough.

The shield, rated at 62% power, is right behind you, and if you're fast you can grab and equip it before Koronis scrambles its first drone.

The generator, at 81% power, is the next closest, but you'll need to go around a ridge to get it. Try not to get distracted by the other hulks who may take priority on your radar - you really need this generator to survive long here, but with a bit of luck you can locate it and fight off the drones before your shields run out of juice.

Once you get it, you're safe for awhile, even with an underpowered gun. Fights will take longer, but it will be some time before the drones can penetrate your shields. Still, you don't want to dawdle. There's a crosshair module by the inner ridge too, which I don't bother with, but the rift also has a 70% power battery, and 79% power laser, both of which which you absolutely want, and an inertial dampener which I find more useful than the crosshairs.

The inertial dampener should always be turned off when you are not engaging drones. Turn it off whenever you make planetfall, prepare to turn it on when you need to fight, and turn it on when one flies onscreen. Don't be afraid to turn if off in the middle of a fight, especially if your shields start to run low.

Leave once you have it all. The only other things found here are two out-of-the-way radars which are incapable of finding anything in subsequent rifts.

 

Rift 17 

Turn right here, not left.

 

You start tucked in a crevasse, but if you can find your way out of it, you'll soon locate the critical detonator module. Stash this on the ship for sure.

Other good things here include a 70% power shield, 91% power generator, 85% power battery, and mapper. It's a pretty open map, so it's not that hard to find them.

Rift 18 

 

The mapper comes in real handy here, thanks to the maze-like ridges. But there are only a few things worth keeping; a 95% power generator, 77% power laser (the efficiency is much higher than the 79% power laser found earlier), and 95% power battery. Everything else can be dismantled.

 

Rift 19 

The most maze-like rift, but it's not worth exploring.

 

This one's a quick snatch-and-grab. The only worthwhile thing here is a 67% power shield (also rated much more efficient than then 70% power shield found earlier; I'm guessing that means faster recharge). And it's directly ahead of where you start.

 

Rift 20

 

Sell the inertial dampener - by now it's a liability. Equip the detonator. In retrospect, you don't really need the mapper here; the rift layout is pretty open, but I brought it anyway. A drive module might have been better here, but oh well.

There are no upgrade modules to be found here, only drones and bases that shoot back, but if you got here quickly enough and equipped properly, your shields should protect you. Bases can be destroyed with your own laser, or by the RT bot, but it has a tendency to get stuck after destroying them - you can fix this by blowing away your own bot and returning to the scoutship for a replacement.

Eventually your radar will lead you to the main defense base. Once the skies are clear, send the RT bot in with the detonator, and Koronis is yours.

 

GAB rating: Bad

Funnily enough, Koronis Rift's biggest issue is poor difficulty balance, just like in Sinistar, only this time it's seemingly thanks to being rushed rather than executive-level demands for greater coin returns. More time spent playtesting would have improved this game immensely.

The technology here is impressive, the concept is novel, there are some interesting ideas on display, and I had a modicum of fun once I figured out an optimal path to Koronis Rift's conclusion, but the vast majority of my playtime was tedious trial and error, frustrated further by bugs and UI hiccups, and that part of it wasn't fun at all.

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 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.

Game 453: Winter Games

I had hoped to do this one in the winter, but organizing sessions for a multiplayer game isn't always easy. But here we are, in early August, and "B" and "D" return to the games, now hosted in Calgary.

There are only seven events this time, and two of them are basically the same thing. As before, we practiced all of them, and decided that five were worth doing in competition.

I play Ahab, from native Canada. "B" plays Otty, from the fantastic land of Epyx, and "D" goes as D, from the USA.

 

Hot dog aerials

I got my first and only 10 recording this gif.

Do stunts off a ski jump before the judges and make sure you land safely. It's basically the same game as Summer Games' platform dive except even simpler. Tricks are performed by holding a direction on the joystick and releasing to complete the trick - six directions correspond to six tricks including front flips and backflips. If your timing is very good you can transition to a second trick before you land, which guarantees you a good score if you can land it. But any imprecision and you will faceplant.

This was "D"'s favorite event in the game, and she actually got the best score of all of us during practice. But my double-backflip won the competition by a tenth of a point.

 

Biathlon 

IMO, this is the nicest-looking event.

Cross-country skiing alternating with rifle shooting. Alternate presses of left and right to stride forward - it's rhythm, not speed that counts - but watch your pulse, because the shooting portions become more difficult when it's elevated.

This was "B"'s favorite, though he missed enough shots to be relegated to second place. Overall, a pretty good event, but by far the longest one. It takes roughly three minutes to complete the course, and most of the other events are over in seconds!

 

Speed skating 

Another joystick-waggle event, like so many others. Rhythm and speed are both important here.

The skating does feel pretty good, and the SID-powered sound of your blades cutting through the ice is satisfying. This was overall a well-liked event, and "B" took the gold here.

 

Ski Jump 

An ominous overture warns you that this is Winter Games' most hardcore event.

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to land safely. In theory, it should be simple enough; you use the joystick's four directions to correct your stance before landing. But I never seemed to be able to find the safe landing stance, or else my skis would just get crossed at the last second.

Despite this, I nearly won the gold on distance alone, which counts for a lot more than style, but then "B" snatched it on his final attempt with a 60m launch that landed awkwardly but safely.

As a side-note, for the final four events, you have to flip the disk before and after each event, for some reason! You need to be on side 2 to play the event, but you need to be on side 1 to see your scores. It's small, but it's annoying.

 

Bobsled

B: They should have you shoot guns from the sled. Call it an Alaskan drive-by.
A: We'll call it Cool Gunnings.
D: I want to divorce both of you.

Winter Games' final challenge is... kind of underwhelming? It's a race, but all you can do is lean into the turns to avoid crashing, which is not that hard once you learn to anticipate them. There's no pushing, and there's no controlling your speed, which seems like an important part of a racing simulation. I'm not even really sure what determines your speed, but we all came in within a fraction of a second of each other.

After the final event, we see the final standings and are dumped back to the main menu. No closing ceremonies this time!

 

Figure Skating

 

One event pretending to be two events. This one wasn't good enough for competition.

Essentially a long-form version of the hot dog aerials. Seven tricks are performed by pushing the joystick in a corresponding direction with the button pressed, and landed by centering the stick and pressing the button at the correct time.

You have one minute to perform a routine that incorporates all seven tricks, and points are lost for awkward executions and falls. A second, mode, "Free Skating," gives you two minutes and a more complicated scoring system that has no strict requirements about which tricks must be performed or how often but rewards variety.

I couldn't manage to get a decent score in this mode. "B" and "D" could barely even do the moves.

GAB rating: Average. I think we all liked this better than Summer Games II overall, and the events were pretty consistently okay. None of them are great, and personally I didn't think any were as good as kayaking or the javelin throw, but none of them were bad either.

Game 422: Summer Games II

 

Epyx's VIC-pushing, Olympics license-dodging killer app returns with another set of eight events.

The formula is still the same. Practice individual events as much as you like, then compete in one, all of them in sequence, or a selection. You can even add events from the first Summer Games disk into the lineup, for a total of 16 events!

It took a while to organize a session, but I got "D" and "B" to join me for a repeat - once again we sampled all of Summer Games II's events through practice, and then played our favorite events in competition, but didn't bother replaying the old ones from the first game.

Unfortunately, only three of the eight events made the cut, and one of them just barely. At least the recording worked fine this time.

 

Loading seemed to be much faster than in the first Summer Games, anyway, taking just a few seconds per event. I have no idea if this is due to improved code or a difference in emulation settings.

The first event, and one that made it to competition, is the triple jump.

Conceptually it's hard to imagine this being much simpler. There is no button bashing - you automatically sprint to the fault line, and then you press RIGHT on the joystick to jump. Press RIGHT a second time as soon as you land from the first jump to spring into the second jump, and press LEFT upon landing from that to push off into the third and final jump, and press UP to maximize your airtime. The more precisely you time your inputs in sync with the optimal timing, the farther you'll jump.

Competition mode gives everyone three chances and only the longest jump counts. Unfortunately, "B" and "D" both choked here despite practicing earlier and couldn't stick a single jump, consistently tripping themselves on the third one.

Event 2 is rowing. I was once an okay rower in real life!

 

Alternate pushing left and right on the stick to row - it's not about waggling at maximum speed, but about maintaining rhythm, as seen in the animating sprites. You want your oar strokes to be complete, not rapid.

In competition two players will race each other, and a third races the computer, but the final rankings are determined only by time, much to the irritation of "D" who beat the computer by over three seconds but still came in last.

The third and final event that we played in competition was the javelin throw, which was easily "D"'s favorite event.

 

We've seen this one before in Activision Decathlon, Microsoft Decathlon, and Track & Field, and it's the same formula; tap the button to build speed, hold LEFT before reaching the fault line to begin the throw, and release at the optimal angle to launch. Angle matters more than speed here.

From here on out, the games get worse, with one exception.

The equestrian event is baffling. It helps somewhat to think of the joystick as controlling the rider, not the horse, but that doesn't make it less frustrating when the horse refuses jumps and all you can do is wonder why. Pressing RIGHT at a precise time will make the horse jump over obstacles, but the correct timing is difficult to read, and an incorrect one gets you a refusal, forcing you to back up. Though occasionally it would instantly launch itself from a standstill over the obstacle at horse warp speed instead.

Also, the monochromatic horse is crudely drawn and animated compared to the humans. Not only does it look out of place here, like it belongs in an Atari VCS game, but better animation could have improved gameplay by giving more visual feedback on the horse's gait, cues for the jump timing, etc.

I got okay with solo practice, but it takes rote memorization to know where the obstacles are, how far apart they are, and how wide they are, which informs when to speed up, slow down, and the jump timing, which never felt intuitive.

Event #5 is the high jump.

It's another baffler! We've seen this one in Activision and Microsoft Decathlon, but in those two, you ran toward the launch head-on, while here you run perpendicular to it and sort of push off at a sharp 90 degree angle. Real high jumpers run in a J-shaped pattern to let them lift off with one foot, which seems to be what Epyx is trying to simulate, but it just comes across as awkward.

Controls are badly explained in the manual, and technique isn't explained at all. You move up and down the track widthwise by pushing the joystick up and down, but it's hard to do that while also tapping it right to build speed, and it's not clear at all what the purpose is.

The actual jump seems like it has to be initiated way before you reach the mat, otherwise you don't even jump and just run past it. And most of the time we just crashed into the bar no matter how low it was set. Pressing UP is supposed to perform a mid-jump hip lift so that your feet don't hit the bar while your back sails over it, but the game won't tell you if you're doing this correctly or not unless there's some subtle animation cue that I'm just not seeing.

 

Event #6 is fencing.

 

Once again, this one was just too complicated for the one-button controls, which are at least adequately explained by the manual, but fencing technique isn't and we pretty much got by on practice flailing our foils around.

When the button isn't pressed, you are in a defensive posture - up and down angle your foil up and down, and a parry is performed by matching your opponent's angle and sweeping left to right as they strike.

When the button is pressed, you are in an attack posture - up and down execute strikes, left and right move you across the piste.

None of us really got a grasp on how to fence properly. Parrying, in particular, seems way too complicated to be worth the risk; mistime it, or guess wrong about whether your opponent is going to strike high or low, and you take a hit. I don't think any of us managed to do this successfully once.

I did some solo practice afterward, and beat the computer on its highest difficulty doing nothing but repeating lunge strikes. Most of the time this resulted in a score-nullifying mutual hit, but a few of them landed, and the computer opponent didn't land a single point on me. So eventually I won.

Competition mode has you face other players instead of the computer, but we didn't bother. "B" thought this had the potential to be one of the better games with enough practice, but the learning curve still seems too steep to be worth it.

Event #7 is cycling.

 

Rotate the joystick clockwise to pedal. I very quickly had traumatic flashbacks to Mario Party.

This one is pure finger pain on a d-pad, which is the only option on D's preferred controller. Note, though, that you aren't trying to spin as fast as possible, but are trying to match the pace shown on-screen by a rotating arrow. With an analog stick, it's easy to spin too fast, which brings your pace to a screeching halt.

The analog stick definitely feels better overall, but it isn't great. So we skipped this in competition too.

The final event, kayaking, is easily my personal favorite, but "B" and "D" both found it frustrating.

It's a downstream slalom event with 15 buoy pairs, two of which must be paddled through in reverse, and one upstream.

Keeping control over the kayak is already a challenge, even before you have to fight the currents and the rocks, but it doesn't feel obtuse or unresponsive. Granted, having the kayak shift into random directions when you inevitably bump into things can be pretty annoying, but I took it as a challenge to do better.

 

Overall, I rank the events like so:

1. Kayaking. One of the more substantial games, with a good balance between responsive and challenging controls.
2. Javelin. Simple, but polished and satisfying.
3. Rowing. Shallower than the javelin event.
   
4. Equestrian. Doable with practice, but pretty confusing.
5. Triple jump. A bit lame, to be honest.
6. Cycling. Please don't make me spin the joystick in circles. Ever.
7. Fencing. I don't get it.
8. High jump. I really don't get it.
    

GAB rating: Below average. Summer Games II is more of the same, and the variety of events is better, but the ratio of good events to bad is worse. The javelin event was the only one enjoyed by all, and it's not even my favorite version of it.

Games 347-348: Pitstop & Pitstop II

The next whale, Epyx's Pitstop II, is a sequel to the less famous non-whale Pitstop from 1983. So I played both.

The Pitstops are arcade-style racing games closely modeled after Pole Position (and to a lesser extent Turbo), with the gimmick that in extended races, you'll need to enter the pits and complete a minigame to quickly refuel and replace your worn tires, and you risk running out of fuel or a disqualifying blowout by putting this off.

These came out around the time that Epyx was transitioning their focus from Atari to Commodore, and so "B" and I played Pitstop's Atari version, and Pitstop II's C64 version, which I believe reflects their respective development priorities, though both were available on either computer.

 

Game 347: Pitstop

Pitstop's title screen offers a few options prior to gameplay:

• Number of drivers (1-4). Drivers race sequentially, and are ranked by finishing time once all have completed their laps (or been disqualified).
• Number of laps (3, 6, 9).
• Difficulty (Rookie, Semi-Pro, Pro). Harder difficulties make it more difficult to pass your opponents (who drive slower than you in any difficulty), and also cause collisions to wear out your tires quicker.
• Race type (Single, Mini-Circuit, Grand Circuit). Single lets you select one of the six circuits for one race, mini-circuit plays through three of them, and grand circuit tours all six of them in order, displaying the drivers' cumulative scores and overall standings between races.
   

 

"B" and I decided that six laps was best, as with three laps you don't need to enter the pits at all, circumventing the game's very namesake, and with nine the race just goes on far too long. We played a few single races at each of the difficulties, and the below video showcases a six-lap race in semi-pro, and a three-lap race in pro.

 

The racing model here is simplistic and not very satisfying. Taking turns is trivial - this is the Pole Position model where steering means lateral movement, turns simply push your vehicle toward the curb, and here you can easily counteract this no matter how fast your vehicle is going. Turns are so barely consequential that it hardly matters what track you race on! The challenge is passing other cars, who spawn at random and as in Turbo/Pole Position serve more as obstacles than actual opponents.

Collisions aren't disastrous - they just cost you speed and some wear, which is represented by the color of your tires. Pulling into the pit lane at the start of each lap lets you replace them and refuel through a straightforward point & click interface.

The sound of passing cars reminds you of precious time spent here.

GAB rating: Below average. Pitstop is inoffensive, but too simple to be worth spending much time on. I am not surprised that it has been virtually forgotten in favor of its sequel.

Pitstop was ported to ColecoVision, where it can be played with a steering wheel and throttle pedal.

Game 348: Pitstop II

 

Pitstop II's big new feature, which the box and manual remind you of no fewer than four times (auto racing is not a solo sport), is the simultaneous split-screen multiplayer option, providing active competition and not just slow-moving drones to get in your way. Racing solo? The computer will take the second screen.

"B" and I once again raced multiple times, trying each of the difficulty settings on a different track. The below video shows six laps in rookie, and three apiece in semi-pro and pro.

On paper, Pitstop II looks like a big improvement over the original. Not only is there two-player racing, but the graphics and physics have been overhauled, now better resembling Pole Position both from its smooth pseudo-3D projection and its simulation of centrifugal forces that wear out your tires while pushing you laterally. The other cars on the road, aside from player 2's, are still more obstacles to surpass than real opponents, but they come into view on the horizon as blips, giving you plenty of time to swerve and avoid slamming into them at 250mph, and generally behave just like your actual opponent, just slower and ephemeral. Turns are now a challenge to navigate, and on the harder settings you'll need to properly manage your throttle to get through them or else take excessive damage.

 

So why did I say on paper? Because despite the more advanced physics model, Pitstop II just doesn't feel good to play. "B" and I constantly oversteered, then understeered, then oversteered again, causing our cars to slide back and forth across the lanes, which is hardly ideal for passing the slow-moving traffic. On rookie mode, you can get away with riding the curb, but on semi-pro this will shred your tires, and on pro even a few bumps is devastating. The C64's lack of analog control options is lamentable here, and I can't imagine trying to play this on a stiff authentic joystick.

Taking the turns slowly makes controlling things a bit easier, but throttle control is janky too, with pushing up and down on the joystick directly raising or lowering your velocity like one adjusts a thermostat, and the sense of speed conveyed by the pseudo-3D view doesn't feel quite aligned with the speedometer display. The fire button activates a turbo boost, but would have been better served as a harder brake option. You don't see turns until you're already in them, you don't really know when you're about to come out of a turn either, and the minimap isn't precise enough to really show you when you're close enough to a turn to need to start decelerating. I'd often brake while already in the turn, grinding my wheels against the side until speed dropped just enough that I could instantly overcome all of the centrifugal forces and instantly zip over to the other side of the road and grind my other wheels against the other curb.

And then there's the pits. 

 

Your F1 team must have had a budget cut, because you've only got one tire guy now, and he controls like he's been hitting the bottle. Actions like walking around the vehicle and getting into the precise pixel needed to change a tire are just frustrating! And on a personal note, the color-coded damage stripes on the tires are less meaningful to my cone-deficient eyes than they were in the original.

"B" and I both enjoyed this less than the original Pitstop, despite the surface improvements. I did spend some time replaying alone, and I did improve a bit, but never to the point where I felt differently about its flaws on my initial impression.

GAB rating: Below average. Pitstop II is the more complete package, but it trades the flaws of the original for different flaws.

As a side-note, it's interesting to me that splitscreen multiplayer was more or less simultaneously implemented by both Spy vs. Spy and Pitstop II, and both on the C64. Is there an earlier example of this that both games might have followed?

Game 333: Impossible Mission

Another visitor! Stay awhile. Stay FOREVER.

Thus barks Dr. Atombender in menacing SID-powered clarity as you descend the first elevator shaft into his secret underground computer lab. Sworn to revenge upon the world for ruining his video game high score with a poorly timed power outage, you must locate and enter his control room and stop him from breaking the ICBM launch codes, ensuring the security of U.S. nuclear secrets for almost another 40 years.

You have six ingame hours, and each agent that bites it will take ten minutes to replace. 30+ lives may seem like a lot - it carried me and many others through the famously difficult Contra. But this game ranks somewhere between Jumpman and Jet Set Willy in terms of ridiculous lethality. It's not uncommon to get killed ten times in the same room and still not clear it.

Smooth C64 sprite animations are recycled from Summer Games.

Atombender's lair is a semi-randomly generated maze of elevator shafts and 32 connecting rooms. These rooms' layouts are fixed, but their positions in the lair and the behavior of the patrolling Dalek-like robots are random. Most of your time is spent here, where you must search the furniture for the passcodes you'll need to progress. They look a little plain, and a few rooms are downright ugly, but Epyx makes good use of the C64's SID chip for ambiance here, with the constant hum of mad science equipment, whirring motors, buzzing electrical discharge, and occasional orders of destroy him, my robots heard spoken over the rooms' loudspeaker systems.

The main goal is to locate the 36 punchcard fragments, but you'll also find, on occasion, one-time use tokens, which can be used at the various terminals to reset the elevators, which I rarely found useful, or to freeze the robots in place, which are incredibly useful and almost too good to use, except that sometimes a robot or two is placed and programmed as such that there's no other way to clear the room. There's definitely a puzzle element to solving these rooms along with the arcade-like platforming, and the procedurally generated elements change up the solutions from game to game to some extent.

This formula would be fine, if a bit of a letdown after so much creative level design seen in Jumpman the previous year, but Agent McFlipperson here has an awkward jumping arc that can't be controlled and is hard to predict. Pixel-perfect collision detection, normally a good thing for an arcade-style game, becomes frustrating when applied to fancy animation loops, and though his death scream is legitimately hilarious, it gets old. I frequently missed platforms simply because my feet weren't facing the ground at the precise moment of passing over them. I'd sometimes get killed by a robot behind me because my sprite's feet extended too far backward in a running animation frame and touched the robot. Tiny gaps can in theory be crossed by your stride without having to jump, but success depends on your sprite's feet spanning the gap at the precise moment of crossing. Sometimes you cross, sometimes you just fall in, and it feels completely arbitrary. There's a reason why sprites in platformers usually have compact, rectangular silhouettes, or failing that, rectangular bounding boxes or tile-based collision detection over pixel-based ones.

Another unfair difficulty factor is that you can never be completely sure of the robots' behavior until you're in their line of sight, which can be instantly lethal, and you won't know until you try. A lot of them simply patrol back and forth, firing their weapon at fixed intervals (or not), and pay no mind to you, while others may detect the player based on line of sight, or proximity, or movement, or some combination, and react by turning to facing you, accelerating, and/or shooting.

Your only defense, apart from avoidance and jumping, is the use of robot snooze tokens, which are much more limited in availability than your lives. No sonic screwdrivers here. There's the constant dilemma of whether to use a token to help pass a difficult room or to save it for an even more difficult one later. Some pieces of furniture will turn out to be impossible to search without using a token, and nothing's more disheartening than dying from a bad jump after expending one, thereby wasting both it and an agent.

A gif can't properly convey how the music puzzle works, but you must sort notes from low to high.

 

Two special rooms in the lair with chess board patterned screens theoretically grant unlimited tokens by having you solve musical puzzles, but they get unsustainably more complex with each one solved, and become basically impossible to solve without a scratch pad or a good pitch ear about eight iterations in. The token type reward you get alternates, so you must solve two puzzles for each precious snooze token you wish to obtain.

 

The game is solvable, and I managed to catch Dr. Atombender after a few days of practice, memorization, and some luck. Also with quite a bit of patience for farming tokens at the music rooms, which I solved using a variant of the merge sort and some careful note taking.

I eventually learned which rooms are the most doable, which rooms are trouble, and figured out general solutions to navigate the trouble rooms, including precise footings to jump from. I learned that it's better to squander a snooze token than risk death, but better still to clear a room deathless without using a token if you can.

My first successful run was far from perfect. I did clear most of the rooms without needing snooze tokens, thanks to my practice and a lucky avoidance of randomly bad robot configurations, but here and there I wasted lives, and a few rooms were especially bad for wasted tokens and lives. I spent a good 20 minutes farming tokens in a room near the start, and yet I still ran out as I neared the far side of Atombender's lair, forcing a time consuming refill. But as inefficiently as I played, I still finished with almost an hour to spare, and could have certainly done better than that if I had been smarter about assembling the punchcards.

Even if you know the password, you still have to assemble all nine punchcards.

 

The final challenge is to take the 36 punchcard fragments and assemble them into nine complete cards, each corresponding to a letter of Atombender's control room password. Cards can be flipped, rotated, and copied, and there's also a color-changing mechanic which only serves to waste time. You can also phone H.Q. for hints at the cost of two minutes per call. One hint option is to have them rotate two of your fragments into the correct orientation, which I decided to just do for all of my cards and then brute force them together until I found combinations that fit. The hint calls take 36 minutes to get all of the fragments into position, and I had plenty of minutes to spare.

The other option is to have them tell you whether or not a specific fragment can be completed with the rest of what you've got in your inventory, and this strikes me as nearly useless. If you've got all 36 fragments, then you can assemble cards from all of your fragments and the question is redundant. If you've got less than that, well, I estimate that you'd need 27 fragments in your inventory for there to be about a 40% chance that its three partners are located in the remaining 26. It seems far less tedious, and a more efficient use of your phone hint minutes, to wait until you have them all and use the auto-rotate hint for all of them.

Once all nine cards are attained, the control room can be entered. Hopefully you remember which room it was in!

No. No. No!

GAB rating: Average. Impossible Mission has a good overall concept, ahead of its time in ways, and some great audio aesthetics, but I didn't find it very enjoyable to play thanks to an obnoxiously unbalanced difficulty curve brought on by weird jumping mechanics and other questionable design choices.

Game 320: Summer Games

 

It's not much of a coincidence that our first round of Commodore 64 whales (finally!) postdate our final Atari 2600 whale by only a few months. Atari had dominated the North American market for years up until the infamous crash, all but taking down its competitors along with it and sending rippling effects to the arcades as well. It wasn't until after Atari sales bottomed out that the C64 games market gained a chunk of that ceded ground. The computer itself, though an incredible seller as early as 1983 thanks to its budget price and high RAM spec, initially went underappreciated as a games machine. Even visionaries like Danielle Bunten Berry failed to grasp the power of its VIC-II chipset, unmatched in its sprite and scrolling capabilities by any contemporaries except for expensive arcade PCBs and the Famicom.

It's also not much of a coincidence that Summer Games, the first of these C64 whales, bears a strong resemblance to Activision Decathlon from the previous year. Epyx had just merged with developer Starpath, whose unsuccessful Supercharger product sought to expand the Atari 2600 with more RAM, higher resolution, and bigger games, and one of its unfinished prototypes was the dismally named Sweat!, an attempt to improve on the aforementioned game. The concept, if not the programming or any particular gameplay mechanics, planted Summer Games' seeds.

I did give Sweat! a cursory look and can conclude it is not suitable for review as an ancestor - it's barely playable in this unfinished state, and does not inform our understanding of Summer Games' evolution beyond some aesthetic design choices.

Sweat! would have featured parallax scrolling, multicolored sprites, and 7 sprites in a scanline.

The format of Summer Games is familiar, but the disciplines are more varied and complex than their Decathlon counterparts, which in Activision's interpretation amounted to little more than waggling the stick and pressing the button at a precise time. Only the 100m dash and the pole vault are recycled, and the rest of the games are new.

Summer Games does have an option to play all of the games in sequence, but without a Decathlon-like scoring system for evaluating overall performance, we didn't see much point. When playing individual games, may can choose whether to practice or compete. The main difference is that practice allows quick replays but has no player registration and no awards, while competition has you register each player's name and nationality ("D" objected to the exclusion of her Portuguese heritage, and hissed at my suggestion of representing Brazil instead), and gives you each one shot at the game before awarding medals, acknowledging broken records, and dumping you back to the title screen.

I had a session with "D" and "B," where we first sampled all of the games, and then played our favorite events in competition, giving each of them a practice round or two first. I recorded it, but unfortunately the video completely crapped out during the first several minutes, ruining most of the high dive event, which we did first. I've cut out the ruined portion, starting with the tail end of the high dive event, and even that is choppier than it should be, as are a few later parts.

 

Unlike those prior decathlon games, you really do need to practice each event before you can be even competent at it. You'll want to read the manual too, as most events have more involved controls than the Decathlon predecessors.

 

I must note here the Commodore 64's greatest and most infamous weakness. The disk drive, by far the most popular format in the US, is painfully slow. In VICE, with accurate 1541 timings and a G64-format disk image, it takes a good two and a half minutes to get from system boot to gameplay, and another minute to load each subsequent event. The warp speed emulation option helps some, but you have to take care not to overshoot the loading sequence and miss the event itself.

The first event, the pole vault, is one of the most frustrating, but what I find interesting is that it mirrors Microsoft Decathlon almost exactly. First you select the bar height, and then select a pole grip height - the lower your grip, the easier the timing demands will be on the subsequent actions, but higher grips allow higher jumps. Then, as the runner enters the screen, press down to plant the pole, up to kick into a handstand, and finally fire to push off. Microsoft Decathlon also made you manually run by alternating left+right, but apart from that and some timing differences (and the C64's colorfully animated presentation), these are the same game.

The strict and confusing timing requirements made the event frustrating to all of us. Figuring out when to plant the pole was a matter of trial and constant driving into the runway or mat, and even after I could consistently get it into the box, I could never figure out the ideal kick-up time. Most of my vaults would sail right into the crossbar with no indication on what I did wrong. At least Microsoft Decathlon gave you feedback on your timing errors.

None of us could clear even the lowest bar consistently enough to make a competition worthwhile, so we moved on to platform diving.

The judges watch in horror as the diver fails to surface.

Here, your initial score is determined by how close to perfectly vertical you are when entering the water up to a maximum of 50 points, which is then multiplied by a difficulty factor determined mainly by how many rotations you completed before entering. Your only input is to control the diver's tuck level, which determines rotation speed. You need to straighten out at just the right time so that you enter the water head (or foot) on, and the faster you're spinning, the harder this will be.

I found the best strategy is to go right into a full-tuck right off the board, straighten out just before landing, and hope for the best. You just don't have time to slow down gradually, and a perfectly executed dive with the second-fullest tuck scores you barely more than 100 points, which you can easily beat with a fair-to-middling full-tuck dive.

 

The next event is the 4x400m relay.

Where Activision Decathlon destroys your joystick and your arm with a 45-60 second marathon of intense waggling, Summer Games goes for a more strategic game of stamina management. Joystick neutral maintains pace, joystick left 'coasts' to regain stamina, joystick right expends stamina to sprint, and the button passes the baton.

The rules on gaining and expending stamina are a bit obscure, and I'm sure that with some analysis one can calculate the optimal strategy. I found that constantly alternating between coast and sprint got me under the three minute mark fairly reliably.

All of us thought this was one of the better events, and we played it in competition mode, where two players may race simultaneously. As the C64 only has two joystick ports, the third has to race the computer.

 

The 100m dash goes right back to arm-breaking mercilessness.

It's a Decathlon-style joystick waggle game. We all thought this one was lame, but at least it's short.

Gymnastics comes next.

It's somewhat like the pole vault, a bit more complex, but the timing is so much easier, and the event so much more doable as a result. Time your jump to hit the far end of the vault board, time the push-off from the horse for maximum power, and then hold up to tuck and somersault, and down to straighten out for a landing. If you land off-balance, correct it with left or right. You can optionally perform a Yurchenko vault by holding right on the stick as you hit the springboard, which boosts your score but increases the difficulty of the push-off timing. With full power, up to three flips can be performed before landing, and this matters more to your score than sticking the land (though you've got to do both to get a 9+ rating).

In the competition, you get two vaults, and the scores are summed. We all did pretty crummily in competition here despite the practice. Consistency is key. Nevertheless, all of us thought this was one of the better events.

400m freestyle relay is the next event, and probably the most technically impressive in the game.

 

Horizontally scrolling a complex, multi-color scene of this resolution is something you just don't see on contemporary computers or consoles other than the Famicom. The effect is complicated, but playing the game is pretty simple; 99% is simply tapping the button in rhythm with the swimmer's arms. The rest of it is pushing the joystick left once you reach the end of the lane to reverse, and pushing right again to launch the next swimmer, both of which can be done a bit early to save a good fraction of a second.

The next event is 100m freestyle but this one feels like a cheat. It's just the same swimming event again with a single lap instead of four. We didn't do either of them competitively.

 

The final event is skeet shooting.

So it's not exactly Duck Hunt, or much of a C64 technical showcase, but it's challenging without being obtuse. Speed matters more than precision; you get a very generous hitbox on the targets, but you only get one shot per. Your aim slowly drops when the stick is left in neutral, adding the challenge of anticipating how high to lead your shot.

GAB rating: Average. Summer Games is certainly improvement over the monotonous Activision Decathlon (and Konami's excessively harsh Track & Field), and from an audio-visual perspective, a good example of early C64 material, but none of the games here hold much lasting value. The best of them are rather basic and easily mastered, and the two Decathlon events here kind of stink.