Showing posts with label Sega. Show all posts

Monday, June 2, 2025

Game 450: Space Harrier

We’re jumping a bit ahead of schedule as this past weekend, I had an opportunity to play 1985’s Space Harrier on an original deluxe motion-cabinet at Funspot, NH, and wanted to do a writeup while it was still fresh in my mind.

Space Harrier was never my favorite Sega game, though my experience with it until now had only been through ports and emulation. It seemed quite repetitive, with little to distinguish the moment-to-moment gameplay of its 18 stages other than visual variety, the pseudo-3D shooting action clumsy, imprecise, and full of unfair deaths, and its much-praised Super Scaler technology just felt visually incoherent, providing nothing to look at but a vast, empty void with a large number of smoothly-scaling objects flying at you at warp speed. It's very colorful, sure, but the monochromatic wireframes of Star Wars and even Elite offered a far better sense of 3D space and perspective.

This deluxe sit-down cabinet, similarly to the deluxe cabinets of OutRun and After Burner (which also feature at Funspot and are placed right next to it), tilts and pivots as you push the flight stick to move your character around the screen. It's definitely an added dimension to the trippy experience that emulation can't replicate, but it's not quite as immersive in this early iteration. OutRun's moving seat bounces as you drive across bumpy terrain and physically leans into your turns, and After Burner's moving cockpit syncs with the chase-camera perspective, tilting and pitching as your F-14 Tomcat does, but here, the pseudo-3D perspective isn't tethered to your character's movements as he zips around the screenspace, and the cabinet motion doesn't feel as connected to the action as it might have. One suspects it might have made more sense in the first prototypes where you actually flew a harrier, instead of a guy with a jetpack and a space bazooka.

I played through Space Harrier's 18 stages for the first time at Funspot, and while the motion cabinet doesn't do anything to enhance the gameplay, it does enhance the experience. I'll note that I'm very grateful for the tertiary fire button located physically on the cabinet, as repeatedly squeezing the joystick trigger gets very, very tiring. I then played through for the second time at home, using a USB flight stick to steer and the left-ctrl button on my keyboard to shoot. The game has no limit on the number of times you're allowed to continue, and no penalty when you do. Therefore I had no incentive to replay and try to play more optimally or use fewer of them.

The game controls quite well with either setup, but is still very shallow and very repetitive. Each of the 18 worlds has a distinct color scheme and visuals, but it makes little difference whether you're shooting at giant Moai heads while dodging their fireballs and avoiding stone pillars on the ground or you're shooting at harriers while dodging their missiles and avoiding steel towers on the ground. Basically, never stop moving, never stop shooting, and try not to move into oncoming obstacles.

Space can be a tough place, and you will eat flaming laser death.

Bosses, at least, provide a bit of gameplay variety, but they're pretty brief and a lot of them are still samey. There are also two rounds where you ride a Luck Dragon and just try to smash through as many obstacles as possible for bonus points, and the final stage is a boss rush and considerably easier than the stages before it. There is, of course, no plot and no context at all for why you're here or what you're doing.

I will give some credit here, for lack of a better place to mention it. Space Harrier's audio design is quite excellent, with a psychedelic FM soundtrack, clear voice samples (AHHHHH!!! .... get ready!), lots of rumbly explosions, zippy cannonfire, a distinctive 'bloop' sound of enemies unloading clusters of fireballs in your general direction, and convincing stereo separation effects behind it all.

GAB rating: Average. Another cutting edge Sega game pushes their signature sprite-scaling technology even harder than Hang-On did, but colorfully trippy visuals and break-neck speed can't make up for overly simplistic and monotonous gameplay, and unfair quarter-munching design.

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Games 423-424: Champion Boxing & Hang-On

Sega's legendary designer Yu Suzuki's wrote his first game for Sega's not-so-legendary SG-1000 console, a contemporary of the Famicom with the graphical prowess of the ColecoVision. Retrospectives tend to consider the later Master System as Sega's true answer to the Famicom, and reduce the SG-1000's role to its forebear if it is even acknowledged at all, and truth be told, I don't see myself exploring the SG-1000 library much either. No whales originated on it, but this ancestor is a rare opportunity to emulate it.

Game 423: Champion Boxing

"B" and I played a few matches in MAME and recorded our last and probably most exciting one, in which he plays the taller boxer and wins by decision.

The game is a bit simplistic, but overall it's not bad! The controls have a strange design choice where button 1 punches and button 2 cycles between punch types (jab, straight, uppercut), but they're fast and responsive, and the animations are fluid and readable. Action tends to oscillate between attack and defense; land a hit and you're in a good position to follow up with another, but you've got to mix up your punches with high and low blows to keep him guessing how to block. Block successfully and your next blow will come out faster than his, making the ideal opportunity for a counter-offensive. Or, if you just can't seem to block your opponent's string of punches, you can back off and leave him swinging at air, forcing him to come to you while you take a breather. The strategy isn't by any means deep, but it's something.

GAB rating: Above average. Like Urban Champion but better, I enjoyed this sparring match more than I expected to.

Game 424: Hang-On

Sega's arcade ventures are well known for being early adopters of pseudo-3D and eventually 3D technologies, often relying on bespoke, pricey hardware, but some of their earliest attempts don't hold up terribly well. Turbo, for instance, powered by the sprite-scaling VCO Object board, plays awkwardly and looks primitive compared to Namco's Pole Position from just a few months later, and Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom looks flashy but is otherwise a chaotic mess.

Enter the famous Super Scaler board, or at least a progenitor to it - a 16-chip, dual-CPU beast designed for one purpose - to one-up Pole Position (itself a monster of a PCB). Truth be told, considering Hang-On is three years younger, the improvement is almost underwhelming, but it goes to show how much arcade technology stagnated in the interim years between 1982 and 1985. But make no mistake, it succeeds at this goal; Hang-On's 3D perspective is just as convincing as Pole Position's, but runs smoother, speedier, and is much more colorful than anything before it, and the technology would only get better.

Photo by SegaRetro

Nearly as important to the graphics technology are the cabinet externals, which feature analog bike handlebars for steering, a twist throttle, and braking lever. The deluxe ride-on model, shaped like one of the ingame motorcycles, goes even further for immersion and is controlled by tilting the assembly with your whole body weight - an impressive feature all but impractical to emulate! ACAM of New Hampshire has such a model, but it remains inoperable, sadly.

To emulate this as best as I could, I brought out my Logitech steering wheel and pedals, which probably allows easier control than the real thing did. My wheel would steer, my gas pedal would throttle, but I mapped one of the paddle shifters to the brakes. You need analog throttle, but you don't really need analog braking.

And, it works! It works quite well - this is easily the nicest-feeling arcade racing game I've covered yet - much is because unlike Turbo and Pole Position which use free-spinning, centerless wheels, I can comfortably map Hang-On's steering to a standard wheel, but the action feels responsive, sufficiently weighty, and fast. Sliding through a hairpin turn at just the right speed so that you don't understeer and drive off the road feels great, and even better if you pass another biker or two mid-turn.

Granted, this is still the Turbo-mode of gameplay and pseudo-3D physics, where the road is flat, turning is an illusion, and rival bikers are mere obstacles to be passed rather than true opponents. But a good illusion goes a long way in an arcade racer, and this is the best illusion of turning yet.

Hang-On is intensely unforgiving - you cannot afford a single accident if you hope to get through to the end, and even if you never crash or bump into another rider and spend most of your ride at maximum throttle, you can still lose because you took turns too cautiously, or even because a road segment was congested with bikers and forced you to wait for an opportunity to pass. Luck, in the form of the bikers and when you encounter them, plays a role - they can be easy to pass, risky to pass, or impossible depending on when you reach them, how many there are, and whether they're off to the sides or actively changing lanes at the time. Many of my attempts were doomed by a rival bumping me off the road and into a rose bush or a signpost as I futilely tried to pass him.

I'd say it took me at least 30 tries to get through the entire course for the first time, and I made it twice - the second time is shown in the recording. A crash flings you from the bike which dramatically explodes in the background and effectively costs you eleven seconds - five to recover, and six to get back up to speed - and both of my successful runs were accident-free and finished with fewer than ten seconds remaining.

Both runs also involved a hidden secret; one that requires me to describe the runs as "accident-free" rather than "crash-free." During the fourth leg of the race, you'll eventually see a Sega logo on the left curb, followed by H-A-N-G-O-N letters. Crash into the 'G,' which is rather easy to accidentally swerve around instead of into, and you'll put twenty seconds back on the clock. Without exploiting this secret, both of my successes would have been failures.

GAB rating: Good. Hang-On is a Sega milestone, marking the start of their long-reigning position at the forefront of the coin-op scene's cutting edge. While the driving isn't obviously more advanced than Turbo, or even Atari's Night Driver, presentation and feel makes it fun.

Friday, July 28, 2023

Game 374-376: Missed arcade golden age classics

Our next whale, Tecmo's 1984 title Bomb Jack, is a lesser one that's probably more famous for its ports to the 8-bit microcomputers in Europe and its NES sequel than for the original arcade release.

The early arcade works of Tecmo - then called Tehkan - are informed by some golden age classics which had been moderately successful in their day but failed to secure much historical legacy, and didn't make whale status. For this post, I am covering these games for the first time, as ancestors.

Game 374: Head On

Developed in 1979 by Sega & then-partner Gremlin Industries, Head On is, in a word, stressful.

Driving a car around and around a course of concentric encircling lanes, your goal is to collect all of the dots while a rival driving around the course in the opposite direction tries his darnedest to crash into you, for some perverse reason.

Similarities to Pac-Man are impossible to ignore, though without any solid evidence that Iwatani took cues here, I'm content to assume them coincidental. But while Pac-Man's mechanics afforded the player occasional breathers from the manic chase - power pills, escape tunnels, and AI patterns that alternate between "pursue" and "scatter" on an interval, Head On offers no respite from its suicidal chicken game. Wind up in the same lane as the red car and miss your opportunity to change lanes, and you crash. Change lanes too late, and you crash. Change lanes too early, and the red car changes lanes right with you and you crash. Misjudge your own lane, or misjudge which lane the red car is going to take, and you probably crash. Fail to enter the lane-changing zone at just the right time, which gets increasingly difficult to reckon as the round drags on and the red car gets faster, and you probably won't be able to avoid a crash.

There's a puzzle-like element seen here determining the optimal route to hit all of the dots without crashing. The red car's AI is simple and almost entirely deterministic, reacting mainly to your changes in position by honing in on it. You can accelerate, but at top speed you may only change one lane at a time while at standard speed you can cross two, which is often necessary in order to survive.

I only managed to reach the third round once, where you go up against two cars instead of one. I didn't last long at all - in fact the entire game lasted not even two and a half minutes. Even this meager victory was neither enjoyable nor rewarding.

GAB rating: Bad. Head On is too simplistic, too stressful, and too punishing. Pac-Man may or may not have been influenced by this, but either way, this just isn't it.

Game 375: Rally-X

Released by Namco a few months after Pac-Man, Rally-X is ostensibly another maze chase game, but unlike Iwatani's pizza-shaped sensation, openly takes after Head On, though it more resembles Pac-Man in all ways except for theme. Racecars chase you through a maze - a four-way scrolling maze far bigger than Pac-Man's single screen - as you try to collect ten flags scattered throughout.

The large maze makes all the difference here, and frankly it isn't for the better. Skillful twisting and turning - or use of the smoke screen weapon - can put several screens of distance between you and your enemies, which was obviously impossible in Pac-Man, but since the screen can't show you the whole maze at once, and the game speed is much faster, you can't really develop Pac-Man's type of complex evasion strategies either. Here, enemies pop in from off-screen, your only advance warning being a small radar display showing their approximate positions, and will crash into you under a second.

Scoring hasn't got much nuance either. Doing well in Pac-Man requires developing tactics to clump ghosts together so you can eat them all in one go, but here, you're rewarded mainly for efficiency - finishing quickly and with minimal use of smoke screen gives you a larger bonus for remaining fuel. The only other factor is a special flag which doubles the value of all subsequent ones, worth up to 4,500 extra points if you collect it before all others, and it is absolutely not worth spending time prowling the maze to find it and ensure you get it first.

Retrogame Deconstruction Zone offers an insightful and more thorough comparison that I recommend for further reading.

I made it to round 6 in my best attempt before getting bored. I'd have stuck with it longer back when I was playing 1980 whales, but for whatever reason I just don't have as much patience for these early arcade games as I used to.

GAB rating: Above average. This is fine, definitely a better game than Head On, but it's no Pac-Man.

I should note - in 1981, Namco followed up with New Rally-X, which is a big improvement over the original. I prefer the original game's earthier colors and music, but New Rally-X plays more fairly, with a gradualized difficulty curve, mazes with fewer dead-ends, fewer cars, and the special flag is highlighted on the radar, making it actually viable to go for it early instead of just hoping you luck into it (a new "lucky" flag supplants that niche). I do think it errs a bit on the easy side - reducing the vehicles makes it takes longer for things to get challenging - but slightly too easy is better than unfairly hard.

Game 376: Phoenix

Phoenix might be the most notable of these missed classics. There's an air of mystery about it.

For one, no other game of its era, or indeed any era, quite looks like this, with so many sprites moving around the screen in erratic unison, animated so fluidly, and yet a bit jerkily, being somehow both evolved years ahead of its time and not quite up to par for its time. This surreal look and feel, motivated by the unconventional technique of using animated background tiles in lieu of hardware sprites to draw everything (a technique which Galaxian also utilized but committed to less fully), is difficult to appreciate when looking back from games of 1984, but we need only compare it to Rally-X to observe just how different Phoenix looks from anything else in its generation.

We also don't know for sure who made this game. Mobygames credits Amstar Electronics (their sole sitewide credit!), but a trade magazine sourced on Wikipedia notes Amstar as the manufacturer of the U.S. cocktail table version as a counterpart to Centuri's upright cabinet version. There are many early and obscure video games whose developers are unknown, especially from Japan, but Phoenix may be unique among them as a multinational hit, which brought its respective manufacturers money and fame and spawned a strong selling console conversion and multiple imitations.

Phoenix's Galaxian-inspired gameplay unfolds in a loop of five stages, and is possibly the first of its kind to.

In the first, things indeed look very much like Galaxian. Small, flying aliens, more resembling bats than the Space Invaders of old and with a slick wing-flapping animation, flit about the screen and swoop down to attack. Unlike Galaxian, these are no simple, predictable dive-bombing passes, but chaotic dances that makes it even more of a challenge to hit them.

Aliens that make it to the bottom tend to linger there for a little while, where they may try to kamikaze your ship, or just hover above at a close range so that hitting them is easy, but avoiding fire should they shoot as you pass below is nearly impossible, making it risky to pass. To help the odds a bit, you have a shield, but it's difficult to use defensively as like so many other shields, by the time you realize you need it it could be too late. It can be used offensively to ram them, but this carries risks too - it immobilizes you for the duration of the shield's pulsations, and sometimes it doesn't even work and the enemy or its shots go right through the shield and destroy you!

The second round is just a repeat of the first round, but you have double the firepower. Both rounds have some tricks to score extra points, but it's peanuts compared to what you can get later. Except for one trick which I've never been able to pull off and is probably a glitch - shooting three aliens in rapid succession during the right animation frames gets you a massive 200,000 points!

The next round introduces the phoenixes, large, swooping birds in an eternal cycle of fluidly animated birth, life, and rebirth. Until you shoot a laser up their smug little beaks.

Despite their predictable motion patterns, it is difficult to hit them at any part of their sinusoidal flight paths except at the very crests, which tends to put you in the corner where you are most vulnerable.

Some decent points can be scored here by clipping the birds' wings before finishing them off. The payoff is random and not worth taking unnecessary risks to pursue, but if the opportunity presents, go for it.

Round 4 is just a repeat of round 3 except the birds are pink.

The final round is an attack on the mothership, whose outer hull and inner shield must be blasted apart before landing a shot on the purple commander. You've got three zones of death here - the center, where the mothership fires, and as usual the corners, where you can only escape in one direction when things get hot. The flier support will do its best to drive you into these danger zones!

This fight offers the real jackpot - 8000+ points - and it's risky but well worth it, even if you lose a life in the process. The mothership descends throughout the stage, and each pixel it advances not only makes its bullets harder to dodge, but also shields the fliers from your own bullets, making them deadlier as well. To score big, you must allow it to descend to the lowest point possible before landing the killing shot!

One pixel higher and you get nothing.

Easier said than done, but the best method is to punch away at the center hull early on while it's still possible to dodge the return fire, and then chip away at the rotating shield from the edge where you're safer, and cannot accidentally hit the commander. Kill the fliers when you can - the more you can kill, the less you'll have to deal with while waiting out the mothership's final descent.

I was only able to clear a single loop before feeling done with this game - once again, I think I'd have had more patience and more will to improve had I covered this game years ago rather than now.

GAB rating: Above average. In a way, Phoenix feels like an evolutionary dead-end, building on Space Invaders and Galaxian in areas that the industry wasn't quite ready for. It's a visual spectacle, and offers a gameplay variety that anticipates Gorf of the following year, but I can't help feel the overall experience is a bit unpolished. Galaxian consistently rewarded precision and strategy, but the chaotic enemy movements and sometimes unreliable hit detection make Phoenix feel random and frustrating. And the longer a round goes on without thinning out the enemies, the worse it exacerbates. It's worth playing, but it isn't my favorite.

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Game 199: Congo Bongo

I'm very curious what Sega was thinking here. "Donkey Kong made a killing nearly two years ago. What if we remade it with Zaxxon's hardware, in isometric perspective?"

To be fair, it's not exactly the same as Donkey Kong. For one, you're not trying to rescue a damsel in distress or do anything noble. You're after revenge.

See how you like the destruction of your habitat.

The Donkey Kong motif only really holds up for one level too. Verticality quickly becomes de-emphasized, and the fourth, final level feels more like Frogger.

When I played Zaxxon, I had some issues with its 3D collision detection, and although Congo Bongo mostly avoids Zaxxon's problem with ambiguous positions of objects relative to the terrain (although the falling coconuts can be tricky to judge), hitboxes are a bigger problem given that you have to maneuver around enemies closely and can't just shoot them from far away. It's often just not very clear where you can stand and not get killed. One time I even slid off a ledge while walking parallel to it!

I beat the loop once, but couldn't finish the first level on the second loop, and didn't feel motivated at all to try again and do better.

GAB rating: Average. Congo Bongo's biggest issue is that the stage design is a bit dull. Three of the four levels are almost completely flat, which on one hand avoids potential difficulties in wondering where the platforms and ledges exist in 3D space, but it doesn't make them very interesting to look at or play. If the levels had been more inspired, I might have felt more inclined to master its frustrating collision detection and enemy movement patterns, but alas, I didn't.

I have to wonder if Congo Bongo was popular in the UK. In a few years, sidescrolling became the de facto standard for platformers by both US and Japanese developers and stayed that way for the better part of two decades, but around the same time, axonometric platformers like Congo Bongo became a regional phenomena closely associated with the ZX Spectrum, much in the way that sidescrolling platformers became associated with the NES.

Friday, April 24, 2020

Game 178: Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom

Sega is well known for their trailblazing and often ahead-of-their-time work in 3D video game graphics. Even Zaxxon, their breakout video game and earliest whale on this blog, explored the use of pseudo-3D axonometric perspective long before it was commonplace. Before the age of emulation, this was lost on me; my first exposure to the company name was through the Sega Genesis, which to me was basically an upgraded NES, with similar sidescrolling action games but with much improved visuals, audio, and slicker, zippier gameplay. Their achievements in 3D graphics continued in the arcades, and spilled over a bit into the Genesis' library, but this did not characterize my view of the platform the way that 2D sidescrollers did.

Zoom 909, released internationally as Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom (with zero connections to the long running multimedia franchise except the cabinet artwork), is the second Sega whale, and takes 3D perspective to the next level, offering a speedy third person perspective with parallax scrolling starfields in the space stages, convincing 3D terrain and obstacles in planet surface and trench stages, and some not so convincing sprite scaling effects everywhere. This isn't the first game to offer this kind of perspective, but no such game before it has been so steadily fast, or had so much stuff going on at once. This is very much an ahead of its time game, which isn't really a good thing.

Planet of Zoom plays like a rail shooter, though your relative freedom of movement depends on the stage type. Space zones control like Star Fox, with free up-down-left-right movement, but your general direction is ever forwards-moving. Trench stages are largely about lateral manuevers to avoid obstacles, with very limited up and down movement. Planet surface stages allow turning in any direction, though there's nothing on these planets to make them worth exploring. All stages allow you to adjust your engine speeds in a range from 1 to 99, but this ability is easily forgotten.

The pseudo-3D graphics are powered by an upgraded version of the PCB that powered Sega's Turbo in 1981, now running at 60fps instead of 30, with 1024 onscreen colors, and a 512 pixel wide resolution. The sprite scaling, unfortunately, is this game's Achilles heel. Unlike Turbo, where objects were always on the road, Zoom's got free-flying objects of every altitude zipping about all over the place, and consequently the game's representation of 3D space makes no sense at all.

Sprites routinely overlap your spaceship when they should be in the distance. Even shadows of the enemy ships, seen during trench and planet surface stages, will overlap your ship. The schizophrenic 3D collision detection allows you to pass right through some obstacles, while others will kill you for being in the same time zone, and judging objects' depths is impossible even in the stages where they cast shadows on the ground. In the above shot, just how big are those space mines anyway? Are they just utterly ginormous, or did I get hit by one in the foreground? In most of the stages you can also forget about shooting enemies accurately; just keep firing and you'll hit what you hit.

Make it to the eighth sector, and you fight a very large but pathetically easy boss, if your brain can handle the nonsensical perspective where your ship and your missiles are drawn behind it despite also being in front of it.

Sega's "VCO Object" hardware, used for the last time in this game, supposedly involves analog sprite scaling circuitry, but that could have fooled me. Sprites do not scale smoothly, but "step" through a small number of discrete sizes. This is extremely obvious in the boss stage, but evident with all sprites except for explosions, which do scale smoothly. I thought at first this might be an emulation issue, but video footage of real hardware shows this is accurate.

Zoom is one of few arcade games of its time that allow continuing from your current location on a game over. Unusually, continuing does not reset your score, making a high score achievement completely pointless. Anyone, with enough quarters, can get a high score no matter how badly they play. It doesn't take very long to flip the score counter either; I managed on round three.

GAB rating: Below Average. Planet of Zoom might be historically important, and its presentation may be unprecedented, but like its hardware predecessor Turbo, it does not play well at all. I'd go as far as to call it mechanically broken, and perhaps saved from a Bad rating only by merit of being a rather easy game, which isn't good, but I'd rather a game be too easy than be hard for the wrong reasons.

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Sunday, March 8, 2026

Superauthenticity: Arcade game aspect ratios

Atari

Breakout

Centipede

Star Wars

Marble Madness

Paperboy

Gauntlet

Namco

Galaxian

Pac-Man

Dig Dug

Xevious

Pole Position

Midway

Wizard of Wor

Tapper

Spy Hunter

Konami

Super Cobra

Frogger

Gyruss

Rush'n Attack

Gradius

Nintendo

Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong Junior

Popeye

Mario Bros.

Williams

Defender

Robotron: 2084

Joust

Sega

Zaxxon

Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom

Space Harrier

Capcom

1942

Commando

Ghosts 'n Goblins