Xybots - Arcade

How... do you pronounce that?

Take 2 players, drop them into a maze filled with increasingly more difficult layouts and monsters/robots and make it part Third Person Shooter and you've effectively got yourself Xybots.

It's quite a bit daunting at the start

In taking from possibly the idea of Gauntlet but giving us an "in maze" view rather than the typical top-down view, Xybots not only takes the approach of giving us warning messages the first time anything new happens, much like in Gauntlet, but it also lets us see the action happening in the playing field. The view itself is split up into 3 parts. One screen for player 1, one screen for player 2 and the rest of the screen, which is the upper half, is dedicated to stats, layouts and the map for both players.

And then the difficulty kicks in

Play takes place for Xybots in the same arena for each player. As the players move and progress through the maze, they'll gradually map the maze out from their views. Sometimes players start together, sometimes they don't but they ideally have to find the same exit (and there's warps to other levels too). This leads to possible routes of attack where players can flank and ambush enemies that have specifically-directional shields. In other cases this isn't a good idea as the game may flag up that shooting each other will hurt and most hits take 10% of your ever-fading life bar.

Maps and sensors, though costly, will save a lot of time.

Yep, Xybots is one of those countdown games where the longer you take, the less health you'll have in the next round and such. However the game is unique with its control system in that not only do you navigate with the joystick to move forwards, backwards, sidestepping left and right, but turning is done by twisting the top of the control to turn 90 degrees either left or right depending upon the direction turned. If you're not aware the game can do this, you'll find several first few maps that have you running sideways down a corridor until you either learn it, get killed or miraculously get to the end of the corridor while being shot at.

Some enemies have shields, some fire back. Beware those that have both functions.

Enemies are the rather non-descript entities ranging from spaceships that pick up items and move them around, including coins which are used to buy things at the end of levels, health, keys, weapons and so on. Large robots that move and shoot at you while taking several hits to be killed fully, smaller robots that take similar hits but can selectively use shields to block and fire, insect looking things that move almost erratically and hammer the player with a huge level of shots while they themselves can only be shot at JUST the right time. Every now and then you get to meet a Master Xybot which needs to be shot repeatedly in key places to succeed and losing will knock you back some 10 or so levels. Sounds very fair to me.

Each new event gets a lovely little (annoying) message about it!

Speaking of sounds, the music in the game takes a very lacklustre approach and while it doesn't overwhelm the ambience of the game, there's plenty of room for extra that could be better used to build upon the mechanics of the game. While the sounds are the usual bleep and bloops we've come to expect from this time period, it's interesting to behold the digitised speech mechanic within the game. Otherwise it's clear that most of the focus has gone into the graphics of the game and the gameplay.

And there's bosses too... Good luck.

It's a fun game initially though the first few levels are a little too gradual on the difficulty curve while later levels will ramp it up to becoming a vertical way that eventually flexes back upon itself. Stick to it a little and have someone competent playing alongside you and you'll do well to enjoy this game.

Gauntlet 2 - Arcade

Whose face is more horrifying between Warrior and Valkyrie?

Why Gauntlet 2 and not Gauntlet 1? Simple really, read on and I'll tell you. Gauntlet 2 is the successor to the largely popular game Gauntlet. A game based around the lovely lore of Dungeons and Dragons, which involve some Dragons and maybe a Dungeon or two. Everything that Gauntlet has, Gauntlet 2 has more of and better.

Mazes, ghosts and monsters ahoy!

Pick your character by holding the joystick in a specific manner and pressing start. Choose from A warrior (Tough guy but slow shots), Wizard (Wuss but heavy firepower, a glass cannon so to speak), an elf and a Valkyre who are the middle ground between the warrior and wizard, and venture forth into the multiple, multiple levels of Gauntlet 2.

New incidents come with a little instruction.

You start your intrepid journey in Gauntlet 2 with a top-down/birds-eye-view display of the local part of the dungeon and can move in 8 directions while either firing your weapon or casting magic (if you have it). You'll have a health counter that steadily counts down, meaning you'll have to find food or other sustenance to survive (more credits help a lot) and battle lots of different enemies that will be keen to drop your health counter further than it already has.

Sadly, some mazes have invisible walls.

That is the basics of both Gauntlet and Gauntlet 2, however the intricacies are what keeps the game going and what keeps bringing people back to the game itself. Through each level, one can find keys to unlock doors and chests that (may) contain treasure (or death... he's not nice at all), locate food to up the health counter and other special power ups that include Invulnerability (Yet the health drops quickly anyway), reflective shots (which can hit AND hurt you), transportation (You teleport through walls, chests, keys, potions etc), IT (makes the enemies run at JUST you), repulsiveness (enemies run away but still shoot back) and various potions that act like smart bombs in taking out most of the junk on the screen or boost stats like strength, attack, defence and speed. There's a lot to be found and used within the game.

Wouldn't be much of a secret if it didn't have those...

To stop you, Gauntlet 2 throws every cliché in the book at you. Ghosts, trolls, lobbers (little people that throw stuff), demons, sorcerers, dragons (rare but damn they're tough) and DEATH to name but a few problems you'll encounter. You can run into most of these things and cause damage (except ghosts and death, they just damage you and Dragons... Well if you're running INTO one you deserve to be crispified) or shoot them. They in turn will cause damage if they chomp, whack, bite, punch or "death" you on contact or hit you with a ranged shot.

The deeper you go, the harder it gets. Said the Actress to the Bishop.

Interestingly, the game has a curious narrator that likes to comment on almost everything and every new "instance" of something happening will pause the game, explain what it does and then carry on without repeating itself. This goes for being hit by a new enemy, being shot by a new enemy, picking up anything you've never picked up before etc. etc. The narrator will happily talk to you about it including when you do stupid things like shooting the food, even going so far as to tell EVERYONE who did it. The narrator will also happily tell you when someone's "Life force is running out" or the most famously remembered line of somebody "...is about to die" with base notes warning of impending demise.

Eventually though, you just get bored of it all.

That said, unless you're pumping in credits left and right, this game will not let you finish it. Even working in tandem with partners and having a foolproof system, you're going to get butchered one way or another and enemies like Death are designed almost purely just to get credits out of pockets and into the machine. Dragons too if you get too close. Else it's a good fun, smoothly playable game that is worth a visit or two every few years or so.

Berzerk - Arcade

Sorry, there is no title screen for this game. Here's an empty highscore table instead.

A game steeped in infamy, a game that is responsible for at least one person dying, a game that features possibly the happiest nemesis you will ever encounter. I am talking about of course, Berzerk. A game possibly made famous because of the associated death but also having a level of uniqueness to it that other games back in 1980 didn't quite have.

Robots!

Berzerk has you, as a happily animated little green character, running around a maze while either trying to shoot or avoid robots. A group of rather vocal robots that will happily announce their intentions to "Stop the intruder" or "Kill the humanoid" and various other insults that run along the lines of indicating that you are indeed a card-carrying member of some poultry based organisation. While you're running around, you can either leave by one of the doorways at the edge of the screen or go for the bonus points and try to kill every single robot in the room before Evil Otto turns up to shepherd you out of the arena. Or kill you.

There's Otto, he's killed 2 people already, you might be next.

Mazes are a rather unassuming group in that the maze is usually randomly generated upon death/starting over and each maze has usually, 4 exits. However, if you entered into the maze from one direction, you cannot leave in that direction as there'll be a door there. Touching or brushing against any of the walls of the maze or locked doors, much in the same way as touching a robot or being shot, or getting caught by Evil Otto, will kill you. In a lovely display of flashy colours for your little humanoid.

Whoo! Lots of red robots!

Where the difficulties stand within the game, as also are the predictable nature of the AI, is that your shooting can only be done in 8 directions and in the direction in which you're moving at the time of firing the shot off. At the same time as this, if an enemy robot has line of sight on you and there's room in the maze for a shot, it WILL fire at you, even if it means hitting the walls. While your character shoots directly from their hand rather than the middle of where their bounding boxes are located, so your attacks will invariably be inaccurate, initially.

Cyan robots! They shoot MORE bullets!

Robots themselves come in multiple flavours. The brown/yellow ones just idle around getting shot by the player. The red ones will take it in turns to fire a shot at you before someone picks the bullet up and fires another shot like some artillery based game of hot-potato. While the blue robots will have 2 bullets they share in which to try and terminate your existence. They do manage to do it surprisingly quickly for simplified artificial intelligence.

Fight, or run off. If you run, you'll be called a "chicken".

But that's not to say that combat on that level is the only choice available to the player. You could for example, get the robots to shoot each other, how you go about doing that is down to you but it can happen. Also, any exploding robot is deadly to everything, yourself AND other robots so you could try chain-linking some deaths together.

Redraw lines, repeat until brain seeps out of eyesockets and slithers off in shame.

 

As fun and quick as the game is, with some fantastic voice effects and quite an extensive vocabulary for the game itself, it falls into that old arcade adage of mindless repetition. Each level varies by a small amount of differentiation and ultimately, it gets dull quickly as you run through similar levels while occasionally being caught up by the ever-present Evil Otto. The shock and awe factor of 2 people having died while playing or shortly after playing, wears off quickly and you realise that death CAN COME as the game attempts to bore you to death. Avoid it or take a look for the sake of the infamy, but realise you're looking not because it's recommended as a good game, but because it's the "killer" game.