In 1984, 10-Yard Fight was re-released as "Vs 10-Yard Fight" (no connection to Nintendo's VS System), a cocktail cabinet which added a proper two-player mode lacking from the arcade original, and with this addition the game rules actually resemble football instead of a weird offense-only game where you win the round by scoring a touchdown and lose by running out of time. This version's existence completely slipped my mind until I began writing this post - and I have no intention of going back to revisit it. The intended setup, with two players on either side of the cabinet facing each other, isn't something I can easily replicate anyway.
Irem's 1985 Famicom port retains the two player mode, and adds a few of its own distinctions. That said, it's still very simplistic, and if anything, even slower than the original.
I played and recorded a match with my usual sports games partner "B." In the end he didn't like the game enough for a rematch, so this video is our first and only session. For the first half neither one of us really knows what we're doing, and truth be told I didn't really know what I was doing in the second half either. He absolutely crushed me, 21-0.
We start with the kickoff, and it plays like before, only now one of the defenders is human-controlled... and if he catches you, there's no shaking him off.
The field is also zoomed-out compared to the original, containing the entire width of the field and eliminating the need for eight-way scrolling. But the players are smaller, suffer from sprite flicker, and everything feels slower.
As before, the plays are chosen for you from a limited set, but the player on defense may choose which of two men to control, and the player on offense will not know which until the ball is in play.
'A' or 'B' picks the player.
Offense strategy works like the arcade game - you position your receiver by waiting as he runs across the field until the snap. But he moves so agonizingly slowly that more often than not I just said screw it and put the ball into play, which rarely went well for me.
"B" was often more patient than I was.
Other than that, there's not much room for strategy. The player-controlled defender can certainly ruin things for you in ways that the dumb AI couldn't, but then again sometimes defense goes horribly wrong as you eat dirt trying to tackle and the rest of your team uselessly shuffles around like a Keystone Kops pickup game.
What are you guys doing?
Overall, though, gaining yardage seems much more difficult - appropriate since in the original arcade game, you'd soon reach a point where failing to gain yardage even once meant an instant game over.
"B" noted one important difference here that I never really cottoned onto. In the original game, you could shake off players by wiggling the joystick after they tag you, but here, it seems more advantageous to wiggle it slightly before they grab you. This doesn't work on human-controlled players, and it doesn't help against a dive, but when done with proper timing against an AI-controlled defender, you'll "dodge" the attack and seemingly teleport ahead of the pack. My failure to grasp this is probably the main reason I didn't score even once.
"B" shows how it's done.
I'd have given this game one more chance to see if I could manage any better, but "B" had enough and I don't blame him. So moving on,
GAB rating: Below average. Resounding 'meh' from both of us. It's limited, slow, and boring, and I'm sure it holds little appeal to players who actually like football. For what it's worth, I slightly preferred the arcade game, "B" slightly preferred the NES game, but neither of us had much fun with either version.
"Kung-Fu Master" sounds awfully similar to Karate Champ, doesn't it? Much like that earlier game of 1984, Kung-Fu Master is credited for kicking off an entire genre of martial arts-themed action games - beat'em ups, to Karate Champ's fighting games - while also not playing very much at all like its more codified descendants.
Supposedly adapted from Jackie Chan's Wheels on Meals - apart from the obvious nod with characters named Thomas and Silvia I don't see much plot similarity - you must enter a pagoda full of bad guys and kung-fu your way up, fighting a powerful and unique enemy on each floor, until you reach the fifth where you'll showdown with Mr. X and rescue Silvia. The setup seems much more like Bruce Lee's unfinished Game of Death, which Wikipedia claims is "also inspired by."
Here, unlike in so many beat'em ups that would follow in the years to come, most of the enemies are knocked out in one hit, making the game flow more akin to a shoot'em up, only that the short range of your attacks and relative lack of vertical control means timing is emphasized over aiming and movement. The timing windows for your attacks are strict, and a mistimed strike will more often than not lead you to take some damage. Punches have less range than kicks without being significantly faster and therefore have stricter timing, but award more points. You can also punch and kick while crouching, which has its uses, and punch and kick while jumping, which is a bit limited in its usefulness.
Kung-Fu Master is a pretty tough and not always fair experience, though fairer still than most arcade games of the day. If you can figure out the timing to hit each enemy, and the technique to beat each boss, you can beat Kung-Fu Master as long as the random enemy creation routine doesn't spawn more impossible enemy combinations than you have spare lives. And with enough tries, this is bound to happen eventually. I'd say it took me about two and a half hours before I "won" by completing a single loop, and with this victory I was satisfied. Below is my video.
The first floor is your introduction stage and has waves of 'grippers'
come at you from left and right to give you hugs if they get close
enough. You can usually shake them off before they do too much damage,
but the real danger is the knife throwers who can kill you in two or
three hits if you're immobilized or otherwise just can't dodge their
knives quick enough.
Make it to the end and you fight a man with a big stick, who may seem impossible at first. He outranges you, after all, but he's slow, and gets knocked back a smidge when you hit him, giving you time to back out of his range (or duck) before he retaliates. Aggression - and beginning with a decent amount of health - pays off.
Beat him and you reach the next level. My most hated level.
Aaargh! Level 2 is short, but the opening is chaos. Complete chaos. Deadly pottery comes crashing down from the ceiling nonstop, each piece unleashing some dangerous ordinance in your direction - snakes, firebreathing dragons, and deadliest of all, disco balls that explode into confetti. Dawdle here and you are sure to get overwhelmed and die. Make any error here and you'll probably die.
Make it to the end and the rest of the level is easy. Grippers are joined by Tom Toms, little kids who can only be beaten with crouching attacks but are otherwise normal enemies. Even the end boss is easy.
How are you talking?
Level 3 is more of the same - grippers, Tom Toms, knife throwers, just a lot more of them. You need to learn that when enemies approach from behind, to keep moving and turn around to fight at the last minute; if you waste too much time standing your ground as they come to you, you'll run out of time.
The boss here is a giant who doesn't attack low very often.
Level 4 opens with a swarm of killer moths. Like with level 2, I found it best to keep moving as much as you can. The longer you spend fighting them, the more of them spawn and trouble you.
The usual grippers and Tom Toms attack after that, but now the Tom Tom's have a new trick - a somersault attack that jumps over your crouching kicks. It doesn't hurt quite as much as a knife-throw, thankfully, but it's better to avoid it by standing up.
The boss is a nasty hunchbacked magician. At a distance, he'll summon moths and dragons. Up close, which is where you need to be anyway to hit him, he'll throw fireballs high and low and not really give you a fair chance to react and dodge appropriately. You do not want to strike him with anything but crouching attacks, because a single hit to the face will make him teleport and shoot a spell off at you. He'll do that anyway after enough low blows, but the fewer spells you allow him to cast, the better.
The fifth and final floor would be my most hated, if it weren't for a little trick I discovered.
Level 5 is a grueling endurance test of endless waves of bad guys. Not only is running out of time a credible threat, but I swear that this game actually drops inputs when there's too much going on, which is, of course, potentially fatal.
The trick? When a knife guy approaches from behind you, don't fight him! Just keep moving, and nobody else will spawn from that direction. It's easier to dodge the knives he throws at your back while dealing with enemies in front of you than it is to deal with hordes of grippers and Tom Toms from both directions at the same time. You reach Mr. X a lot faster this way too.
Granted, there is the risk that you'll run into two knife-throwers who toss their knives at the same time in an impossible-to-dodge pattern, but you run that risk regardless, and the longer you spend on this level, the more likely it is to happen.
Mr. X awaits at the end of this marathon. At first, he seems to be able to block all of your hits and then counterattack with undodgable blows. But with persistence, technique, and a bit of luck, he's not too bad. The trick is to attack right before he does. Do it a bit too soon and he'll block, but that's okay; it interrupts his attack and usually delays the next one. Crouching punches seem pretty safe - he can defeat them with a jump-kick, but he doesn't do that too often.
You rescued Silvia! Marital bliss is yours forever, right?
Very funny, guys.
GAB rating: Above average. Kung-Fu Master is mechanically pretty solid, and I can't discount its influence on what would come, but for how steep its learning curve is, the game is pretty shallow and simplistic. You'll probably die in a few seconds the first time you play - I certainly did. I got much better with practice, but repetitive, barebones gameplay made it unsatisfying to master.
The Famicom/NES port simply called "Kung Fu", likely the most widely played version, is noteworthy as its director was none other than Shigeru Miyamoto, with sound design by Kōji Kondō. One of the few early-era Famicom games to feature smooth horizontal scrolling, it, along with Excitebike, anticipates Super Mario Bros. It's actually one of the first video games I ever played, albeit only once and very briefly, while visiting a kindly, slightly eccentric spinster, who was one of two people in the neighborhood who had a Nintendo at the time. It seems to be a pretty direct port in terms of gameplay, with the expected visual and audio downgrades, and the addition of a 'Game A' mode which considerably reduces the damage you take. Completing a loop in it takes you to 'Game B' mode which is close to arcade difficulty.
I was a little surprised when my post on Computer Quarterback, an
inscrutably abstract two-player Apple II simulation of a sport I have
zero interest in and almost as little knowledge about, sustained
well above average reader interest.
So now, here's
a football arcade game with direct player control and some very weird
interpretations on the sport's rules. There is only offense, only one
receiver is available for passing plays, your dash is more like a
relaxed walking speed at barely a yard and a half per second,
interceptions are penalized with yardage loss, scoring a touchdown beats
the "level," the clock is all but guaranteed to run out well before you
hit the end zone, and once it does, you've got to gain ten yards every
single down or lose the game.
The
above video cuts out the first two levels which represent high-school
defenders and isn't very interesting to watch (or play). Subsequent
levels represent a college team, professional team, and finally a Super
Bowl team.
Each "level" starts with the kickoff and first return run, where your team moves in a tight, unshakable formation.
This
already feels weird and I don't even follow football. Everything's just
so... slow, and the play mechanics are odd. Your team moves in perfect
synchronicity, following the quarterback's lead, and to keep the
defenders off him you've got to jostle around the whole team so that
individual players block the pursuers, incapacitating both for a few
precious seconds.
Should one catch up to you, wiggling the
joystick will shake him off, but getting caught by two or more players
will end your run, and because the defense always moves faster than your
own pokey gait, you're certain to get mobbed eventually. The computer
loves doing comically long "Superman" tackles, which can't be shaken
off, and being tagged four times will also result in an instant tackle.
You'll
want to gain as much yardage as you can here, obviously, but thanks to
the way 10-Yard Fight works, performing poorly can completely ruin you.
On the college level's second half, you effectively get 30 seconds of
running time, and after that runs out, just one unsuccessful play can
mean game over. Every ten yards you don't gain here is a fight that
you'll have to win later on.
The
plays are quite basic. Your only strategy option is where to position
your receiver, who runs across the field until the snap. Forward passes
are pretty risky; even when there's an open zone, defenders move
erratically and can close the gap and intercept faster than you might
think, which will cost you a disastrous 20 yards. The safest choice is
usually to do a lateral pass and run as far as you can with it, though
as time starts to run out, you may need to play things not so safely.
Pass
or throw, though, there are no long yardages plays. You run slower than
a typical New Yorker walks, and even if you break through the lines,
you will get dogpiled.
Score a touchdown and you'll earn thousands of points and get a "kick or run" bonus game, with a chance to score another 1000.
Kicking is easy. Running seems impossible.
Then
the cycle repeats, but it becomes harder, and crucially, the running
time becomes pretty stringent, each round giving you fewer seconds than
the round before it.
One peculiarity that shows up on the harder
rounds, owing to the time limit, is that sometimes it's beneficial to
scuttle a play, giving up a few seconds so that you can retry with more
favorable conditions. For instance, suppose it's 1st & 10, and there
are six seconds left on the clock. If you go for the play, it's do or
die; your time will run out, and then you either make your ten yards or
you lose the game. Or you could deliberately try to get tackled before
time runs out, maybe gain a few yards, and then have a second chance to
gain the rest of them, hopefully against an easier defense formation.
I made it to the "pro" league, where you get 25 seconds in the first half and 20 in the second.
GAB rating: Below Average.
10-Yard Fight is weird, slow, shallow, primitive, and not a whole lot
of fun. The defense is erratic, sometimes changing its directions
mid-charge instead of going for an easy tackle, and my best plays felt
more like they exploited strange AI behavior than that I employed good
skill or strategy. I almost want to rate this "bad," and yet I found
myself strangely compelled to replay it and figure out how to not
completely suck at it, which must say something considering I don't even like football.
10-Yard
Fight had a 1984 re-release called "Vs. 10-Yard Fight," which despite
the name has nothing to do with Nintendo's VS. System, and allows a
second player to control one of the defenders while properly alternating
offense and defense. An NES port in 1985, based on the Vs. version,
somewhat expanded defensive options, and being the system's first
football title is likely the most widely played version of the game.
I
am curious if 10-Yard Fight might have influenced the later, and much
more fondly remembered Tecmo Bowl series. From what I've seen of it, it
seems very plausible that 10-Yard Fight walked, so to speak, so that
Tecmo Bowl could run.
Irem was founded as IPM Co. in 1974, and their earliest credit on Mobygames is 1978’s “Power Block,” which at this point I’m not even going to bother verifying that it’s a Breakout clone. It isn’t listed in MAME in any event. Wikipedia lists two Mahjong games and a “Nyankoro,” but without any identifying details these aren’t especially useful credits.
MAME’s earliest attribution to IPM Co. is Andromeda, but it isn’t fully playable yet.
This is as far as it gets.
Their next credit is IPM Invader, a 1979 Space Invaders clone with barely anything even slightly interesting to distinguish it from the original game.
It’s got color sprites, remembers the top five scores, numbers the waves, and that’s pretty much it.
Soon after its release, they changed their name to Irem, and their next few credits are similarly uninteresting.
Head On, a clone of Sega/Gremlin’s VIC Dual game running on custom Irem hardware.
Galaxian, a clone of the Namco game that doesn’t even run on custom hardware and may be a bootleg.
Space Beam, which plays identically to Konami/Leijac’s Space War
Their first game of 1980, Sky Chuter, appears to be original.
Game 136: Sky Chuter
But it isn’t good.
At first it looks like a somewhat novel Space Invaders knock-off – you control an anti-aircraft turret and fire at waves of bombers, who sometimes drop parachuting landmines. But these bombers are much faster than the invaders, and you can rarely afford to ignore the landmines – let them land on the ground and they’ll stay there until you run over them. A landmine in the middle of the screen effectively cuts off half of the playfield from you. Between their speed, the constant distraction, your gun’s slow speed, long cooldown, the bombers’ deceptively tiny hitboxes, and the game’s annoying tendency to drop your fire command when a lot is going on it’s nearly impossible to keep pressure on them, which means more pressure on you.
But the real game killer is that no matter how many planes you shoot down, and no matter how perfectly accurate and efficient your fire is, the final part of the wave has planes come in at the lowest possible altitude.
I could never survive this part.
At this point, the red bombers are so close to the hypocenter that you haven’t got a prayer of shooting down their mines, or avoiding their normal bombs should they happen to drop one while you’re even slightly beneath them. Without an extreme degree of luck, and I didn’t manage this even once, you’re dead, and the wave restarts from the top.
GAB rating: Bad. It’s poorly designed, poorly programmed, and rigged.
Game 137: WW III
MAME lists this as a clone of “Red Alert,” but WW III appears to be the original.
Red Alert adds some pretty realistic sounding voice synthesis, muffled a bit by radio-like static, telling you at the start “Red alert. Enemy aircraft approaching [beat] France. 20 jet fighters approaching, destroy all fighters by 1100 hours or MIRV will be launched.” It’s pretty impressive considering this is 1981. Sadly, MAME doesn’t emulate sound effects correctly in either version, so the ingame aural experience is disquietingly barren.
I opted to play WW III on the off-chance that Red Alert also has any gameplay differences to go with its audio additions.
WW III is clearly expanding on the ideas of Sky Chuter – most evident in the helicopter stage – and with greater success. And it’s also obvious that Missile Command had some influence here – there’s the theme, there’s a red megabomb that when shot, explodes in the sky in a radial pattern and can take out multiple targets, and of course there’s this:
General Thomas S. Power would be okay with that.
Apart from the theme, the game plays like Galaxian with more variety. Irem’s earlier title UniWar S was, in fact, a Galaxian ROM hack, which added variety in the form of multiple stages with different enemy types, formations, and tactics.
The first stage involves shooting down a 20-bomber wave.
The bombers are fast but move predictably, and their bombs are fairly easy to dodge. You haven’t got much time to clear the wave though – at 4:00 PM, about 50 seconds of gameplay, the bombers leave and a game-ending MIRV drops. Hypothetically, you could shoot down every warhead before any of them land, but this is much more difficult than just shooting all the bombers in the first place.
I don’t really see why they call off the MIRV once you shoot down the bombers – presumably this is a nuclear ICBM, and even the earliest ones were precise enough to devastate Paris without manual guidance.
The second stage is about shooting helicopters, and this is where the Sky Chuter roots become clear.
Thankfully, the parachuting bombs just explode when they hit the ground, creating this odd effect where a section of the background briefly turns red, and will kill you if you are too close to it. The helicopters buzz around in unpredictable patterns, making them trickier to hit than the bombers.
It’s not terribly difficult either. The parachute bombs are the helicopters’ only means of attack, and only so many can be on the screen at once. They don’t seem to target you, so it’s simple enough to thin out their ranks by picking off stragglers while the densest clusters drop useless bombs on the city far away from you.
Then night bombing starts and things get real.
Here, the bombing is much heavier than in the daytime, they fall faster, and you can only fully see the bombers as they pass through the searchlights. Fortunately, their bombs are visible in the dark. Unfortunately, the bombers can take out your searchlights, and with the bombs being dropped so heavily and with no means of protecting your searchlights except for scoring direct hits on these tiny bombs with your slow-firing gun, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before it happens.
It happened.
And then you’re stuck shooting bombers in the dark, with only the trail of bombs and the occasional blinking light giving a hint as to their positions. With your shooting accuracy diminished, the bombers you miss will fly at lower and lower altitudes as dawn approaches, until they fly so low that you couldn’t reasonably dodge their bombs even if you could see the craft they were coming from.
Survive the night, which I only managed once, and peace and world stability are achieved forever.
Just kidding.
I only managed to save France once, and failed the U.S. phase during the night bombing phase as usual.
GAB rating: Above Average. Kudos to Irem for giving the Galaxian formula some variety, but there isn’t any hidden depth here, and the difficulty spike is extreme.
Game 138: Moon Patrol
I wouldn’t have made this inference before starting Data Driven Gamer, but Konami’s Scramble was clearly a major influence on this game. It’s not the most obvious connection; Scramble is an early horizontal shmup, and Moon Patrol is more like a platformer, although it wasn’t informed by any previous platformer-like games as far as I can tell.
But despite the fact that in one game you control a space ship and the other you control a land rover, the similarities are strong and numerous.
Auto-horizontally scrolling playfields
Obstacle course-like level design
A checkpoint system that shows your progress toward the end goal
Horizontal controls aren’t based around moving left and right, but rather slowing down and speeding up
A vertically-oriented secondary weapon
Ability to continue from a checkpoint on a game over (from Super Cobra)
On that last point, Moon Patrol does one better than Super Cobra; while Super Cobra had a limit on the number of times you could continue, Moon Patrol lets you pump in quarters until you win. Not a lot of arcade games of the time allowed this; the only other one I’ve played is Vanguard, and even that stopped allowing continues after beating the first loop. Moon Patrol’s leniency, it seems, is limited only by the depths of your pockets.
And they clearly understood that, because dear lord, this game is a quarter muncher. There are only so many ways you can clear the nonstop obstacles, and if you don’t know what’s coming, you really can’t react fast enough. Your forward-firing gun is slow and not effective against large or multiple targets unless you’re moving at a reduced speed. Changing speeds takes some time, your speed affects the height and distance of your jumps, and when you do jump, you have no control until you land. Move too fast while making a jump, and you might slam right into a rock on the other side of the chasm. Move too slow and you might not have time to get up to speed to perform a necessary long jump right after. And the chasms are deceptively wide; if any of your wheels even come close to either edge, you’ll probably fall in, so you really don’t want to cut things too close. The name of the game is trial, error, and retrial at the cost of a quarter.
And even practice may not be enough, as occasionally UFOs start bombarding you and the terrain, leaving craters for you to jump over in addition to any other obstacles that were already there. The randomness of their fire may just force you to maneuver in a way that doesn’t complement the avoidance of the upcoming obstacles.
There are two courses, and the second of the two has a much bigger variety of obstacles and MUCH tighter timing needed to pull everything off, even once you know exactly what’s coming. I managed to get good enough at the first course that I could beat it on a single credit and score thousands of points from finishing it quickly, but didn’t feel compelled to master the second in that manner.
GAB rating: Above Average. Moon Patrol is pretty well designed, well programmed, looks pretty nice, it’s fun, fast, exciting, and has a decent amount of variety considering how long the courses are, but the trial and error gameplay can feel cheap and frustrating.
Also, does the way the moon buggy’s wheels move up and down independently of the chassis remind anyone else of Metal Slug?
