Jurassic Park - Arcade '93

Welcome... To Jurassic Park...

Brought out to coincide with the release of the groundbreaking film, Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park (SEGA) is an on-rails shooter that capitalises upon several things. Namely that you get to see large parts of the film, you get to shoot dinosaurs and several other things too, and you get to replay that bit in the film where the T-Rex chases the jeep... Several times.

Faster, must go faster!

The plot in Jurassic Park, for want of one as it stands, is simple enough. You're driving through Jurassic Park with your infinite ammo, never overheating, machinegun(s) and you get to see the lovely tour of what is most of the island and key locations from the film. You'll be sped quickly through jungles, overgrowth, ripped up fences, fields of lush emptiness and even through the main compound including the front door and beyond as you try to survive the journey with your vehicle still intact.

They're flocking this way!

Your health bar seems to be a mix of your own body and the vehicle, but either way if one is stopped then your forage through Jurassic Park is over anyway. Your large gun is mounted to the dashboard of the large car/cabinet and you're presented with a nice attempt at having something tangible around you while playing the game. You can find health packs through the game but almost certainly just after you've pumped in another credit and they become redundant to your situation.

We clocked the T-Rex at 32 miles per hour.

As a game, it's short. The speed at which you're racing through the levels, combined with the fact that you'll be assault virtually the entire time you're in Jurassic Park, means you'll either burn through the credits quickly or you'll be done with the game inside of 20 minutes. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's a fun experience and doesn't overstay its welcome but you will most likely have spent a considerable amount of money to get that far and it won't feel worth its value.

...Clever Girl

Graphically, Jurassic Park is using the same core as Alien 3: The Gun and Out runners, though there's been a significant overhaul in the detail of the game compared to Alien 3, the dinosaurs look impressive from the T-Rex as it chases you along the road and through the overgrowth to Raptors leaping at you from all angles, pterodactyls dive bombing you in series of waves, even up to and including racing along a Brontosaurs' back, off its head and later meeting one that (in due homage to the film) sneezes on you and blows you over a cliff. Everything looks quite impressive but what's even more impressive is the fact that the game is fast and you really do get a sense of urgency when on the run from the larger creatures.

When the Pirates of the Carribean ride breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists!

As for the sounds, Jurassic Park's music is usually fast paced, action enhancing and fairly fitting to Jurassic Park but you won't be finding the famous score in this game. After the second time you face off against the T-Rex, you'll be dreading the starting bars of each subsequent battle with them as they tend to do a lot of damage and the music is very distinct from the other pieces composed for this game.

We spared no expense.

Overall, Jurassic Park is an attempt to cash in on the franchise and it's done fairly well but the game is too tough and too greedy for the credits which invariable leaves plays with a cheap rewarding thrill but a bad taste in their mouth afterwards. Not unlike time spent with your mu- [Article End]

Line of Fire - Arcade

You're firing, in lines... Maybe.

Sega seem to enjoy milking this game engine in particular for over the top gunnage (it's a word now, I said so) and for giving people the chance to be Rambo. Having reviewed Jurassic Park back in the J section of these reviews, I thought I'd take a gander at Line of Fire.

Missions are complicated and involve a lot of thought and consideration.

The arcade of Line of Fire, sported two heavy machine guns mounted to the cabinet in both the stand up and sit-down versions of the machine which added an extra level of immersion to the game while the game itself did away entirely with the idea of ammo, reloading, driving or guiding any real vestige of control related to gaming and just have you on rails and shooting stuff, you don't even overheat the guns and the power remains at the maximum. Seriously, if this was a gun in the military, EVERYONE would want it. (I already do)

The game puts a huge focus on the importance of timing.

The plot is pretty much that though in Line of Fire, someone has made these guns and you're part of a team (or solo) that have gone in to steal them. In doing so, you get caught and decide to use the guns to escape while kidnapping a driver in a jeep (I think, against his will) and make a Beeline for the nearest pick up point to be rescued while fighting off everything you could possibly imagine that an army would throw at you at even more.

Shots taken at your are often hard to see and camouflaged.

So off you go through the game of Line of Fire shooting everything from soldiers with rifles, grenades, knives, rocket launchers and more to tanks, helicopters, jets, AWACS (which are on your side... not very stealthy really) and a whole host of assorted vehicles that tend to act as bosses at the end of levels to whittle away your health bar and make you use up your explosive "kill all on screen" shots.

Enemy vehicles often blend in with the scenary.

There's a significant challenge within the game in that Line of Fire just bombards you figuratively and literally, with an enormous amount of enemies in faster time than most games will introduce their whole line up, in just one level. The action rare, if ever, lets up but you've got infinite bullets and you'll going to have to make them count while cutting swathes of damage through line after line of opponents and obstructions.

There's multiple routes of travel and most will have very few enemies on them.

While the sound effects in Line of Fire are fairly suitable, I can't say the same for the music which is usually drowned out by the shooting, explosions, bombs, rockets, people dying, people throwing things at you and pretty much everything else in this game. Thankfully, you're not going to be missing much with the absence of music and the focus on shooting and killing takes priority, not such a bad thing but to be honest, this is ALL this game is about.

Bosses are often a long distance affair.

It can be rather intimidating at times in Line of Fire when you're being nothing less than overwhelmed by the sheer volume of attackers and assaults on the player. At times your only real option to escape damage is to use up one of your bomb/rockets or hope that soon after that particular point, there will be health items to shoot and/or bombs to shoot as well to boost your stock of explosive One Hit Kills.

This game causes image captions to be lies... Maybe.

If you can manage to navigate through killing as many threats as possible and also to predict where rockets and heavier vehicles will spawn from, you can last quite a while and enjoy some longevity from your credit, you might even want to play it through to the end just to see the bigger and more powerful bosses, but like other gun-games, it's almost certain you'll want to play it once and leave it at that.

Smash Hit

Yes it's free, no I didn't pay.

In a change of events, I thought I would take a look at Smash Hit. Oddly for me, it's a new game and was released recently upon the iPhone. As a medium I've yet from which to properly take a review. Released in the last few months, Smash Hit is one of those games that's proudly wearing the "experimental" tag on its game, which is to that it's a game with a gimmick that has been invented and then fashioned a game around that gimmick hoping to make a game, rather than make the game and building the engine into that game. In so far as to say, there's one thing you do here and that's it.
 

The further you go, the more devious yet intriguing the designs become

In what seems at first to be one of those tunnel flying games, where one would expect to navigate around obstacles and traps by turning or tilting the controller; you instead take the guise of travelling on a straight path through the Z axis while watching a rather surreal landscape pass you by. On your way you'll encounter various objects that for some reason have irked you enough that you can hurl large steel ball-bearings at them to break them and reward yourself with more balls. If you've ever been the kid that went they threw a rock through a green-house, wanted to throw more instead of running away, this game is for you. 

Hitting the edges and such won't help, the one point you need to worry about is in the dead centre

Each time you hit one of the crystals, you'll be rewarded with more balls, while the game will also throw at you various translucent obstacles made of glass that you'll have to hurl balls at in order to smash, obliterate and remove from your pathway otherwise you take a hit from the glass and spew out ten balls right there and then. Run out of balls and you run out of game and have to start over. If you manage to hit ten consecutive crystals without missing any of them, you get to fire more and more balls per shot at the cost of a sole ball to your collection, up to a maximum of five balls at a time in a large 'X' formation.

The whole game reeks of that pseudo-futuristic cleanliness, which does add to the atmosphere, admittedly

Like a lot of games on the iPhone, it's quick to pick up, quick to play and quick to learn. Which is essential given the fast and rapid flow of gaming these days on mobile devices where the gamers will want to be in the game, playing and out again before the next bus stop, or by the time they're called in for their usual VD clinic check-up. This game is of no exception to that situation and fulfils the requirement dutifully.

 

It's a shame I can't show this as a fluid animation, it's impressive to see

Graphically speaking, it's impressive to see in action. The movement remains fluid through out and glass in the game has that slightly refractive surface while being at the same time, translucent to seem like the panes of glass in bathrooms. The physics engine happily gives room for breaking parts of the glass and watching large chunks of it fall away as one might expect but don't get your hopes up for having breathtaking shatter effects. Chunks will disappears around where your ball hits and as long as you can get your view point through the obstacle, you won't really have to worry about much else.

 

Yes, I lost a combo just to take this shot, but the translucency was impressive

The difficulty ramps up suitable with the first few areas just an exercise in aiming the balls and gathering more by destroying crystals, before stationary glass obstacles begin to appear. Later levels have sliding glass, glass that flips up into position, glass swinging from ropes, glass hanging from ropes in suspension and will break and move depending upon where the tension gives up first, glass that rotates and spins and an assorted host of different shapes and structures to smash your way through.

 

Each zone has a doorway that has one or more buttons that require to be hit, good luck

Some parts of the game allow for a rapidfire item to be collected while gives you ten seconds to effectively "machinegun" your way through the game, spewing out ball after ball towards whereever you have your finger pressed down upon the screen. This doesn't make you invincible however and you can still crash into things, lose more balls, or miss crystals and lose your multiplier effect and becomes a little jarring the first time it happens and realise that the power-up isn't that much of a power-up.

 

It does get hard at times to judge what's going to actually hit you are be a near miss

The music jaunts along merrily enough in the background as an ambience to the game and doesn't really add much to the experience but then again it doesn't really subtract from it either. The glass breaking sound effects have just the right pitch and frequency to be satisfyingly close to what you're seeing and don't seem to be muted down or overblown in that regard.

 

Spinning glass, another problem is working out WHICH glass will hit you and making sure not to waste shots

Overall it's a fun little arcade style romp that's found a gimmick within an engine and put it to fairly good use. You'll likely play this a few times to see the effects and feel somewhat impressed by what your device is capable of doing and a fair few people will play it to see it through to the end or to score higher and higher against their friendslist. But without something new to challenge people, there's little replay factor beyond a week or so at most for the majority of players. Give it a go, you might be surprised.

Space Harrier

Welcome to the fantasy zone... get repetitive.

It does seem that the further back we go in time to gaming, the simpler and slower a game is compared to the modern days of gaming. That's probably more than given as processing powers are a lot more powerful than in the older days. Given that some of the machines in the older days are running around 10 Mega Hertz and the computer I'm writing this on is a 3.4 Giga Hertz machine quad core processor. There's been a little bit of an improvement in the last 30 years or so.

 

Another late shot after you killed the enemy, but it'll happily float there and show you what killed you.

Likening this to cars, it's like saying a car back in the 80s was running at max speed of about 10 miles an hour and nowadays it can run at 3400 miles an hour. But as was said when someone made this comparison a few years back. It's nice but nobody wants to drive a car that crashes several times a day. Some will likely disagree with me on this, but I'm happy enough cruising around at 120mph thanks very much.

You get to ride a giant cat. Whose fantasy zone is this? It sure isn't mine!

Given that in 1985, you had games like Boulder Dash, Commando, Choplifter and a whole host of other such games that weren't renowned for being fast action-paced games. Space Harrier set a new bar on how to get the most out of the processors within the machine and as such, boosted the idea of arcades being more adrenaline fuelled and frantic.

Moot point, moot level.

In this instance we have Space Harrier, from SEGA doing what Sega seems to do best, making a fast action packed game with very little overall substance or even gameplay. You control FloatyMcPrickman, a blonde haired ass-hat with little real value or personality as he enters the Fantasy Zone (get ready...) with little more than the ability to fly at variable speeds that the game controls while armed with an unlimited supply of energy shots.

Each head needs to be killed, individually. Boss fights are actually more fun than the levels.

Initially, the game looks impressive. It runs fast, you're up and flying and moving around the levels with incredible speed and shooting down trees, bushes, flying robots and other such nasties while avoiding the occasional incoming projectile and the surroundings. Making yourself survive for long enough treats you to the boss monster that surges back and forth while spraying flaming rock balls at you while you try to pepper its head with shots.

Nice to see the grass has been mowed well.

Levels themselves are bright and colourful and showcasing nearly the full spectrum of colours. Though in this it also becomes hard to work out what's an enemy, what's an incoming attack and what is a background/arena aspect that can be avoided or shot down. But the psychedelic experience is what most will remember from a very colourful and very vividly graphic game.

Great... killed by a giant high speed dick-tree-mushroom thing.

Aiming is a bit of a hazard as you can only shoot straight ahead on the perspective plane. If you're in the top left of the screen, you're only going to shoot whatever is in the top left of the field of attack and to hit something that's aiming for you, you're going to have to shoot while on the move rather than strafing or orbiting them. Identifying them is also a problem from a distance, especially when there's a myriad of projectiles hurtling your way and usually you can't see specifically what the target is until it's glaring at you in the face and heading away again while it's invulnerable arse is lovingly displayed to you.

Finally, something mildy recognisable.

That said, the game for the most part is relatively easy if you keep in mind that projectiles are very direct and very exact. The difficulty comes when you've got other things to worry about such as the flight paths of enemies, the oncoming obstacles and the general shift and movement of the arena while you're moving around within it. The further difficulty comes from where you've gotten used to the fact you can shoot the floating rocks and huge trees in one level, then when the next level turns up, you find you CAN'T shoot the large structures and instead fly straight into it like a moth to a flame.... before being blasted by a brick.

I can't imagine the East End of London named this level.

The game does love to taunt you however, namely by showing you enemies and speeding them away before anything happens. Or even worse, when you DO die, whatever it was that hit you just stands there, remaining perfectly poised in showing you THIS IS WHAT KILLED YOU! while the rest of the game carries on around it. Aside from this, there's not much more to the game other than finding out what new sprites await in later levels and how much more difficult they can make the game by hurling more and more awkward enemies at you at regular intervals. Even the bosses start to become recycled and the game continues this way until the unceremoniously defeated final boss happens.

Though few will both spending the cash and time getting to the umpteenth repetitive level.

Later, flying jellyfish. For now, repeated robot sprites.

Having said that, the music is fairly memorable and toe-tapping for each composition contained with the game while the control system is a little overly responsive to movement but whether this is because of the way it plays and feels that it should play or is on the part of the designers to smoke out some more credits, is a harder question to answer. There's a lot of nostalgia factor in this game and those that remember it will do very well to make sure that it stays remembered and ONLY remembered, this is not a game to revisit.

Sometimes the game randomly speeds up, and catches me off-guard... the cheating bastard.