Even though almost every Universal game is derivative, I have to give
them credit for not just making the same game again and again, tempting
as it must have been once they hit gold with Mr. Do! Cosmic Avenger
took after Konami's Scramble, Lady Bug after Pac-Man, Mr. Do! after Dig
Dug, and Mr. Do's Castle, their first true sequel, takes after... their
own Space Panic?
Space
Panic, even though it's one of Universal's few original designs, and
considered by some to be the first arcade platformer ever, was a pretty
miserable experience, with unreliable controls, inconsistent gameplay
mechanics, and excessively random enemy AI in a gameplay loop that
depends on you being able to manipulate their behavior. Mr. Do's Castle
has all of these problems too, and yet, it improves just enough to be a
pretty fun experience, if a sometimes frustrating one.
Mr.
Do's apparently gotten himself a sweet castle, and finds himself
invaded by unicorns out for his blood. Sometimes a clown just can't
catch a break.
Trading his superball for a hammer, Mr. Do can't
reliably kill unicorns with it directly. You can try - sometimes it
works, most of the time it just knocks them back, but there's a pretty
good chance that you'll miss entirely and get killed. The simplest way
is to smash the floor out so it falls and crushes the unicorns below,
but for that to work you'll need a good lead on them and also puzzle out
a way to position yourself so that their pathfinding makes them walk
underneath you.
Perfect, the red unicorn must walk under the cherry block to reach the ladder.
Not so great, the unicorns will just climb the ladder on the right to get you.
The
unicorns can also be slowed down by breaking the floor behind you so
that they fall in, buying you a bit of time before they wiggle out and
continue their pursuit. You can even whack them over the head, making
them fall down a level, but I rarely found this technique useful; it
makes them angry and faster, and leaves a hole in the floor of your
castle, which ultimately impedes your traversal more than it impedes the
unicorns'.
This technique is where Mr. Do's Castle feels closest
to Space Panic, but where in Space Panic this was difficult but
necessary to pull off, here it's easy but not often very useful. A stuck
unicorn blocks your movement, but not other unicorns, so it
won't do much to get a conga line off your tail, nor does it often trap
individuals long enough to kill them.
A more useful technique is
to employ skull trap bridges. There are several methods of triggering
them, but the most basic is to drop a skull on one side while being
pursued, keep crossing the bridge, drop a cherry block behind you, and
then drop the other skull block while a unicorn is stuck in the hole you
just created. Preferably while another unicorn or two is stepping on
its face.
This collapses the bridge, sending any unicorn in the gap you made crashing down with it. Occasionally other unicorns standing on
falling cherry blocks get crushed too, but it's unreliable. This, for
some reason, leaves a perfectly usable bridge behind, so you'll want to
make sure you have an escape plan before doing this. All too often you
can find yourself stuck between two survivors on both sides of the
bridge and with no way out.
The diagonal ladders can be
pushed from the top to change their orientation, effectively
reconfiguring the maze and making the unicorns alter their paths. This
is often crucial to setting up an effective trap. It reminds me a lot of
Lady Bug and its revolving doors that reconfigure the maze in a similar
manner.
To really score big points, though, you need to smash the
three key blocks. This releases a shield, which you can collect to turn
the unicorns into the EXTRA-spelling alpha monsters.
Tempting
as it may be to camp by the shield and wait for the unicorns to get
close before snagging it, it's usually better to get it as soon as
possible. The longer you delay, the less time they'll be transformed
(and the faster the survivors of your murder spree will be), so it's
more effective to get it quickly and then hunt them down.
Take too long to clear a level, and you'll start having to deal with deadly blue unicorns, who ramp up their speed fast
and can multiply. This happens very soon after the scene is down to its
last unicorn, so always have a plan to kill the last two quickly.
GAB rating: Good.
Mr. Do's Castle is a tough, fun, and often satisfying puzzle platformer
that mostly fixes the Space Panic formula by completely revamping the
gameplay. I mentioned earlier that the weaknesses of its inspiration
aren't completely gone - there are no dropped inputs, but
occasionally the game interprets them wrongly, especially taking "up"
not to mean "climb up the ladder a few pixels to your left" but "walk
off the ledge to your right," which is a frustrating way to lose a life.
AI, though a far cry from the infuriating randomness of Space Panic,
can sometimes behave inconsistently, throwing off your best laid plans,
and collision detection can be maddeningly inconsistent, with even the
attract mode demonstrating a method of crushing unicorns that rarely
works in actual gameplay.
Compared to Mr. Do!, Mr. Do's Castle is
slower and more methodical, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But
where Mr. Do's gameplay often led to crazy sequences of events unfolding to
your benefit in unexpected ways, Mr. Do's Castle is more about planning
moves out, and when something unexpected happens, it usually throws a
wrench in your plans. Or less often, a desperate tactic that usually
fails, like hitting a unicorn directly with your hammer, just happens to
work when you had no other choice.
Mr. Do would return for two
more games in 1984; Mr. Do's Wild Ride, and Do! Run Run, which in
Universal's fashion played little like each other or prior games, but
would never be seen again outside of a licensed Neo Geo remake in
1996. Universal would bow out of the video game industry in 1985 and
continue their primary business of pachinko and slot machines, which
still operates today.
Talk about a turnaround. Right after churning out a baker’s dozen worth of underperforming mediocrity, Universal produced the very decent Pac-Man inspired Lady Bug, and the next year released Mr. Do!, a brilliantly insane Dig Dug derivative, which would be hands-down their greatest video game hit.
The monitor art, the best part of many Universal titles, is kinda blah this time.
Before playing the more familiar version of Mr. Do, I tried out an earlier version featuring a pitchfork-wielding snowman character. Sources are conflicted on whether this is the Japanese version or a prototype – either way, the only gameplay difference I could tell is that this early version lacks gobblers (more on those later), which makes it a lot easier to bag valuable alpha monsters (also more on those later). The snowman does have a neat head-asploding death animation.
The OG snowman still appears in the final version of the game, on the title screen when you insert tokens.
At first glance, Mr. Do! doesn’t look much different from Dig Dug. You’re a clown instead of whatever the hell Dig Dug is, you drop apples on the heads of dinosaurs instead of dropping boulders on the heads of dragons and whatever the hell a Pooka is, you throw a SuperBall at enemies instead of bursting their innards with a bike pump, you collect snacky cakes instead of vegetables, etc. You’re likely to notice the bunches of cherries you can collect as an alternate means of finishing the stage, as if Dig Dug merged with Pac-Man, which if collected in an uninterrupted sequence play a do-re-mi scale and award 500 bonus points. Before long you’ll also discover that enemies can easily outrun Mr. Do, and finding ways to cope undoubtedly gives this a steep learning curve.
Ultimately, Mr. Do is faster, more chaotic, and more challenging than any of its immediate sources, but also more varied, strategically deeper, and, I find, more fun.
At the crux of the differences between Mr. Do and Dig Dug are the primary weapons. Mr. Do’s ball is much more powerful than Dig Dug’s bike pump – it kills instantly, has unlimited range and navigates tunnels on its own, but also has a cooldown which gets subsequently longer each time you successfully kill a dinosaur with it, and it can be difficult to predict where the ball will wind up going if you throw it down branches or diagonal tunnels. You can become helpless if you rely on the ball too much, or if it bounces somewhere unexpected.
Task failed successfully?
The escalating delay, though, combined with the dinosaurs' quick gait, is what really means you can't rely on just the SuperBall to carry you through a level, as a novice Dig Dug player using low risk, low reward playing style could rely exclusively on the bike pump to last a reasonably long time. After you've killed three or more enemies with the ball, it will take a dangerously long time to reappear in your hands, leaving you defenseless against any enemies that get close to you. Even if you're just going for the cherries, that means walking around the entire level and probably having to kill most of the dinosaurs in the process. You'll need to kill with the apples, and the more you can take out with a single drop, the better.
There's an incredibly useful apple technique, which feels exploitative, but it's used during the attract mode. By digging a tunnel one tile's distance underneath an apple, letting it fall behind you, and then pushing it back just a few pixels into an overhang, you'll block enemies from pursuing. They'll tend to get stuck under the apple, their pathfinding routine completely broken, and when several have gathered you can push it all the way, crushing them and making your life easier.
It's not a perfectly reliable trick. Sometimes the enemies will wander away seeking another path, and if an enemy can't figure out a way to reach you, it will eventually get angry and start digging its own path, which can take a distressingly short amount of time on later levels. That said, once I had figured out how to use this trick, my average play times almost instantly doubled, and my scores tripled.
There there's the alpha monsters, who really push this game's risk/reward factor through the roof. Like in Lady Bug, you'll be rewarded with an extra life if you can spell EXTRA, and instantly finish the level to boot. This time, instead of collecting coins, these Teletubby-like creatures with letters on their torsos will spawn at the top of the screen, awarding you the letter on a successful kill. You want those letters, even if you have to go out of your way to collect them, and you can make them spawn in one of two ways.
First, every time your score surpasses a multiple of 5,000 points, an alpha monster spawns. This can actually discourage high scoring moves! Suppose you've got 9,900 points and are only 100 points away from an alpha monster - a 6,000 point scoring move would take you all the way to 15,900 points, skipping the 10,000 point mark entirely and spawn only one alpha monster. If you can, it's better to collect a few cherries, kill the alpha monster, and then go for the big crush for a lot of points which will hopefully spawn a second one.
The second method is perhaps the more interesting one. When all of the dinosaurs have spawned, they'll leave behind a piece of junk food in their lair, much like Lady Bug's beetles and their vegetables. Collecting it freezes the dinosaurs in place and spawns an alpha monster following a conga line of "gobblers" which remind me of cookie monster.
Gobblers eat any apples in their way, even mid-fall, making it risky to try to crush them. Killing the alpha monster transforms all of the gobblers into short-lived apples and unfreezes the dinosaurs - be careful that you don't kill the alpha monster when you're in a vulnerable spot. Also note that you can't spawn a second alpha monster by collecting the junk food when there's already one on the screen - this just spawns gobblers - and if collecting it takes you past the 5,000 multiple point mark, you waste that alpha monster spawn chance.
The attract mode also shows that dropping apples will sometimes leave behind diamonds, worth 8,000 points and a free game, but in nearly eight hours of play, I never saw that happen once.
GAB rating: Good
This one took some time to appreciate - there's so much going on that it can feel overwhelming and unfocused, and made me long for the relative simplicity of Dig Dug. But with practice, I came to enjoy the manic, unforgiving gameplay, the variety, and the thrill of seeing an awesome sequence of events unfold to my benefit, whether because of skill, strategy, or sheer dumb luck. Mr. Do is a great golden age arcade classic, and I award it a harpoon.
Once again, Universal ripped off a successful formula, though for once it isn’t a space game.
Surprise! After that poor showing last week, this game’s pretty good, and stands out from its source material once you look past the surface.
The biggest addition to the Pac-Man formula here is the revolving doors, which are barriers for the beetles but rotate 90 degrees when you enter them. Data East’s Lock ‘n’ Chase and Exidy’s Mouse Trap also had maze manipulation mechanics, but this is the best one of them all, and lends itself well to strategic gameplay. The beetles are random and stupid compared to the Pac-Man monsters, but there aren’t any power pills just lying around – just some skull tokens that will neutralize a beetle (or ladybug) that wanders onto it, and in later levels they can outrun you. You will need to make smart use of the doors to keep the beetles away from yourself and from the places you want to be.
The beetles spawn gradually, on a visible timer, and it’s quite possible to clear the earlier mazes before all four leave their home. When they do, though, a vegetable is left unguarded. Collecting it scores big points and also freezes the beetles in place for far too short a duration. Given how randomly the beetles move, they tend to converge near the center of the screen, making the vegetable very dangerous to grab. It doesn’t even make you invulnerable, and you can screw yourself if a stalker traps you in its alcove.
Could say I’m in a pickle.
An important scoring element, which seems to be somewhat pinball-inspired, is the six colored tokens that start on each board, three with letters, and three with hearts. The tokens cycle through three colors with corresponding values; red for half a second (800 points), green for 2 ½ seconds (300 points), and blue for seven seconds (100 points). Collecting a heart while it’s blue will raise a multiplier up to a maximum value of 5x, which applies to all tokens and dots, but sadly not to vegetables. In addition, collecting the letters EXTRA while green awards a bonus life and completes the level, and collecting the letters SPECIAL while red awards a wedding ceremony scene and a free credit.
For a decent score, you want to get the hearts as soon as possible, and definitely while they’re blue, to raise your multiplier to 5x before getting any of the letters. Hypothetically, the optimal scoring method is to collect the letters needed to spell EXTRA while they’re green, and collecting the rest (including duplicate EXTRA letters) while they’re red, but it is incredibly difficult to reliably snatch up the letters during the split-second of being red unless you camp by them and wait, which gives the beetles time to spawn and overwhelm you. I found it easier and in the long run better for my score to eat up dots nearby said letters and go for them when they change color, usually settling for green. I wasn’t concerned about spelling SPECIAL; it’s an uncommon occurrence that you even get all those letters in a game, and the free credit doesn’t help your score anyway.
GAB rating: Good. Uncharacteristically good for Universal, and the only Pac-Man clone, apart from Ms. Pac-Man, to give the original a run for its money.
Universal occupies a strange place in video game history. The first time I heard of them, I was reading about Space Panic – allegedly the first platformer preceding Donkey Kong, and sort of free-associated with Universal Studios, who unsuccessfully sued Nintendo for trademark infringement over that game. In truth, this Universal is a Japanese coin-op machine manufacturer, and their business has historically been in pachinko, slots, and related gaming hardware, and are obscure to western mainstream video game consumers. Among arcade machine collectors' circles, they have a reputation for beautiful cabinets housing mostly lackluster games. ACAM, notably, has a Universal lineup with the entire set of titles released in the U.S.
By cross referencing lists on MAME, Mobygames, and the Wikipedia article about current holding company Universal Entertainment Corporation, we get the idea that video games were a brief but intense blip in the company’s history.
1978 to 1980 were their most productive years in terms of sheer output, dominated by a “Cosmic series” of space-themed video games seeking a piece of the Space Invaders pie. In 1981, production slowed down but quality improved, with only two games released that year, Cosmic Avenger and Lady Bug. In 1982 they released their greatest hit, Mr. Do! Three sequels followed, and then in 1985 Universal bowed out of the video games market with their final release Indoor Soccer, which saw more success as a port to 8-bit European microcomputers than it did as a coin-op arcade game. More than a decade later, a Mr. Do! remake surfaced on the Neo Geo MVS arcade system. Sources conflict on whether Universal authored or merely licensed it, but this was their only post-1985 involvement in video games until they were merged into SNK’s holding company Aruze Corporation in 2005, which in turn renamed themselves Universal Entertainment Corporation in 2009.
Scan by FlyerFever
Mobygames lists four 1978 credits, but only one, UFO, is an original, and it is unemulated. An English language flyer describes a Breakout/pinball hybrid. Hypothetically, this could be emulated in MAME someday, as the flyer advertises being powered by a CPU rather than discrete logic chips.
The three others are publishing credits for Nintendo’s Computer Othello, and Japan distribution of Exidy’s Circus and Ramtek’s Clean Sweep.
Their first title of 1979, and their earliest emulated game, begins the Cosmic series.
Cosmic Monsters & Cosmic Monsters II
You lost your gun, hon.
If UFO managed to subvert the expectation that every first-generation Japanese video game developer must get their foot in the door by completely ripping off Breakout, then Cosmic Monsters doubles down on that other expectation; that said company must follow up by completely ripping off Space Invaders. I don’t know if they had some kind of licensing deal with Taito, but Cosmic Monsters is, in MAME parlance, a clone of Space Invaders, running on the same hardware and using modified ROMs. Apart from the Flash Gordon-esque artwork and minor graphic differences, the only difference I can tell is that the UFO comes very infrequently, is easier to hit, and if you don’t shoot it down you are punished with an additional row of invaders.
This is followed by Cosmic Monsters II. I can’t figure out what makes this any different from the first one. The title screen even just says “Cosmic Monsters,” just like the first one!
Adding to the mystery, a flyer for Cosmic Monsters depicts a dial, rather than a joystick, but otherwise describes gameplay exactly as it occurs in Space Invaders, including its UFO behavior and scoring values, which are different in what I played. Meanwhile, a flyer for Cosmic Monsters II accurately describes the UFO behavior seen in both games.
On top of that, MAME calls the first game “Cosmic Monsters version II,” and the second game “Cosmic Monsters 2.” Normally that wouldn’t be noteworthy – versions and sequels are distinct concepts, but all of the incongruities here make me wonder if these are even different games.
Forgetting about MAME for a second, we have two indistinguishable games, both called “Cosmic Monsters” ingame. There exists a flyer for “Cosmic Monsters” which does not accurately describe either, but there also exists a flyer for “Cosmic Monsters II” which accurately describes both. My preferred hypothesis is that the first flyer depicts and describes a mockup or prototype that differs from the final version, which was later rebranded as “Cosmic Monsters II” with an updated flyer but without any meaningful software changes.
I can’t really think of these early efforts as games distinguishable from Space Invaders. They don’t get numbers or GAB ratings.
Game 159: Galaxy Wars
Later that year, Universal showed an inkling of originality. Galaxy Wars plays like a hybrid of Space Race and Space Invaders. The similarities to Space Race are pretty strong, but inexact, and could be coincidental as I don’t know if that game had ever been released in Japan.
Not officially part of the Cosmic series, but the artwork is suitably sci-fi pulpy.
Rather than shooting the invaders, you launch a rocket at them, and have to dodge meteorites along the way up as well as their fire. In a glaring violation of common sense for the sake of gameplay, you lose a life if the invaders shoot down your rocket mid-flight, but not if your rocket hits them.
How nice, it says GOOD! after a successful wave.
At first I thought this wasn’t too bad. But I got bored with it long before my first (and only) game ended. Meteorite density is low, there’s not much challenge, and there’s no time pressure or competitive element here as in Space Race, which also had the good sense to end after 100 seconds of play, which is still a longer amount of time that Galaxy Wars was fun.
GAB rating: Bad. It’s playable, just boring as sin.
Their last game of 1979, “Cosmic Guerilla,” solidified that this “Cosmic series” was going to be a thing. I didn’t play it long enough to critique, but let’s just admire the artwork overlay.
Game 160: Cosmic Alien
In 1980, Universal released four games in the Cosmic series alone, starting with this one.
Oh good, now we’re ripping off Galaxian! But what’s with all the demonic imagery on the monitor overlay?
Last guy… HOLY CRAP!
I found it quite a bit easier than Galaxian – the enemies aren’t nearly as aggressive or unpredictable. On subsequent rounds you start off some rows closer to the action giving you less breathing room, but it peaks at round 7, at which point the demon starts moving across the screen between rounds like a ring girl carrying the round number sign.
I made it to screen 9 before losing my last life, mostly from losing focus out of being a bit bored.
GAB rating: Below Average. It’s like Galaxian but slower, uglier, easier, and more boring.
If that wasn't enough devil for you, their next Cosmic game is called “Devil Zone.”
And rips off Radar Scope.
I didn’t play this very much. I did briefly play the next one “Zero Hour,” and it’s a full-fledged vertical shmup, the earliest one I’ve seen yet, featuring 8-way directional movement, a rapid fire gun, and a Lunar Lander-like bonus round where you land the ship precisely for extra points. But the controls are sluggish, and overall I didn’t find it interesting enough to play in-depth. Universal also released four games unrelated to the Cosmic series this year; Cheeky Mouse, Magical Spot, Magical Spot II, and No Man’s Land. I played none of them.
Universal’s final game of 1980 is the seventh Cosmic game, and certainly the most influential.
Game 161: Space Panic
Tanktics author Chris Crawford describes this as a platformer, preceding Donkey Kong by a year. I’m not convinced for sure that it had any influence on Donkey Kong – it’s certainly possible that Shigeru Miyamoto copied its ladders and tiered-platform design, but it’s just as possible that he came up with that design independently.
What seems quite impossible to handwave as a coincidence is how this game, with its mechanic about digging holes in platforms in order to trap your enemies, so closely anticipates Broøderbund’s Apple II classic Lode Runner. Said company even published an unauthorized port as Apple Panic prior to Lode Runner.
The ladder-and-girder stage design also compels me to rethink an assumption I made recently about BurgerTime. I had once thought that its ladder mechanics must have been inspired by Donkey Kong, but its gameplay and perfectly orthogonal stage design much more strongly resemble Space Panic.
Space Panic’s broad concept of digging holes to trap aliens may have been influenced by earlier game Heiankyo Alien, but given the lack of concrete similarities between these games, and also considering Heiankyo Alien’s obscurity, this could be coincidental.
Either way, kudos to Universal for making something original. Sadly, like so many of their games so far, Space Panic isn’t very good. It looks mediocre, controls badly with frequently ignored commands, and the chaotic randomness of how the aliens move ultimately means that the best strategy becomes surrounding yourself with holes and praying that things go your way before oxygen runs out. The space monsters, which look like rejected Pac-Man designs, seem to be indifferent to the location of the player or any holes you’ve dug. They show some preference for moving your direction when on the same level as you, but otherwise just bumble blindly around the level, roaming wherever they will, which often means bouncing back and forth between two ladders for the better part of an eternity while your oxygen levels run ever closer to zero.
Later rounds introduce Bosses and Dons, who take a bit more planning to kill, as burying them only drops them a level, and to finish them off you must drop them multiple levels by digging holes directly above other holes in pixel-perfect alignment, and hoping that they wander into the holes you dug on the higher levels first (and that you can scramble up there to bury them before they escape, and without getting eaten). Improperly disposing of a ditched enemy can also promote it to the next rank.
GAB rating: Bad. It may be original, but an unforgiving game like must have reliable controls, consistent mechanics, and at least some sort of AI pattern that you can influence, and Space Panic hasn’t got any of this. It’s just a tedious, frustrating experience, one that’s frequently ruined because your space man refused to turn around, dig, or climb a ladder at the exact moment you needed him to.
Game 162: Cosmic Avenger
Heading into 1981, we have Universal’s final Cosmic game, and we go right back to ripping off other space shooters, this time Konami’s Scramble.
Like other Universal games, this isn’t an exact carbon copy of its inspiration. You do have bombs as in Scramble, but this time your speed affects their falling arc, which is tricky to master but can be used to hit ground targets well ahead of you. Speaking of which, the movement system is kind of strange; unlike Scramble, where lateral movement was limited to increasing or decreasing your forward velocity, you have true 8-way movement and can effectively move backwards to an extent, but the forward scrolling speed also depends on how far your ship is from the left edge of the screen; move as far right as the game allows, and everything will fly by at top speed. Move as far left as possible, and things will scroll fairly slowly, giving you time to react and shoot at stuff ahead of you, but moving forward will speed things up again. You can’t just hang out on the left edge all the time, though, as sometimes UFOs will ambush you from behind, giving you no time to react. Radar, possibly influenced by Defender, will warn you of impending threats from either direction, but splitting your attention can be just as dangerous as ignoring it.
Possibly the biggest difference from Scramble is that explosions can destroy things, including you. So many shmups let you blast incoming missiles at point blank range and cruise through the debris unscathed, but in Cosmic Avenger this will probably kill you, and it’s better to take them out from as far away as you can, or if it’s too late, to dodge them. Taking out a large number of targets in a chain reaction of explosions is pretty satisfying, though, and is something you don’t often see in this genre.
There are only three phases, per loop, compared to Scramble’s six, but they’re much more difficult.
GAB rating: Average. It’s Universal’s best effort yet, but weird controls, repetitive stage design, and bad hit detection combined with high difficulty hold it back.
Playing the games that make up this post was an interesting experience, even if ultimately none of them were very good. I'll say this for Universal - it's kind of impressive that they blatantly ripped off at least four games from four different developers in only three years!
We're not quite done with this company yet, and the games get better from here on.
