Death Star Interceptor - C64

It could be a lot worse... Dark Star worse.

Having looked at an atrocious game last week, I'm looking back at another space based C64 shooter that at least manages to be entertaining though not quite the golden answer to gaming we're all hoping for. Take one dab of fan boy-ism for Star Wars (Namely the Trench run from the last few action scenes of the film) add a dose of repetition and a few sound effects and you'll have yourself a good representation of this game: Death Star Interceptor.

Take off! Unless you crash... Seriously, who builds this?

The game starts with, oddly enough, take off. In which you'll have to successfully navigate yourself out of the entrance into Outer Space or risk losing one of your shields. Incidentally with all your shields gone, you'll lose a life. Once into Outer space you'll locked into combat with multiple enemies that will attack you on sight while being able to move slightly forwards into the background and pull back into the foreground to get around multiple attacks. Once you've killed enough enemies, the main enemy comes forth to give you a slap session before you chase them back to the Death Star and you so begin your trench run.

Fighting the main enemy.

On the trench run you'll encounter multiple different stages that will have a multitude of different enemies. Ranging from avoiding walls that block your route, shooting down missile attacks, going head to head against the main ship that happily fires several shots AFTER IT IS DEAD, to running down walls again with enemies attacking you, giant enemies, tanks and finally getting a shot at the exhaust port that lets you blow up the Death Star and ultimately beat the level. Yes I said LEVEL.

Once won, Death Star Interceptor plays through but faster and quicker than before.

It's the trench run... With a paint job?

There's enough variation in the game to keep it interesting though the drawn out access between levels can wane the attention from time to time and the constantly changing blue and white trench tends to hide and mask inadvertently the enemies' shots. Perhaps if the trench was more grey and darker grey than white and blue, this could have solved an issue. On top of that, all the enemies (and even the launch pad, strangely enough) cycle through the key colours the C64 has to offer as if undergoing a never-ending decision of which skin to wear to the game.

Dodge left or right, you've a few seconds to work it out or get hit.

There's a few odd quirks about the game however, firstly there's the fact that if you sit in the bottom right of the screen, you cannot be hit, you cannot die and you cannot lose, (You also cannot win as you need to be in the middle to fire the last shot) but it's a lovely little breather spot and you can kill SOME enemies there, infinitely helpful as progression is made by points scored rather than time spent in a level.

Those shots on the screen were fired AFTER the last enemy was killed.

Other small quirks are that the bullets/projectiles fired by the enemies can take various paths and routes along the lines of what the enemies can take for a small duration, resulting in shots being fired that bend and turn corners towards you and in some cases, can come back on screen from enemies that have left the view of the game and no longer pose a threat to the player (but clearly they still do). You can also get hit multiple times by the same bullet if you repeatedly move into and out of its reach.

Hide in the corner, it's safer.

The audio in the game is not very impressive however, the initial music takes priority over the control of the game and you've got to wait until it's done before you can start the game and playing the game is spent usually with some odd sine wave oscillating back and forth along the frequencies up until a certain level either overloads it or just silences the game, from there it's nice and quiet with the usual pew pew noises of your shots and explosions of dying and dead enemies.

I win, going home now.

All in all, it's not a great game but I'll happily cut my own arms off and feed them to my own arse while playing this than go back to Dark Star again.

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.

Gradius

Keeping on the theme of the scrolling shooter space-em-up, I'm taking a pickaxe to the next game and mining my way through the craft of game design. Yep, I'm talking about Gradius (Nemesis in some locations). A game which was splurged out in 1985 and brought to the fore, a series of games that would later become parodies of itself in games like Parodius. Which is basically this game with a cheeky look in its eye.

But before a take enough tangents to the curve to come back around on myself, I'll remain focus upon this game for now. You fly ship, ship shooty things, kill things to get power ups, use power-ups, avoid dying, shooty time for big bosses, beat level and prepare to play it again in a different setting. I'm not exactly selling this thing but then again, there's no real plot to this one. (in the game at least, but who really reads manuals? I stopped bothering around the time of Duke Nukem 3D wherein the plot was "aliens invaded, go kick ass". Kind of pointless and not an acceptable medium of delivering a storyline. Do you go to watch a film but have someone tell you the story just before watching it? If so I feel very sorry for you, incidentally do NOT come to the movies with me you oddball)

But what is it about Gradius that makes it particularly poignant that I would write a review about it? Quite a lot to be honest. The graphics are crisp and colourful without being over the top; the music is optimistically upbeat to the point that if it got any more cheerful people's legs would be falling off. It's cute and lively, largely inoffensive and the difficulty ramps up rather naughtily in the background while you're left to admire the cute game for what it is. A rather challenging little number from Konami that does require your dexterity and reflexes if you want to survive it.

The game play was fairly unique at the time. You've 3 buttons of control here, shooting, power up deployment and bombs (most ports of the game decided to amalgamate the shot and bomb button into one, making for a slightly easier game.) No charging of shots here (See R-Type review), just tap it to shoot and tap it quickly to shoot quickly.

Every time you kill a red-ish enemy, or the whole set of type of enemies, you'll be granted a power-up (if you fly into it) where you'll be able to incrementally move across the power-up list at the bottom of the screen. Once you've got the power-up highlighted that you want, you can active it and hey-presto! You’ve got the power-up. The power-ups come arranged in order of Speed Up (too many and you'll just crash into something because your feeble mind cannot comprehend the pixels and speed) Missiles (runs along the ground fucking shit up) Double Shot (your ability to shoot up and forwards to fuck shit up) Laser (fucks a lot of shit up) Option (give you an orb that does EXACTLY what your ship can do in order to fuck shit up by the multiple) and Shield (Which lets you survive having your shit fucked up).

There are some drawbacks, for a start, each power-up you select, resets your power-up count. So collect 2 and opt for missiles, and you're back to having zero in stock. Lasers and Doubles cannot be used together, one or the other only here. The shield will only take 3 or so hits before it fades and that's assuming you're not hit by something that will completely disregard you have a shield and just blast you into nothingness with a rather disappointing sound effect. This of course means, back to square one with no power-ups and no speed.

The first boss, of the first level (naturally, but bear with me here) is a large spaceship that requires you to shoot out the core to kill it. The second boss is a large spaceship that requires you to shoot out the core to kill it. The third boss is a large spaceship that requires you to shoot out the core to kill it... Noticing a pattern? No, I'm not messing about; the first 5 bosses in the game are the same large spaceship! Now the differences before the battle are the sub-bosses which can be active volcanoes, rushed by hundreds of small enemies, tentacle monsters and such. It's not until you get to level 6 and 7 that the bosses change into something more synonymous with the level itself and of course, the 7th boss is the final boss.

It does make you wonder why they didn't have different bosses? When they manage it on the Gameboy version!

It's worth a play however, if only to see what the game series was spawned from with regards to such mechanics in game play. Aside from that you might fair a lot better if you went with the games ported to other formats and sequels where Konami began to up their game.

Or you could fight the same boss five times.

R-Type

Continuing with the theme of shooters, from last review, this time I thought I'd carry on with the scrolling shoot-em-ups and tackle something a little more recognised in the gaming world. Let's see if you can guess it before I finish this para-RTYPE-graph, no? You failed and I never said I was going to play fairly either.

R-Type was released in arcades back in July 1987, and eventually ported to almost every possible platform imaginable ranging from the ZX Spectrum up to modern day remakes on the Xbox Live Arcade delivery platform, R-Type was a different model of game compared to the 1985 release of Gradius (another side scrolling shooty space shippy game, which will be reviewed later).

Taking the rather simple idea of Spaceship on the left, moving right, shoot everything that moves and some things that don't move, kill boss, cheer and look embarrassed when the bigger people look over at you playing the arcade, rinse and repeat method. R-Type added a few things that most games up to that point hadn't really done, the most iconic of which were the charge shot and the "force" pod. The charge shot being where you held the fire button, charged up a large shot and released a big blast of sprite-damage towards your enemies and often took out most of them, and some of the bigger ones as well, in one go. While the Force pod was the indestructible (not always impenetrable) shield/weapon add-on that could be affixed to the front of the ship, the rear of the ship to shoot backwards, or launched off to cause remote damage to enemies.

This alone led to many different ways of playing the game and forcing people to play the game. Weapons themselves could be from bouncing lasers, spiralling helix-style lasers, floor and ceiling sweeping flame throwers and additional pods for protection and firepower that would hover above and below the player's craft, to the missiles and bombs that would drop automatically when firing. The dynamics meant that there's multiple ways to attack the enemies and some of course would be better than others, depending upon the level and the deviousness of the designers.

Yes you will die. Yes you will have to learn and pumping in credits is NO cure as you're moved back to various start/checkpoints rather than just going straight back in where you died. Oh and all your power ups are GONE. Which is a real bitch as the first weapon power up gives you the Force pod with no powers, regardless of the situation and subsequent pods deliver the build up of firepower for the respective different weapon types.

And you're as slow as a snail on dope, again.

Game mechanics aside, the game itself is a tough one, often unrelenting in its aggressive nature and brutally punishing when under-powered or incorrectly powered for the level. Flame walls might be a great attack for those enemies on the ceiling and floors, but it's not going to do shit against the airborne enemies flying towards you. While the Helix laser will brutally slaughter airborne enemies, strafing runs against the ceiling and floor enemies will be a task. The bounce laser might be the middle-ground here but it's woefully lacking in power compared to either of the other 2 main weapons.

The other key issue with the mechanics as far as a game play issue goes, is that while firing rapidly, you cannot charge your blast-shot and while charging your blast-shot, you might have to release it early in order to fire the rapid shots again. So another faux-difficulty/dynamic of the game presented to you early on, with just the right amount of insufficient time to get used to it fully before you bite the big one and start over.

But we can't ignore that these things made cash and money, and making your game easy wasn't the way to winning the coinage back then. Or these days either. Though the idea does come to mind to make all arcades free play and give people time limits within the arcades. £10 gives you an hour... coloured wristbands for players just like in swimming pools that allocate time limits... Might be an idea there...

Music wise, the game has its catchy moments, particular for the boss battles (assuming you survive long enough) where you get to hear the same few bars of composition repeated until you either kill the boss or it kills you/disappears. Take too long on a boss and it'll either sod off or will leave the arena, usually by going through you slowly. But it's catchy enough to be memorable which is more than can be said for quite a LOT of arcade game bosses and such, certainly putting on a slightly higher level than most arcades which are often forgettable even after years of playing them.

Having said that, the game does look impressive for 1987 (same year as double dragon, operation wolf, actually a rather good year for arcades), each level fitting a theme from space-industrial, natural caves, biomechanical and such, all done extremely well given the graphical limitations of the time and the enemies themed and crafted with such detail that it feels like playing levels from various games. Which in a way isn't great as the levels have no real cohesion aside from "These things are trying to kill you, go fuck them up" with your potentially adequately powered spaceship. Or at least your amazing skills of getting-the-fuck-out-of-the-way.

It's a fun game if you've the time and patience, but that often comes with a steady learning curve at the cost of cash. Or a good emulator.