Zoo Keeper - Arcade

You're a keeper, in a zoo. Speaks for itself really.

The further back in history I with regards to video games, the more obscure, random and quite frankly, uniquely interesting I seem to find the games to be. 1982, a fantastic year even if I do say so myself, brought about such games as Q*Bert, Lasso, Dig-Dug and of course, Zoo Keeper.

It has a nice demo to let you know the scoring system.

The story, if one wants to call it that, is you playing the role of the eponymous Zoo Keeper and are tasked with keeping a large assortment of various animals caged up within pens and if any of those were to escape, to capture them and return them to the pen before they escape again. At the same time, you'll be running around the edge building the walls up to try and keep the creatures penned in so when the timer runs out, you get points for each animal within the boundaries of the pen. Whether those boundaries are still there or not don't matter.

Different animals will cause different levels of damage

Extra levels appear that deviate from the norm with platforming sections that require the player to jump from one to another, while avoiding a mischievous monkey that lobs coconuts at you in order to save a damsel-in-distress before a few more cage levels, then another platform section and finally the last level, which pits you against a stampede of animals all hell-bent on killing you and you get to hop over them to get another life.

Building up your layers will help keep the animals secured.

Zoo Keeper manages to find that happy medium of being a platform puzzler. The area in which most of your play takes place, will have you running around the outer walls of a pen, jumping over and around animals while hoping for the net to put into the game space so that you can capture the animals. While running, the walls underneath your keeper are built up, layer by layer, in order to try and stop the animals from escaping. Knowing where and when to run next forms the puzzle while the leaping (and gravity defying wall running) forms the platforming aspects. This is amplified by the bonus levels where in it's all about platforming and timing.

Whoo!! Points!!

The sounds for Zoo Keeper are a little grating at times but hardly the fault of the game and designers given the hardware available and every animal has distinct noises by which to identify. The music plays fairly well and almost recognisably well when the more well-known pieces are played. Walls being laid have a distinctly solid and synthetic sound to them and dying has a suitably foreboding presence added to it with the audio ambience.

A little big of variation between levels to save the "princess"

Graphically, it's rather simple. Black background but nice bright images and sprites for our heroic Zoo Keeper, though the animals take a little bit of artistic licensing to be able to recognise them, but otherwise the game plays smoothly and for the most part, everything looks like it's intended image target.

You can also die trying and meet a game over...

As a game, it's fast, fluid, a little quirky and brought down by slightly awkward controls when it comes to running around the pen and changing from running on the bottom to the sides as the overarching control guidance may change mid-jump, depending upon where and when the player jumps to avoid the animals. As such, a few lives can be expected to be lost to misinterpreting the controls and not being entirely sure as to why it happened.

In The Hunt - Arcade

For Octobers of Redness?

While some might compare In The Hunt to the film, Hunt For The Red October, it probably isn't too far of a stretch to say that one has inspired the other but thankfully in this game, there's no Sean Connery playing a Russian Submarine commander with a Scottish accent. Scratch that, a Sean Connery accent. However the game is entirely about you BEING a submarine commander and you're taking on more sub-acquatic forces than the world actually has, three to four times over. But then it'd be boring if we just played Cold War and nobody really did anything other than promise to use and not quite use nukes on each other.

Bombs, torps, missiles, mines, icebergs... All are nasty threats here

In The Hunt shows that once again, Metal Slug has been borrowing heavily from its former employers and co-workers. It's Irem's sub acquatic baby and you can clearly see the high level of graphical detail that in later Metal Slug games might as well have taken lock, stock and barrel. Though rather than just be one level, or part of a level using a submarine, the entire game is you using a submarine to blow up boats, ships, subs, underwater tanks, helicopters, planes and jets (no those last few are not underwater, but that would be impressive nonetheless).

Sunken Stadium, a rather unique choice for a level backdrop.

Combat as such in In The Hunt, takes place in the 2D horizontal planar and has a slower moving spaceship... Submarine, that steadily cruises through the waters to fire torpedos, launch depth charges and underwater to surface missiles. The game does mix up convention in that if you are to breach the surface, your missiles now become anti-aircraft weaponry and function differently in that they can assault the skies and not blow up when they reach the surface.

This game has bosses galore, but it does limit itself in having to theme everything around an aquatic approach

Graphically, the game looks gorgeous as one might expect from the team that later started to make Metal Slug and as such In The Hunt sports some deliciously detailed and smoothly animated effects that serve as a real treat to the arcade gamer, espcially in a time period when the first few 3D games were coming out along the lines of the hardware firepower of the Playstation. There's attention, detail, precision and a lot of focus on making the game look amazing from the icey waters around icebergs, to the industrial sites and sunken cities, everything is gobsmackingly stunning and may at times catch the player out if they spend too long admiring the backgrounds and little details.

Erm... Ok... Moving along.

In that sense, In The Hunt is rather like one of those Naked Gun films in that you have to watch it time and time again to make sure you get all the jokes and the details. While there's not much in the way of jokes in In The Hunt (until you reach level 5, then it just becomes weird), there's so much going on that you could easily play through a few times and notice something different each time.

It doesn't take long before the boss level becomes "unfair"

The sound in In The Hunt does suffer somewhat in that the music just feels very out of place, it doesn't quite hold the adrenaline rush that you'd hope from a frantic boss fight, nor does the levels seem to fit with the tune and composition of the music set and associated with each particular level, it's quite the shame but thankfully a lot of it is masked with the copious amounts of explosions and attacks going on that you'll barely register the issue if at all.

All things said, In The Hunt is a hard game, if only because your movement is fairly limited and restricted in that you're slow, weapons are fast, and the eternally scrolling levels can force you into moments you'd rather not be in. It's an entertaining and fun game that will take you a good hour or so to beat but the likelihood is that you'd rather not blow all those credits on it. Well worth a play however and another glimpse at the history behind Metal Slug.

Drop Zone - C64

Title, enemies, points. Jut need the controls and we're done.

There's a lot of crap on the C64 if one were to take a look at the entire catalogue of games, place them all next to each other and try to find the decent stuff compared to the terrible stuff. For every Last Ninja, there's a Cisco Heat, for each Giana Sisters, there's a Dark Star. Drop Zone fits in the middle and more to the good stuff than the bad. Inspired by Defender, Drop Zone takes the idea behind the original Defender and forcibly slams home a healthy dose of originality, style, speed and intense gameplay mechanics.

Put these blue guys in the hole for more points.

Take a man, slap him in a space suit, then slap THAT into a jetpack chair and have him patrolling a perpetually loops landscape across an alien planet with infinite ammo and a few Smart Bombs (Screen killers) while guarding several 'men' from being attacked and killed while also getting bonus points for escorting them home and wiping out aliens (and not afraiding of anything). But even this description fails to do the game justice.

Later levels ramp up the difficulty quickly.

You fly by using the joystick and shoot using the trigger/button on the stick. Space bar will drop a Smart Bomb and any other button will activate your cloak (read: Makes you untouchable), while you're trying to pick up your men and deposit them in your base. Even though men aren't safe there, the aliens can drop red men down which will kill your men on contact or if they get into the base, kill another man in there. Dying while holding a man won't kill him thankfully, but he will need to be found and collected again. You don't have to save the men, but it's worth points which give lives. You can only win a round by killing all the enemies.

Lose all your men and it becomes a dangerous wasteland.

There's a whole host of enemies in the game, ranging from the generic green aliens that idly float around, faster ones that drop red men down that then go (for all intents and purposes) completely psycho with their rapid speed and fast firing. Later enemies split into seekers (a smaller and more annoying enemy), while clouds will dot the landscape raining death and lightning down upon you. IN SPACE!

Clouds... In SPACE!

The speed and fluidity of the game only help to accentuate how arcade focused the game is with its requirement for reflexes and incredible reactions times. It's not too fast thankfully as to be unplayable but you will need to keep your eyes open for errant projectiles that the aliens can unleash with uncanny accuracy. On top of that, take too long into the level and the "red pill" alien will turn up that actively hunts you down and rapidly bombards you with attacks, killing it will spawn another shortly after. The challenge ramps up steadily, getting harder and more numerous with enemies as the levels go on while the game is never strictly unfair, but it comes infuriatingly close at times.

Seekers tend to the most annoying, nimble and smallest enemy.

Simple, effective and gorgeous as far as graphics go for the game, be it the small volcanic eruptions or the large firework of death brought about by dying at any point where you simply detonate into a display-calibre pyrotechnic effect. Items and characters are almost colour coded with the careful design of each enemy/man, making it easy at a glance to pick out which enemy is which and where your men are.

Will be dying shortly.

The audio however is a short affair of beeps and boops that play rather well within the setting but there's no music to the game. At least it can't be annoying in this regard, though the explosions and shots are clear and distinct within the game and the alert sounds from the 'men' cut through all other noises to make it abundantly clear when one of them is under threat of being killed.

Whoo! Survived another level!

It's a good arcade thriller, showing that Defender could and was made better by those with the time and dedication (and advancement in tech) could surpass well-known benchmarks within the videogame industry. It's still a game I'll go back to every now and then for the nostalgia.