Star Wars - Arcade (1980s)

Vector delights ahoy!

Vector graphics. Not often I get to look back far enough and see a game that utilised this kind of display. Battle Zone, Gravitar, Asteroids and Lunar Lander spring to mind as games that used Vector graphics while others used Raster Display to showcase their games. It had its time and place but now seems demoted to quick and simple images such as clipart. But I'm digressing as usual.

Riding upon the huge success that is the Star Wars franchise, Atari made a game that served little significance than to be able to sit down in a mock-up of a cock pit with a flight stick and allow players to BE Luke Skywalker as he assaults the Death Star from the eponymous film.

Large cockpit and flight controls make it a fun experience

Star Wars takes 3 key approaches to the battle between the player and the Death Star. The first being an outer-space dogfight session against various Tie-Fighters, though while not giving the player full control of the direction of the X-Wing, the ship that they pilot, they do get to control the approach and direction of the firepower of the craft in order to try to take down as many ships as they can before they're whisked away to battle the Death Star in one of two possible ways (Depending on if it's your first level or higher).

Now you too can take part in the trench run!

The second key session is a run along the surface of the Death Star and facing off against multiple turrets and towers that will pump out fireballs (not lasers, you can shoot these at least) in an effort to force your shields down and get you killed. There's some level of control to your direction in that in aiming to the left and right will guide your X-Wing in those directions. Which comes in handy when you're trying to avoid sparkly spiky balls of "We're coming for you, still coming for you, yes we're bending our direction to locate you" homing capacity.

Just imagine it's Jar Jar Binks and you'll bullseye it every time.

The final stint in the Star Wars game is the famous Trench Run along the circumference of the Death Star itself. Personified in this case by an impressively built looking trench that is peppered with turrets and shielding while you're barrelling down the alleyway, in later levels you'll have to navigate around and over obstacles such as pillars and blockades while shooting turrets and fireballs before the final showdown between yourself and the exhaust port, one direct hit will kill the Death Star (as killed as a constructed space station qualifies for) and allow you to escape for a fat point boost and then to play it all over but with a significant difficulty spike.... And some vector explosions.

Later rounds add more and more challenges

For such a game, Star Wars has managed to be able to reproduce digitised speech of key phrases from the film ranging from Alec Guinness with "Use the Force, Luke" to Mark Hamill's "I've lost R2!" (usually before biting the big one) and up to and including James Earl Jones with "The Force is Strong with this one", it adds to the experience though little else really comes from the films, but at least they made a significant effort with the speech to lend it that little extra touch of authenticity and give a little extra in allowing players to relive that moment in the film.

Next, same again but harder!

Overall, it'll ramp up the difficulty quickly if it wants to and you may find that while level 1 is a cakewalk, level 2 will be the wakeup call that your reflexes need and by level 4 you'll be frantically shooting down literal streams of fireballs from all walks of opponents to the point that you'll swear that the fireballs are launching fireballs at you. It's bright and animates well given the machine and vectors and manages to create enough of an atmosphere to leave players thinking they're in the film (for 1983, bear that in mind here).

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.