Zero Wing - Arcade

Someone set us up the bomb!

All your base are belong to us, Gentlemen make your time and a whole host of other such bad translations are what plagued the Megadrive/genesis version of this game, but now we have just the arcade version which features solely the gameplay and no shoehorned plots and cut scenes that the console version has.

In AD 2101, War was beginning

With that, what we have is a solid, if a little long, scrolling spaceship shooter. Bright and colourful graphics adorn the gameplay while you're zipping through space collecting powerups, speedups and massive bombs while negating around weapons, enemies, projectiles and some VERY large bosses.

CATS: How are you gentlemen!!!

For plot, there's little to realise in Zerowing beyond you leaving an exploding space station and... That's it, you're off! Into the large black abyss that is "The Space" and you're flying from left to right and taking on all comers in a massive battle royal of you vs. everyone else. On your way you have the lovely little ability to shoot and use a sort of tractor beam that lets you capture small and medium sized enemies and then launch them at others or use them as a shield.

Operator: We get signal

Zerowing's powerups come in several flavours of primary light colours, red for spread shooting, blue for lasers and green for homing shots. Get enough of the same colour and you'll power up through levels of 3 shot, to 5 shot and then 7 shot (except for lasers, they just get fatter) while your 2 pods will also stop most attacks and even destroy smaller enemies for you. You can be seriously kitted out in a short amount of time.

You are on the way to destruction!

Which you'll need for Zerowing as the levels can be extensively long and it's not until you destroy the 2nd boss-looking monster that you're actually told it's the next level. Bosses are not introduced with any fanfare, the music doesn't change, they just turn up and you're fighting them while usually the normal enemies are still trying to swarm you. It's almost as if someone added bosses and then forgot to recognise them as bosses.

Take off every 'ZIG'

The controls in Zerowing are fairly responsive though you do have that issue of trying to control a spacecraft that's going too fast if you're not careful in picking up those bonus items. However, there's the issue also of the dying and being grossly underpowered as a result of not having the firepower needed to take on the onslaught of multiple weapons from a myriad of opponents.

CATS: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...

The music for Zerowing is a little simplistic and repeats throughout each level but has the good sense and grace to change with the levels. Sadly some of those levels are EXTREMELY long, take up 2-3 bosses before being defeated or can be won out within a single simple boss. There's an inconsistent pattern about the design and it shows.

Captain: ... For great justice

There's flaws in the game, there's great aspects too with the level design and the fairly constant difficulty curve that's in place. There's plenty of challenge and given the age of the game, quite an extensive set of levels and gameplay on offer for the studious and hardworking gamer. Certainly worth a play just to see some of the bigger bosses and inventive designs for them.

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.

Dark Star - C64 (...run away)

Suicide mission is right, just not how they thought it would be.

Time to cleanse myself, time to sit back and look at another game that helps me realise what makes a good game and what makes a great game and basically if they're not doing what THIS game is doing, it's got to be worth playing more so than this heaping pile of slag.

And it looks like I just ejaculate shots at the enemies... awesome...

Dark Star. Two words thrown together that may or may not incite fear and horror in many a Commodore 64 player. A game so bad it gained a level of infamy despite it coming from the Mastertronic which had a shaky record of releasing good and bad games over the years as a result of their policy of basically publishing inconsistent works for a myriad of bedroom programmers (me too, but was too young at the time to actually publish anything).

Dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull...

So what do we have here? Dross. Shit. Pile of wank. But it's all very easy to band around amusing names (fuckpig) but what we need to do is assess WHY it's a bad game. First off, the graphics are piss poor for most games released around that time on the C64, enemies are dull and unimaginative while the level/game is based rather largely on the trench run from Star Wars but if you want to see that idea done well, go play Death Star Interceptor (Actually I might in the next review), while in this game it's drab, dull and boringly repetitive.

On one hand, I screwed up. On the other hand, this is the best thing to happen to me since starting the game.

Controls are ok, a little unresponsive at times but the scrolling of the levels judders and as such it's easy to hit... ANYTHING and be killed, instant game over and you suck harder that a Dyson in Vacuum (might need to test that idea, add it to NASA for next launch). One Hit Wonder at its finest (or worst to be fair), touch a wall, enemy, bullet or anything that isn't the black background and you're dead, game over.

Yay... Spikes.

The sound... Switch it off and play a horde of babies screaming while using an orchestra of pneumatic drills, it'd be far more preferable and wouldn't repeat as much as the music in this game does. The same few bars of poorly composed, unimaginative, bland and flat music will assault your auditory senses for the duration of the game until death finds you and gives you temporary release from this fucking BLIGHT of a game. (Yes the more I review it, the worse I feel about it). Though even the shooting and dying noises are abysmal, actually... not the dying noise, it signifies the end of this game! Such blissful release!

Whoo... I avoided death again. I envy the dead.

But the game itself. You travel down a trench and every now and then you have to make a choice to go either left or right. The right choice leads to another choice, the wrong choice kills you. You have to progressively remember the right route and make sure to take it like some utterly unfair and backwards game of Simon Says where you have to guess what Simon Says BEFORE SIMON SAYS IT!

Or switch the machine off, DO IT!

Avoid this crap by all means and if you see a diskette or tape of it, I'm officially issuing a TEP on it.