Data Driven Gamer: Williams Electronics

Showing posts with label Williams Electronics. Show all posts

Thursday, September 25, 2025

Game 457: Sinistar

Of the four original releases by LucasFilm, Koronis Rift is the only one whose lead designer, Noah Falstein, has a Wikipedia page and a pre-LucasFilm career described there. Notably, his juvenilia includes the unfinished simulation Koronis Strike: A Simulation of Mining and Combat in the Asteroid Belt, from which Koronis Rift borrows the left side of the title, and his first game as a lead designer at Williams Electronics borrows the rest of it.

Sinistar's prototype logo looked more... sinister

Two pieces of advice for anyone who wants to play Sinistar. One, use an analog stick - it's unconventional for the genre of multidirectional shooters, but Sinistar had a joystick with three levels of pressure sensitivity, and being a Williams game, expected an accordingly precise level of finesse from you. Second, play the easier AMOA-82 prototype version - it's a little buggier, has some missing animations, and Sinistar will call you a coward for doing it, but you might actually last five minutes. And don't worry - it's just as deadly as any other Williams classic, only much stingier with bonus lives.

Not good!

With its radar view reminiscent of Defender, Sinistar continues the house design of moderately complex, high-intensity shooting action, though there's less going on here overall, with only three types of objects to encounter, plus yourself and Sinistar.

Workers are harmless robots attempting to construct Sinistar; a spooky biomechanical construct. Destroying them delays this somewhat, but you can't possibly destroy them all.
Warriors are bots with pivoting turrets. They initially harass you, but the longer you tarry on in a sector, the more numerous, aggressive, and accurate they become, to the point where they can be more threatening than Sinistar himself.
Planetoids are resource-rich astronomical objects which the workers mine for the materials needed to build Sinistar, or that you need in order to destroy him.

Shooting planetoids releases crystals which you can collect to obtain sinibombs; a homing weapon which destroys Sinistar (sinibombs also destroy my wife, so she tells me). But the workers can steal them to accelerate the construction, and it's tempting to chase them down but this is probably a waste of time. Ultimately, it's a race against the workers to obtain enough sinibombs before they finish building him - it takes 13, but you'll want more than that in case some don't land.

Herein lies the most significant difference between the prototype and commercial versions. In the prototype, the planetoids are far more generous with their crystal output. Time after time in my initial attempts with the final revision, I just couldn't shake off enough crystals to take on Sinistar by the time he announced himself (Beware, I live!). And this is effectively a game over; you can't survive long once he starts hounding you, much less mine crystals under that pressure, and even if you have more lives, Sinistar does not reset his state when you respawn, nor do you replenish sinibombs, and he'll just eat you again within seconds.

I did have a bit more luck by camping close to Sinistar's construction site - workers tend to accumulate en masse there where they present as targets of opportunity, but I still couldn't beat the first zone reliably until I switched to the prototype version. And then in that version, I could never beat the third sector dubbed "Warrior Zone," which features increased spawn rates of, you guessed it, Warriors.

Reportedly, Williams' executives demanded a higher difficulty to increase quarter collections. Somewhere out there, there must be an idealized ROM set that has the feature completeness of the final version but the original difficulty curve intact.

Here's a video of my best attempt on the prototype version, where I score almost 124,000 points.

GAB rating: Average

Sadly, this one ends Williams' perfect run of ivory deck entries. Points for a novel gameplay concept and a very cool-looking and sounding villain, but Sinistar is hard for the wrong reasons. Defender, like its successors, was ruthless but kind of fair about it, and I enjoyed the process of mastering its controls and mechanics until I could get a respectable score. Sinistar is too fast, too fiddly, too zoomed-in to get a sense of what's going on, and too unforgiving. The radar is little use; the way it is positioned, if you're looking at it, you're not looking at the main screen, and something on it will kill you while your attention is diverted. And if you are looking at the main screen, something will zip onto it from offscreen and blast you quicker than anyone can react.

It occurred to me while complaining about Sinistar's tight-fisted approach to bonus lives that it is lacking a certain quality that some of the best arcade games of the golden era had, and earlier Williams games did quite well. There's not very much in the way of secondary, bonus point-scoring objectives! Defender, Stargate, and Robotron had humans to rescue, which was always secondary to destroying your enemies and totally optional in Robotron, but awarded the bulk of your points and was well worth pursuing for the bonus lives it would accrue. Joust had its eggs and bonus rounds with special objectives. But in Sinistar, by far the largest point-award is for destroying Sinistar which is what you're trying to do anyway. And sure, you can farm some extra points by sabotaging the construction zone with some early sinibombs, but it's not worth that much, and probably not worth it past the first zone. I had thought about the possibility of improving Sinistar with easier bonus lives, but with fairly one-dimensional goals (destroy Sinistar for points and progress), what would really be the point? Your main source of points is playing the game to beat the levels, and either you play well enough to gain them faster than you lose them, or more likely, you don't.

Next post we'll be back on the LucasFilm chronology with Falstein's first product for the newly founded team, and their last on the Atari platform.

Friday, January 24, 2020

Game 146: Joust

In the days of old, when knights were bold, and sports were quite insano
They’d mount their buzzards, and joust each other, inside a live volcano

This might just be the weirdest premise for an arcade game that I’ve played yet. Not only do you joust a series of buzzard-riding knights, but each foe that you dismount, which is done simply by bumping into them while higher in the air, turns into an egg, which if not collected will eventually hatch into a more dangerous opponent. And on top of that, there are lava trolls and pterodactyls to contend with!

Controlling your feathered steed is intuitive but challenging. Your only inputs are a two-way joystick and a single button for flapping your wings, and you can expect this button to give your finger a good workout. Maintaining stability and control is really important, as you can easily accelerate to speeds that you can’t quickly reverse from without landing, which puts you at a height disadvantage.

The true appeal of Joust, I think, comes from its co-op mode. The phrase “co-op” must come with an asterisk here; you not only score points by defeating your partner, but occasionally the game will declare a “gladiator” round where the first player to do so gains a 3,000 point bounty. It’s not worth it, I think, as you can score far more than 3,000 points on a single life.

I played some rounds with “B.”

Some observations we made:

Opponents seem to have an ever so slight height advantage over you – I got killed more than once when I was certain my lance was a pixel above theirs.
Allowing each player control over their own arena territory prevents accidental team kills, and also makes egg retrieval easier, especially during egg waves.
The edges of the screen are dangerous, because opponents can wrap around and surprise-kill you if you aren’t paying very close attention to the opposite edge.
Like Robotron, eggs are worth more the more you collect in a single life, up to a maximum of 1000 points. There is also a 500 point bonus for catching them in the air.
“Team waves” award 3,000 points to each player if neither one killed the other.
Landing instantly kills your downward momentum. If you want to ascend, it can be faster to do this by landing and then flapping than to try to reverse your fall by flapping in mid-air.

GAB rating: Good. The last video game by Williams Electronics that I intend to cover for a while, Joust continues a so-far perfect batting average for the company, who would soon after go on a hiatus from video games to focus on pinball. Played solo, Joust is perhaps a bit too difficult for its own good. Played co-op, it becomes an engaging test of skill and teamwork to overcome your adversaries without bumping into each other, with a little bit of incentivized skullduggery for good measure.

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Game 124: Robotron: 2084

After replaying Robotron: 2084, and with Williams’ Defender and Stargate in recent memory, I’m almost inclined to think of it as the third game in the Defender trilogy. It’s obviously not the same kind of game as those two – while Defender and Stargate were horizontally scrolling shmupoids with five or six different action buttons, Robotron is a single-screen overhead shooter with zero action buttons. And yet there’s a lot that I see in common. The most obvious is the dual goals of destroying enemies and rescuing people, which can often conflict. Robotron doesn’t compel you to rescue people as Defender does, but it’s by far the best way to score points, and by scoring points, gaining sorely needed extra lives. And like Defender, Robotron awards extra lives at regular point intervals, an uncommonly generous design balanced out by the alarming difficulty of holding onto all those lives. It’s a difficulty which feels fairer than most arcade games, but with a very high skill floor, and a good part of that difficulty stems from the sheer amount of deadly chaos on the screen, which was high in Defender, higher still in Stargate, and possibly peak pandemonium on Robotron, being all too happy to throw everything it’s got at you all at once on a single screen.

The first time I heard of and played Robotron was in 1998, when a 3D sequel came out on the Nintendo 64. I was hooked by its simple, addictive gameplay, ingenious control scheme, and intense difficulty, with massive swarms of killer robots, balanced by ample chance to earn huge supplies of extra lives.

Some years later, once I had and understood MAME, I knew I had to give the original a try, but it didn’t quite grab me the same way. I think they key difference is that in Robotron 64, there’s an end game, even if it you have to complete 200 waves to reach it, and it hands out extra lives by the dozen, generous enough that a patient player may actually reach it.

Replaying it now, with more of a score-oriented mindset than a completionist one, I found it much more appealing this time around.

Like Defender, Robotron has a backstory and gameplay instructions in its attract screen, and it’s more animated and in-depth. Few arcade games in the era offered anything of that nature, at best giving instructions and/or plot printed on the side of the bezel.

I wasn’t quite able to reach wave 200, but after wave 10 you’ve seen most of what Robotron: 2084 has to offer, and after that it only gets harder. The waves essentially loop through five types, like so:

1 – Grunts and spheroids (except during the first loop)
2 – Tanks (except during the first loop)
3 – Grunts and spheroids
4 – Hulk mob or grunt mob (except during the first loop)
- Hulks on waves 14, 24, 34, etc.
- Grunts on waves 9, 19, 29, 39, etc.
5 – Brains

Grunts attack by mindlessly moving toward you in large numbers, but they’re not difficult to herd as long as there aren’t other threats (and there always are). They’ll trample electrodes, neutralizing each other. In grunt mob waves, they’ll surround you. The longer the round goes, the faster the grunts move.

Hulks are big, slow, stupid, indestructible nuisances that kill humans and get in the way of you and your laser shots. They don’t seem to have any particular movement pattern, except that they seem to walk in straight lines for some time, and then turn 90 degrees left or right before walking in a straight line again. Shooting pushes them back a bit, not enough to make a huge difference, but you can occasionally push them away from a human for just long enough to rescue them.

Spheroids generate enforcers, which spam projectiles of varying speeds in your direction. The sooner you kill the spheroids, the fewer enforcers you’ll have to deal with, but that’s easier said than done, and often endangers the humans because your attention is diverted from rescuing them.

Quarks should have been called cuboids. The generate tanks, which spam large, rebounding projectiles, often leading you, and often deliberately aimed to make you think the shot will miss, only to hit you on a bank shot. They only appear during tank rounds, and appear in much greater numbers than spheroids do on their respective rounds.

Brains are, I find, the deadliest enemy, as their zig-zagging shots are extremely difficult to dodge or to shoot down. Their ability to enslave humans and turn them against you isn’t nearly as bad – brains move slowly, the converted humans aren’t extremely dangerous, and levels with brains also have lots of humans, which means more points and more extra lives.

GAB rating: Good

What else can I say? Robotron rocks. Creating balanced difficulty is a very tricky thing – when arcade game developers didn’t design a hard playtime limit into their game, they had to err on the side of high difficulty – better that a game be unfair than unprofitable. Defender, Stargate, and Robotron are more chaotic than anything else I’ve looked at here, but through carefully polished design and understated depth, never feel unfair, even at their most blink-and-your-dead intensity. I award it a harpoon, along with Defender, making Vid Kidz a top tier arcade developer of the era, and the first developer of any kind to get two harpoons.

In 1983, Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar would create Blaster, a pseudo-3D, pseudo-sequel to Robotron, set in the year 2085 when the Robotrons have finally exterminated the human race, and you must blast your way through space in the cockpit of a space shuttle in search of a safe haven. Blaster was not a success, and this would be the last game that Jarvis and DeMar would create for Williams Electronics.

Monday, September 23, 2019

Game 90: Stargate

Was there anyone, in 1981, who played Defender and thought, “gee, there ought to be more stuff going on in this game?”

That’s Stargate in a nutshell. Defender with even more stuff in it.

The basics are all there and work as they did before, but now there are more types of enemies, mostly intended to harass you while you fight off the landers, or to provide a fiercer opposition during the mop-up phase. Every five rounds is a dogfight, where you contend against an overwhelming force of new baddies, although none are as nigh-impossible as the swarm of mutants that you’ll have to face if you lose your last humanoid.

To aid you, you’ve got one new weapon; an “Inviso” cloak device, which also makes you invulnerable for a few precious seconds. In fact, the invisibility part is really just a liability, as it prevents you from seeing your ship, but the enemies don’t seem to behave any differently. I had a hard time getting accustomed to using it, much like hyperspace, by the time I knew it could save my hide, it was too late for me to react, and it was difficult to find situations where it could be used proactively.

In addition, the levels have a “Stargate,” which teleports you to any humans in trouble, but also sometimes dumps you right in the path of an oncoming foe. Advanced players can also use the stargate as a level warp by bringing four humans into it, which triggers a hyperspace jump and a big score boost.

During the title screen, you can press a button to view a “secrets” screen with some ingame pointers.

Stargate also allows you to “reinforce” your fleet by inserting two coins before play, which grants 4 additional ships, smart bombs, and seconds of Inviso. I took this option, naturally. There’s no further reinforcing once the game starts, except for the periodic 10,000 point award, carried over from Defender and with the additional bonus of Inviso time.

All of the old enemies return and are as nasty as before. The new ones are:

Space Guppies – Kind of like swarmers, but less aggressive and evasive. But they don’t wait in pods, so they are a more immediate threat to you while hunting landers.
Dynamos – Relatively tame, they regularly spawn slow-moving “Space Hums.” Like bombers, a low priority target, but a bit more threatening as the Space Hums do target you rather than just float around.
Phred and Big Red – Crude Pac-Man parodies, these will sometimes spawn if you are taking too long to finish a level, and will chase you around and spawn smaller “munchies” which also chase you around. I’d rather deal with them than deal with baiters (though Stargate has those too), and Inviso makes short work of them.
Firebombers – The worst new enemy. Big enough targets, but they tend to dodge shots, often move too high for your ship to reach them, and then wrap around to the bottom where they put humanoids in your line of fire. But they can be “pushed” into the middle of the screen by exploiting this behavior, where you have a better chance of gunning them down. They fire rarely, so they aren’t much of a threat when hunting landers, but their projectile is fast and accurate enough to make engaging them risky, and their death explosion sends a shower of particles across the screen, obscuring things like enemy bullets.

In my best attempt I made it to wave 10, where I had to face off against swarms of firebombers, and depleted most of my special weapons in doing so. Wave 11 was just too much; without having multiple bombs or much Inviso, I couldn’t stop the landers from destroying the planet, and then fell to the onslaught of mutants, ending with a score of over 149,000 points, just a few hundred short of a modest reinforcement.

Monday, May 27, 2019

Game 62: Defender

Holy bee turds, this game is intense. You blink, and you’re dead. Focus on trying to stay alive, and before you know it, one of those green space invaders will have scooped up a colonist on the other side of the planet, and then you’ll have no chance of getting there in time to save him. Miss too many shots while trying to mop up a final cloud of tiny hornet-like aliens, whose electron-high hitboxes and erratic weaving patterns make shooting them like trying to snipe at flies buzzing about a cathedral, and the game will spawn another alien, twice as aggressive and just as impossible to hit.

And yet, it doesn’t feel all that unfair. I found that Defender is very generous with awarding extra lives, and most of my deaths were due being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff happening, or to my own carelessness.

The controls and gameplay are complex for an arcade game of this period. A two-direction joystick controls your altitude, and two buttons are used to thrust or reverse direction. Like Asteroids, you are carried by inertia even when you aren’t thrusting, and although you can reverse direction instantly, this does not cancel out your momentum. You can therefore fly backwards by releasing thrust and reversing, which is often a useful battle tactic. Two more buttons are for your weapons; you have bullets that can (and must) be spammed and leave a laser-like trails streaking across the screen, and you have a limited supply of smart bombs which destroy everything on the screen (usually), and sometimes the carnage continues off-screen as well. Finally, you have a hyperspace button for getting you out of a jam, which just like Asteroids, randomly teleports you to another part of the screen, and will kill you outright about what feels like 25% of the time, which is better odds than in Asteroids.

An attract mode shows you a diorama of the aliens you’ll face.

Lander –Green space invaders, who spawn in waves, move slowly (relative to the other aliens) and aimlessly, and fire slow moving bullets at you when they see you, but don’t really pursue you. They’re the only threat to the colonists walking on the surface, except for your own errant shots. They will randomly swoop down at colonists on the surface, and carry them up into space rather quickly. It’s almost futile to try to react to this unless they happen to be very close when it happens, but if you destroy the lander, it will drop the colonist, and you can get 250 points for picking it up, and another 250 for dropping it back on the surface. Crashing into the surface is impossible, thankfully. But if the lander carries the colonist all the way to the top of the screen, the colonist dies and the lander becomes a…
Mutant –Faster, more erratic and aggressive landers who ignore colonists and target you while dodging your shots.
Baiter – Bullet-firing UFO’s who spawn one at a time and relentlessly target you once the waves of landers are done. They don’t appear at first, but once fewer than four aliens remain, they’ll start appearing every five seconds or so. They may also start spawning if you’re too far away from the action for too long. They’re faster than you, but have trouble reversing direction, making it ideal to let them overtake you and then hit them as they slow down to reverse. Their narrow profile makes hitting them quite difficult. You do not need to kill all of the baiters to end the round.
Bomber – Not that big of a threat, they just float around in slow, predictable patterns and drop space mines that usually aren’t too hard to just weave around. It’s very tempting to take them out as targets of opportunity, but landers can kill off your colonists if your attention is divided. I prefer to save them for last, because thanks to the baiters, I want the mop-up phase to end as quickly as possible.
Pod – Harmless unless you crash into them. But you must kill them to end the round, and when you do, they release a horde of swarmers. Using smart bombs on pods sometimes destroy the swarmers and scores huge points, but not always.
Swarmers – I hate these guys. They swarm, are really hard to hit, and fire shots in big, chaotic clusters. And they don’t count toward the limit for spawning baiters. Ugh…

My best attempt got over 86,000 points, hardly a world record, but it surpasses Eugene Jarvis’ own high score during development.

My strategy was to target the landers first. They’re probably the easiest to kill, and any lander you spare could kill a colonist when you aren’t paying attention and become a mutant. I’d use smart bombs on clusters of pods, and on landers in the process of abducting colonists who were too high up for me to reach in time, sometimes both at once. After the landers were finished and I’d taken care of any mutants, I’d go after remaining pods and try to deal with the swarms before the baiters started spawning (I was not always successful), and finally kill the bombers. It took me awhile, but I eventually got the hang of using hyperspace in emergencies, which certainly contributed to my longevity.

Around the 60,000 point mark, I clearly felt my concentration starting to wane, and made dumb mistakes like pressing the hyperspace button when I meant to press something else, and forgetting to check the scanner, but I still managed to hang around for another two rounds. The game is, as I mentioned, generous with extra lives, awarding one every 10,000 points, which can be easily achieved every round.

But eventually, the landers nabbed my last few colonists, seemingly all at once. When this happens, the planet is destroyed in a spectacular display of particle effects, and then the landers all become mutants. I was overwhelmed, and lost the last of my lives. Game over.

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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