Cad-Cam Warrior (1984)

Name:Cad-Cam Warrior
Number:257
Year:1984
Publisher:Taskset
Developer:Andy Walker
Genre:Top-Down Shooter
Difficulty:5/5
Time:1 hour
Won:No (115W/85L)

Another game from the world of weird gravity, which somehow is a theme with developer Taskset/Andy Walker. We've seen him before on Gyroscope, and while I didn't know it at the time, Taskset published the more well-known Bozo's Night Out. Note, published, since Walker himself was the developer of all but three games currently listed on Lemon64.

And I have to say, that despite all of them coming out in three years, that's some impressive work. All of them have something uniquely interesting about them, even if they probably aren't as good as one might think. Cad-Cam Warrior is in the middle, probably not too far away from when Gyropod was made given the whole gravity focus.

Cad-Cam, which is supposed to be CADCAM, or Computer Aided Design Computer Aided Manufacture, is a type of processing unit in the vague future of the game's very long backstory. Seriously, this has a lot of pages for an action game from 1984. A fancy, newly designed one has stopped interfacing with humans, and it's up to the player to figure out why. You play as a robot, Micro Assembly Droid 2 sent inside the CAD CAM, trying to reach screen 8192. By defraging every screen you go through with a gun or something that makes sense.

After the title screen, you're thrown into the first of many of these screens. Controls are simple, they just use the joystick, move and shoot. It's very stiff, but I don't know if that's just me using a keyboard instead of a gamepad. One shot on-screen at a time, and nothing I encountered takes more than one hit. By the same consequence, so do you.

The big gimmick the game has is the split-screen level design. The top half and the bottom half are linked by various holes, go in one, you come out the same way you came in. Once you go in, you're locked in until you finish the animation going out. Because of the nature of this, it's very easy to accidentally get yourself into a loop of going back and forth. If an enemy does an inopportune movement, it's over for you.

Enemies are weird. I think there's a difference between the four kinds, but in practice I'm not sure I've ever seen any do anything differently. There seems to be a bit different in their behavior, but it's mostly variations on randomly wandering around. They all shoot and just move to their whims. There are also meteors which pop up after certain amounts of time to hit the location you were at when it spawned. Hope you weren't pinned down. 

These factors combined make getting very far in the game difficult. It's hard to not die on a screen, and each time you do, the screen restarts completely. Every enemy is back. I can't use save states to store my process. Which means, this game expects you to play all the way through, in one session. There's no pausing either. Hope you don't need to pee halfway through the game.

Levels aren't just variations on where the holes are, there's actual different elevation. Unfortunately, all this means is you walk up to one edge and jump up to it. Nobody can shoot over it, and because touching means your death, this is actually to your disadvantage. I didn't feel like the controls were smooth enough to handle this sort of thing, I was just gambling that I'd get lucky and an enemy wouldn't camp out near an edge.

Normally, at this point, I'd say how far I got, and then talk about how it had an interesting idea but just couldn't do anything with it. There's some genuine tension to having the screen divided up like this and having to multitask. It's just that you're so fragile and the controls are so stiff that there's no reasonable way to do this without cheating in some manner. The tape I got offered unlimited lives, which I naturally took advantage for.

This actually allowed me to reach somewhere I wouldn't have otherwise reached. The second zone, which is at about the thirty level mark. At first, nothing seems different, then you fire and a mine drops on your current position. This will explode if you or an enemy step on it, no friendly fire avoidance here. You seem to be able to use an unlimited number of these at the same time.

The thing about mines in most games is, they're a specific item in a game full of useful tools. Most people won't ever really use them properly, and otherwise just use them quite simply. Exploit simple AI so you can take them out without really thinking about them as traps. This doesn't work here, because the AI is too random to properly bait. You're spamming this in the hopes it'll take one out. One badly thought out level and you could very well be stuck forever. 

This was about as far as I could get just casually picking it up, and a dedicated playthrough would have to be a one time affair. More than one, and frankly, I'll just find the game far more annoying than it should be. But it's on this playthrough that something interesting happens. I start picking up the random letters that spawn in sometimes...and it starts revealing information about the level I'm about to go to. Two of these are dedicated to it, one to the rules and another to other information. The ability to understand what screen you're about to go on is a power-up so obtuse you might not even realize it exists.

Despite feeling like I was going to be stuck there forever. I get to the third zone quickly enough. More interesting, there are paths. This is connected to another power-up, the branch. A third power-up, zapper, functions as a smart bomb, killing everything on-screen. Not sure what the others do, but the manual helpfully tells me that I'll need to write down passwords and the ilk soon enough.

Zone four switches up to a stun and drag attack. You stun an enemy, then touch it and bring it to a hole. Good thing I had the information icon, or I'd take a while to figure that out. It's a very finicky method. Hitboxes are small for very good reason, and if an enemy is on the edge of anything, like one of the holes or a raised area, you won't be able to reach it. At this point I could either fight through this tedium or give up. Guess what I chose? Both, actually, I gave up then but tried again. 

And finishing that rewards me with an advance to the next larger grouping of levels. This time with broken graphics which I believe are supposed to be bigger holes. Which means I get another set of levels with plain old shooting to kill, then another mine, and so forth. Then repeat it again and again and again. There aren't any new levels at this point, each smaller grouping repeats the same levels. I suppose something changes eventually, but I was disgusted at this point and just gave up.

This is a very frustrating game. I could never see much consistency to the enemy behavior, and the gave loves throwing you in situations where you can't easily get out of their path or just stuck behind a hole. If the game didn't have an infinite live mode in the version I played, I never would have gotten anywhere in this game. Not that there was much point in doing so, but at least I saw something.

Weapons:
Basic gun, except when the game forces you to use mines. 1

Enemies:
I'm still not sure what the difference between the different enemies is. 1

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
A hundred versions of ten levels. It's like Lemmings if the developers were very limited in what they could do. 1

Player Agency:
I can do everything I expect from a game of this style, but not very well. 2

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
The game has a real sense of get up and go thanks to the fact that you're always on a timer. On a level, not just with how many levels you can go ahead, but also avoiding meteors. In-between levels, because if you wait too long, you gradually lose your place on the circuit board. It's especially frantic because if you aren't using infinite lives, you basically get no rest. 2

Graphics:
There are graphics and animation. I had no trouble distinguishing anything. It didn't look very nice though. 1

Story:
None in-game.

Sound/Music:
Simple bleeps and bloops, with one very strange heartbeat mechanic whenever an enemy gets close to you. It doesn't really add much, but I guess it's something. 1

That's 9...the exact same score I gave the last 1984 game. Huh.

From what I saw, reviews could be described as "Hey guys, the check from Taskset cleared" or "Putting the eh in meh". Most of them were short blurbs, so I guess this went by mostly unremarked.

That's about it for Taskset. I was thinking about covering Seaside Special for the sheer oddness of a political game from the early '80s, but decided that I wouldn't have much interesting to say about that.

Next time, something I really should have started a long time ago, Black Crypt, Raven Software's first game.

TerraHawks (1984)

One of three things which could be called a title screen. None of them have anything to do with the show's logo.

Name:TerraHawks
Number:253
Year:1984
Publisher:CRL Group
Developer:Richard M. Taylor
Genre:Flight Simulation
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour 30 minutes
Won:No (113W/82L)

Gerry Anderson is a figure I'm sure is known to many British people of a certain age, and many more outside of that. Responsible for Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, series so popular once upon a time, that it was internationally popular. To the point that they likely ensured that puppetry survived as a medium much longer than it really should have. I don't think I've ever seen any of his puppetry stuff, I've seen a few episodes of UFO and Space: 1999. Very nice miniature work, but I wasn't really interested enough to continue watching.

TerraHawks is his last puppet show, albeit not the marionette-style he used before, instead a Muppet-style design. Never saw it, probably won't. It follows the usual format of his children's shows, a crack team of humanity's best face off against an extraterrestrial invasion force. In this case, the titular TerraHawks, led by Doctor Ninestein, so named because he's the ninth clone of a Doctor Stein. The invasion force are a group of robots who rebelled against their former creators and are now plotting to take over the Earth. Why is probably one of those things they couldn't mention in a children's show.

It's this sort of thing that despite not liking anything I've seen from Anderson, that I have to respect him on. He'll make a show out of some subject that rarely gets touched on outside of literature and commit to it. The robots think they're the good guys, not evil, even though they likely destroyed their old planet. C.S. Lewis once said that the worst tyrant was the one who mistook his own cruelty for the voice of Heaven. He was talking about a theocracy, but is a machine who mistakes his own conclusion for an objective good any better?

But it's 1984, and the work of licensed video games was usually given to developers with little interest in the subject matter and little ability to realize it well. None of the subtext matters. In fact, none of what I just wrote matters at all. There is nothing connecting this to the show beyond the name. This is, pure and simple, an attempt at exploiting British children for their hard-earned pounds.

I realize it's an old complaint about licensed titles. They tend to suck, but let's be honest, by having that license they have a higher standard than some random crap we haven't heard of. We have expectations. SkyRaven 2077 has no expectations. TerraHawks has some expectations. Namely, that at some point, we will be shooting at the bad guys of the show as one of the heroes from the show.

The manual, at least what World of Spectrum has as the manual, describes this as a pilot training program. This simulates a world within a revolving black hole. "The most demanding environment for a spaceship Commander known to the Universe." Fair enough, in theory. A lot of games have the veneer of being a training program, some of them are really fun and interesting. However, at no point does the manual mention anything that actually ties it into the TerraHawks universe behind just the name of the show.

The people behind this were a lot more proud than they should have been.

The game has a slick and well-designed menu system, which I normally wouldn't bring up, except that this is fairly well implemented for the era. You don't need the manual for the controls, you just need it to explain how to play the game. There's also a 2 player mode...testing the theory that all games are better with friends.

This is the game, baby.

Starting a new game, you are greeted by a space warp. This is just here for flavor, because after a half a minute, you're in the game. Flying across hordes of monoliths, as the manual describes them. What are you doing? Trying to find a series of arches to go to the next stratum. What's stopping you? Monoliths and your fuel supply. It's less ragged fight against a superior alien force and more a really odd adaptation of one of H.P. Lovecraft's stories about endless giant stone towers.

To start with, you can move up and down with 1 and Q, Q goes up, 1 goes down. Reversed Y-axis, no option to change it. 9 and 0 turn. Movement is strange, there's no speed control. You get a little icon telling you whether you're pointing up or down, in addition to to the height number going up or down. (And the monoliths slowly getting taller) But the game has a bigger variation on where you're going than it actually shows, as you can be going up or down even when you think you're level.

A set of monoliths in the distance.

Turning is also strange. Tap and you'll barely move, hold it down and you'll get a small delay, then a reasonable amount of movement, before it stops a moment. It'll continue, but it's something you have to work around when you're about to crash into a monolith. It's not the smoothest system, but I said strange, not unworkable. My problems do not lie with how you move, though this could be because you don't actually fight against anything.

You can shoot with enter. There's an ammo count in the lower right, near the time you've spent in the level and your score. All you do is shoot monoliths if they're in your way. Your beams are oddly stuck to where you are, shoot then turn and you shoot what you turned to. In a sense you can exploit it, but it's simpler to either shoot or turn, not turn then shoot. We're not exactly dealing with a complex game.

The objective is to find a series of arches to go to the next stratum. To do this, you rely on your rangefinder and when you're very close by, the radar. These tools are less helpful than they should be, because they work slightly less well than they should. The radar only works when you're within an extremely short range, and it isn't obvious right away that it doesn't turn like you do, it stays still.

But the rangefinder is weird, and didn't exactly work the way I expected. You're supposed to turn until you get a green light, then you start getting closer. Before I hit on the manual, I figured out that one way or another the rangefinder works for that, but went the wrong way. I thought that as the bar gets higher, you get closer, but it actually gets lower as you get closer. I suppose it makes sense, since it goes the same way as you lose fuel, but I expected it to be colored in.

It does look more like a tunnel, but this is your destination.

Once you get there, it's tricky to actually enter the arches. They're very low to the ground, something I underestimated. The first time I made it to one, I crashed into the ground. It's very easy to crash. The area around the arches isn't clear, either when you enter or you exit, so buildings could be around it.

And that's the game. There are nine stratums, at the ninth you can apparently fly into the black hole to go out into space. I made it as far as the fourth, there's no real change in these things as you go along. Once you've gone through one vortex, that's about it for the game's content. You just go on until you run out of fuel. I have no idea if fuel refills when you go through a vortex, I used a cheat someone made, wasn't risking that. The manual only mentions an additional shield every time you go through one, ammo is limited to the entire game.

There's no real world here, just endless monoliths. Sometimes a row of them appear, which is cool to see, but I'm pretty sure that this is all randomized. Even if it isn't, you're still looking at the same thing for hours, while a low droning sound plays in the background. What's worse is that I'm pretty sure that some monoliths are moving forward at a different rate than other monoliths. Which again brings to mind certain parts of Lovecraft's work, but I doubt this is intentional.

For some reason, there's an autopilot feature, as if what this game needed was taking more stuff away from the player. You go to the height and direction you want to be in, then press M. Whenever you have to turn around to avoid some monoliths, you press A to turn back to that direction and height. The thing is, where the light is green is not always consistent and you can always just...turn around to where it is. It's just there, it doesn't add anything, it's just another thing you can do.

Weapons:
Standard laser. 1

Enemies:
Behold, stone pillars! True terror! 0

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Endless monoliths most mundane. 1

Player Agency:
It works, but in such a way that it feels slightly off for the whole thing. 3

Interactivity:
I guess breaking stone pillars by shooting them counts. 1

Atmosphere:
There is something profoundly weird about this game that prevents me from entirely writing it off, I'll give it that. 1

Graphics:
It's kind of neat how many monoliths can be on-screen and in how many differing configurations, but sometimes you can get confused as to what is the monolith and what isn't. 1

Story:
This doesn't even have anything to do with what it's supposed to be licensed from! 0

Sound/Music:
Some occasional sound effects, then a low droning noise for background. 1

That's 9.

Normally, I wouldn't just play something like this, but it was the third game I tried to play this week and frankly, what it was doing felt offensive to me. There are a ton of licensed games which are bad, sure, but a lot are either generic action games which imitate something better or come out a bit janky in how they adapted the license. They might not be good, but they're trying on some level. This isn't trying, someone just took a completely different game and slapped another name on it. If I was a British schoolkid in the 1980s, I'd be angry.

Now, this isn't necessarily a bad idea for a game. I enjoyed it, but then, I'm coming from the position of someone who isn't paying for the name. The concept of having to chose whether to fly higher or lower for different benefits is a solid mechanic. It's an idea that could be improved upon in a game that isn't adapting a television show where I'm expecting epic space shootouts. Lovecraftian flight simulation would be a cool idea for a game.

Last week, I promised a Mobile Suit Gundam game, namely, Mobile Suit Gundam - Jet Stream Attack, a game published by Bandai themselves on the PC-88 and the FM-7. After about fifteen minutes of trying to figure out how the game works, I eventually quit. It's one of those space games where you get a big sector map where you go to where conflicts are. The problem is, I couldn't figure out how to actually fight anything, and just kept dying when a red dot touched me on the radar. I pressed every button on the keyboard and all I ever got was a strange status screen. Only enter did something there, and that was just closing it.

There was also going to be a Apple II game called Space Ark, but I also couldn't find a manual and while I figured out the controls, I couldn't really figure out how to do anything. With these two cut out, and this game out of the way, this actually puts 1984 down to 9 games, which means soon I'll be done.

Next time, it's a return to Wolfenstein 3D...in some form or another.

Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984)

Name:Beyond Castle Wolfenstein
Number:252
Year:1984
Publisher:Muse Software
Developer:Muse Software
Genre:Top-Down Shooter
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour 20 minutes
Won:Yes (113W/81L)

It's finally happened, we're here to kill Hitler. Er...chronologically. Because Wolfenstein 3D technically hasn't happened yet. Unlike the games of tomorrow, we are not going into this as some elite badass, gunning down hordes of nazis. No, we're going into this as a guy who is very fragile and has to sneak his way into the bottom of Hitler's bunker and place a bomb there....and still technically an elite badass, because we're one guy with a pistol and a knife.

I've felt reluctant about this one. Castle Wolfenstein was a good game for 1981, but three years is a lot in the 1980s. Things change fast. The king of the hill in 1981 is not necessarily the king of the hill in 1984. There has been considerable improvement in the genre, so standing still even a little could be bad news.

This was released on four platforms, Apple II, Atari 800, Commodore 64 and DOS. At first I tried the DOS port, but it was rapidly clear that this wasn't going to work out. For various reasons, neither the Atari or C64 port worked vey well, so that left the Apple II version. That wasn't working out much better, so the DOS version it was instead.

Behold, outside.

The game puts you in an empty room to start with. This is because you're going to need it, moving around is a challenge. The QWEADZXC cluster moves around, WADX cardinal directions, QEZC diagonals. S stops. This is important, because you can walk into a wall and you will stop dead for a moment, and this is a problem. I don't think there's a way of getting around it. You move constantly at one speed.

Shooting is down with the IOPK:<>? cluster, or at least, that's how you aim. The actual shoot button is L. Your shots at hitscan and the only indication that you hit someone is if they die. This makes aiming diagonally a lot of trouble, but as anyone who plays soon finds out, this is worth figuring out. H holsters, which is also very important.

Meeting the first guard of the game, note the door on the right, that's a closet.

In every room past the first, there tends to be guards. There are the usual kind, who walk around, scream halt through the PC speaker, then ask you to approach. Once you do so, they ask for your pass, at which point you have to walk up to them and give it. There are five passes, activated by pressing 1-5. One pass works for the entire floor, but give the wrong one and he takes it. Give two wrong ones, and you get killed or captured. At this point, it's probably better to just shoot him if you've given one wrong pass. Unless there's more than one guard in a room, in which case the other will activate the alarm. You can search their corpses with space.

Walking towards a guard with all five passes.

There are also desk guards, who in theory work the same way, but have some changes. They don't walk around and instead sit at a desk. Unlike the others, you can't walk around with a gun and expect to shoot him successfully, you need to do a pass. He sees you with a gun, he raises an alarm, endless Nazis start popping out. But where he differs is in what happens when you bribe him.

"What closet is it for?" "Meh, they don't tell me that."

You can bribe anyone with the M key, assuming you have money. This is apparently 100% successful. You'd really think Hitler's bunker would have people immune to this sort of thing, but apparently not. When you bribe a desk guard, they sometimes tell you useful information. Like what the pass number is on this floor or a series of numbers for a cabinet somewhere. Regular guards just treat money like a pass.

A worthwhile interaction.

Now that the whole getting around the game thing is solved, how about actually taking out Hitler? The bomb is in a closet somewhere, and in order to do that, you need to search them. How? You point your gun at them and then press space. This gives you a wide variety of things, from money, a first aid kit and the occasional pass, to useless objects like tools and Hitler's diary. Naturally, you can't search while a guard has a visible sightline to you, but otherwise you can search to your heart's content.

However, some are locked. In order to open them, you have to press the number keys, three in a row, until you hear a click. As the manual explains, if you press a correct number then an incorrect number, you need to press the first one again to get to where you were. But eventually, in one of these on the first floor, is the bomb.

Note the dead Nazi in the corner, it's more noticeable when you're the one to make the corpse.

The bomb changes the game around considerably. Now you have a timer on all your actions. You can of course, reset the timer as long as you drop it, but if someone sees you, alert, gunshot, dead. Basically, duck out of sight, reset it, then continue on. There's a lot of leeway on this, since it's reasonable for you to get out of the bunker before it goes off.

Don't mind me, just dropping off a special delivery for one A. Hitler.

Eventually, the guards start getting thicker, but chances are if you've made it this far, you won't be worrying about this. At least not for the reason you might think. On any one screen, only one guard needs to be shown your pass, the first one who spots you. If there are a lot, you need to spot the one you need to show it to and get past the horde around him. They won't cause an alert if you bump into them, it's just annoying and adds a slight bit of pressure. It's the one point you can actually lose after figuring out about the passes.

This meeting seems so boring that I'm surprised nobody's killed themselves.

Hitler is on the third floor, surrounded by his elite staff, constantly heiling each other. This is foreshadowing. All you do here is drop the bomb off, reset it, then head back the way you came. That timer isn't how long you get before exiting the bunker...technically, just how long before it explodes. Which then causes all nazis to shoot you on sight. Do you remember the way back, what the passes were and where the elevators were?

"Don't worry, it's fine if you can't walk out before it explodes, it isn't going to shoot off beams of light or anything."

As a stealth game, this leaves a lot to be desired. That I won it this easily is a testament to that. Random bunker layouts along with randomized passes are basically this game attempting to give itself more than a thirty minute playtime. It's annoying, but it's the only reason why you'd spend that much time here. Otherwise the game consists of you finding out what the pass is, acquiring said pass if you didn't already have it, and then showing the pass to everyone you meet.

Taking out single guards isn't that difficult, because it's just a question of remembering which aim key will aim at him and then hovering your finger over it. The only real way to lose in this game is user error. Whoops, pressed the fire button then the left button, now I'm dead. Or gave out the wrong pass, and it was one you needed. Otherwise it's bang, bang, bang, then constant cries of pass, then heil. Bumping into guards is like bumping into a wall, except the nazi starts going away from you. By the end of it, I wished I had killed more, simply because it would have been a mercy to us both if the guard didn't have to keep doing so.

Other aspects include first aid kids, which heal you if you have one, with F. There are also tool kits and keys. The first are used via CTRL+T for some mysterious reason which the manual doesn't explain. The keys are supposed to unlock the doors with CTRL+K, but I didn't seem much reason to do so since the combination lock is more fun. There's also a dagger, which you can switch to, and is silent. Since bullets are plentiful and there's no reason to attack enemies in rooms with more than one guy, there's no point to it.

The game also allows you to move dead bodies by pointing the gun at them and pressing space. This has no point because of the aforementioned factors. I get a lot of what the game is trying to do, but man, a lot of this stuff would only be useful if the game actually needed it. With that, to the rating.

Weapons:
Knife aside, I did enjoy the feeling of having to be a quick draw on your gun to win a fight. 1

Enemies:
There's guy you give money to for the answers to the game, guy you give a pass to ten thousand times, and guy who shows up and kills you if you start an alarm. 2

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Despite the random nature of the rooms, it's clear that there are a limited amount of pre-made rooms which I don't think are enough to fill out an entire game. 1

Player Agency:
I kept accidentally pressing the wrong buttons for shooting. Most of the keys are self-explanatory, even if you need a look at the manual once or twice, but it kept happening. Perhaps it's me, perhaps it's the game. 4

Interactivity:
An odd amount of stuff to do despite the somewhat simple game. 2

Atmosphere:
Feels a lot less action thriller and a lot more German bureaucracy drama. If you use the wrong thing, it's another long wait for you. 2

Graphics:
Simple, kind of distracting. Enemies change their hat shape depending on which direction they're pointing. Otherwise you can make out everything you look at, at least. 1

Story:
Uh, you're in a bunker where Hitler is, take out Hitler. 1

Sound/Music:
Scratchy sounding gunshots and real speech from the nazis. Adds some flavor, but gets old quick. 1

That's 15. Four more than the last game and reasonable for 1984.

I have to admit, it's an odd choice to have a game depict stealth be as mundane and boring as this game does, even if it's not realistic for you to be gunning down potentially dozens of Nazis with no comment. I've spent hours on worse games and this was better than I was fearing, if only just.

Looking at other reviews, I don't see anything I didn't mention, but I will note that all the reviews I could find were from later on, none at the time. This is probably linked to the company soon going bust. There's nothing about it that strikes me as bad or uninteresting for the time, but it is sitting comfortably in the middle of the rating scale, so maybe I'm not the only one who thought of it as middle-of-the-road.

Next up, a Mobile Suit Gundam game on the PC-88, something which is sure to be interesting.

Skyfox (1984)

Name:Skyfox
Number:244
Year:1984
Publisher:Electronic Arts
Developer:Raymond E. Toby
Genre:FPS/Flight Simulation
Difficulty:5/5
Time:50 minutes
Won:No (107W/79L)

We've seen quite a few alien invasion games so far. It's a simple enough plot to come up with and provides easy conflict. At first glance, Skyfox does nothing to change up the formula. Oh, sure, it's a first-person flight sim rather than the hordes of side-scrollers and top-down games, and within atmosphere rather than space, but that's not too different from the template.

Skyfox was released on most platforms of the day, from Apple II, C64 and ZX Spectrum, to later Atari ST and Amiga ports. I chose the Amiga port, based on the logic that since it was released later, it probably smooths over the worst parts.

Starting the game up, you get a difficulty selector and a mission selector. The latter can be divided into two categories. Training and the real deal. Training pits you against a limited selection of enemies and you have to take them out. The real deal pits you against an entire invasion, complete with a mothership you have to take out. For future reference, I took the easy way out as far as difficulty is concerned and stayed on Cadet.

At the start of every game, you get a map of the area you're in. In training missions, this just shows where you're going. In an actual battle, this just shows the tanks that have freshly spawned off the ship. Fortunately, you can bring this map up, complete with up to date tactical info, with C. There's a whole bunch of other stuff you can do, but it doesn't matter. At first, all you really do is just click until it brings up a launch mode, select high or low launch, which almost always seems to switch to high, then launch.

When I first managed to flew around, what was brought to mind wasn't a flight sim. This is not even an arcade simulation, it's more like a FPS where you're flying. You move at a constant speed, determined by what number you hit, and up and down causes you to turn up and down. You rise and fall based on that. Hitting the ground doesn't hurt you, you basically just float across it. Moving in any direction doesn't cause constant turning, it moves you a bit then you right yourself automatically.

This actually makes it really annoying to do much of anything. Since you're constantly fighting against your plane going back into the same, standard position, you can't really move around quickly. It's also hard to aim, because you never seem to stop on an enemy. At first I even thought each time you turned, you turned 45 degrees, but no, it's just freeform for that to not be true. It's slightly better with a keyboard joystick over a mouse. The mouse aiming here isn't like regular mouse aiming, it's holding it down, which any joystick does better.

Training is more or less what you expect it to be. Here you are in this situation against these enemies, now take them out. The rub lies in these being training missions. Technically, you are in an actual live fire action, but regular enemies like tanks and planes aren't that difficult to deal with.

But the weird thing is, you never seem to fight the two at the same time, instead, you alternate between the areas they're in. Press U to jump up into the clouds, press D to go back down to ground level. There's a long shift as you automatically move, then a time you wait for the disk to load.

To fight back against enemies, you have three attacks. Your typical gun, in this case an automatic laser. This works well enough, but you can only hit enemies with it when you turn, not when you're just gliding along. Then you get two missiles, a guided missile and a heat-seeking missile. The guided missile seems to have a higher chance of not hitting its target, but otherwise the function of the two are the same.

Once you master training, it's time to deal with an invasion. This removes all enemies from the board at the start, placing you against a giant, floating city which constantly spawns planes and tanks. These go after friendly installations which you can recharge your ship's fuel and heal damage. You're going to need to do that, because unlike in training, those are important concerns. You get three spare fighters, and depending on how things go, you'll need them.

Motherships are far more difficult to kill than anything else. It's not necessarily that they're tougher or more difficult to hit, just that they fire a lot at you. I'm not sure how getting hit works, it seems to just happen based on if there are enemies around, but if you're near a mothership, you're getting shot.

Unfortunately for the mothership, it isn't any stronger against missiles than anything else. So get a lucky missile hit against it and poof. This makes the strategy fairly easy to understand. Rush to the mothership, then hit it with a missile. No more enemies spawn, and you can take out the rest before they clear you out.

This is of course, the small invasion on the easiest setting. A proper invasion consists of multiple motherships. I beat one of them, dubbed Halo. Here, there are five motherships, one in the center, four two tiles away from home base. This is the easiest of the proper scenarios, simply because the motherships don't drop tanks. With less firepower, it's easier to take out a mothership and then you can clear out the planes that launched much quicker.

There are more variations, some based on unorthodox gimmicks, others based on throwing as much as they can at the player. Even on the minimum difficulty, they're throwing groups of five tanks at you, which is very difficult to counter. Higher difficulties don't seem to increase this speed, it just turns them into more dangerous enemies. They actually chase after you a lot more rather than the more casual stroll the lower difficulties have.

Getting away from the big problems of the game, there's a lot of little problems. The game slows down when there are a lot of enemies nearby. Tanks stare at the player with an almost unreal look. It's odd seeing a half a dozen tanks turn in perfect harmony. You basically just speed from place to place and hope your fuel doesn't run out at the worst possible time.

Weapons:
A simple blaster and some missiles. 2/10

Enemies:
Tanks, planes and a boss which seems invulnerable. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
Don't let this place get hit. 0/10

Levels:
The game tries to have variety in the number of scenarios it has, but there a few obvious variations. The grouping around a single base and the "chess" motif, in which there are bases on one side and motherships on the other. In 1984, I might have even considered working through them. 2/10

Player Agency:
It's sort of what you expect, but works in enough odd ways that it feels more off than if it was outright unusual. 5/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Very meh. 1/10

Graphics:
Colorful but not too garish and a decent number of variations, but the ground is one solid color. 3/10

Story:
So little they don't even pretend there's one in the manual. 0/10

Sound/Music:
There's a jaunty intro tune and some soft sound effects. 2/10

That's 17.

While it didn't have much to capture my attention, and I didn't have much fun with it, I see several good points about it. We've got the basic template of any later action game with small-scale, randomized missions, just with a spawn rate that's way too large. Seriously, five tanks at a time?

Tobey had an unusual career afterwards. He had a hand in three other games, Budokan - The Martial Spirit, one of the more notable early fighting games, a chess game and a Sega Saturn adventure game. The later two he does not list on his personal site, instead focusing on graphics programs he worked on. Considering the number of people who seemed to have used them, I can see why.

Next time, in order to get out of this feeling that I've been spinning my wheels here, I've decided to go very out of chronology and play Streets of SimCity, one of Maxis's weirder titles.

Strontium Dog and the Death Gauntlet (1984)

Nothing screams Strontium Dog like whatever this is.

Name:Strontium Dog and the Death Gauntlet
Number:242
Year:1984
Publisher:Quicksilva
Developer:Argus Press Software
Genre:Shoot 'em Up
Difficulty:2/5
Time:40 minutes
Won:Yes (107W/77L)

The last Strontium Dog game was interesting, but absurdly difficult. Undoubtedly suffering for being an action game on the ZX Spectrum. So, what does the broadly superior C64 game do? It's a shoot 'em up. Only, it kind of isn't. It's an endless runner, sort of.

The story, as told by a pirate intro, is that our hero, Johnny Alpha, crash landed on a planet full of renegades (bad guys, presumably) while being pursued by the Stix Brothers. Run until Johnny gets to the ship where his partners are waiting. The death gauntlet of the title is him just walking across the desert to survive.

This, in contrast to the last game, is not based on any story, but just uses characters. The Stix Brothers, which is actually an entire family, are a group of mutants who all look and dress the same way. Very convenient for a video game adaptation.

The controls are weird if you don't play them on an emulator. Basically, space shoots and the joystick moves. What makes this really weird is that because I'm generally emulating my joystick, space is the joystick button. A whole lot of effort just to get back where it all started. Function keys deploy a timebomb, which sends you forward. I never really had need of it.

At first, the game is insanely confusing, bordering on insane. Randomly running into things, not understanding why you've suddenly died, and things just happening. There's very little visual clarity, the most detailed objects on-screen are Johnny and random rocks. Everything else is somewhat detailed but one bit. It's odd, visually.

Very quickly, things become clear. The first part is that the game runs weirdly. Up and down move up and down, but left and right control your speed. This is different from plain old moving left and right. No, going faster depletes your strength, while going slowly allows it to slowly restore. Oddly, when you move very slowly, it's basically impossible for any significant amount of damage to happen.

When Johnny inevitably crashes into something or gets shot, he loses a life and starts flailing around on the ground like he's screaming about life not being fair. The other game didn't exactly put a big mental image of the guy in my mind, but at least I can attribute that one down to forced choices. This just feels like it's mocking the guy while he's down.

The inevitability of getting knocked down and how low amount of damage and quick regeneration actually creates a weird effect. It's not quite an endless loop, but it comes off as something where you have to put in very little effort to play. It's almost like the player is useless in the equation. There are powerups scattered around which increase strength, but why break what's a winning strategy?

This creates a weird loop. Playing it as slowly as possible is fairly simple to play, but it isn't very fun. Speeding it up kind of makes it interesting, but adds in danger. The thing is, I never quite figured out why one form of injury resulted in Johnny's death and another just resulted in him flailing around for a bit.

While it is difficult to fully avoid getting knocked down, individual pieces of scenery are easy to dodge. Johnny's hitbox is just his feet and all the scenery is surprisingly small. It's very generous, the game just throws a lot at you. That, along with the enemies is what gives the challenge, such as it is.

Enemies too, have a hitbox that seems to just be their feet. While this makings dodging most a cinch, it also makes hitting them trick. You only get one shot on-screen and most duck and weave enough that hitting them is rare. The ones you're most likely to hit are the ones that are most likely to cause you trouble if you don't, ones that slowly move to where Johnny is.

After a while, they start shooting back. It's not difficult to avoid. I never got shot once and I wasn't exactly putting 100% in at that point. All of the shooting in this game felt superficial. It's there because it's supposed to be there. I think the cracked version I played had an issue with the infinite ammo cheat, because I suspect ammo was supposed to drop down at one point and it never did. It didn't really matter that much, but it might have affected things a little bit.

As you gradually move through the area, scenery begins to change. This is the only obvious indication that you're moving. Yes, there's a bar at the bottom that shows how much progress you're making, but it uses white to show where you are. In case you haven't noticed, there are parts of the bar that are white. Which means you can't see precisely where you are.

That said, visually, most of the later screens are uglier than the earlier ones. The rocks looked nice, the trees less so, and then it seems like it degenerates into random pixels. I guess it's a ruined city, but it sure seems like it's a lot more ruined than the worst bombs designed by man could ever do.

At the end, the game stops, two figures pop up. Is this a boss fight? No, I've won. The game ends with two figures popping up and then the game just loops. If I'm charitable, my winning playthrough took a half an hour. Which is kind of embarassing, even in this era, since there's basically no point to replaying it since it wasn't fun the first time. To the rating.

Weapons:
Your basic blaster, the time bomb isn't really a weapon. 1/10

Enemies:
A mass of vaguely humanoid and robotic creatures with some variation in behavior. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Rocks and tress slowly move towards you. 1/10

Player Agency:
Very smooth and easy to understand as far as movement goes.  5/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Nothing positive. 0/10

Graphics:
Detailed, but as a whole, feels unfocused. Johnny has considerable animation, but feels oddly smooth for the action around him. 2/10

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Blips and bloops. 1/10

Just going to subtract 2 points before finalizing for a total of 10.

There's no going around it, this game is bad. I try to see the good in creative matters, but no, this game is just bad. The kind of bad where you question why the developers chose to pick a creative field and charge money for the end result. Which usually is something we all ignore, but tends to hit harder in licensed media, because this is a character people like getting turned into a joke.

Next time I'll pull out something a bit off beat in Obitus, a game which is of many genres and nobody can quite agree on which one it truly is.

Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984)

There's a very nice animation proceeding the title.

Name:Raid on Bungeling Bay
Number:240
Year:1984
Publisher:Broderbund
Developer:Will Wright
Genre:Top-Down Shooter
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour
Won:Yes (105W/77L)

When we think of a predecessor to SimCity, one would naturally think of a strategy gather rather than...this. As we've often found, important game ideas come from the unlikeliest sources. One particular element of a game is more interesting than the rest, so let's turn it into something more. Welcome to Raid on Bungeling Bay, the game SimCity was originally a level editor for.

The concept is simple. The Bungeling Empire has built six factories, destroy them, and don't get shot down by the enemy. To aid in this task, you have five helicopters, and an aicraft carrier to act as a base.

Keyboard controls consist of the IJKL cluster, with I being forward. Space shoots and Z drops a bomb. Turning is generally smooth, but you can't turn and shoot at the same time. Instead, you lock into place. Forward movement is increased by gradually holding down I or decreased with K, but you only go backwards as long as you hold down K. Which occasionally creates some problems, like when you have to land on the carrier.

You don't die in one hit and you get nine bombs. Landing on the carrier restores your health and bombs, which you do by getting to a low enough speed above the carrier and shooting. Unlike the rest of the time you shoot, this stops it. Because of the nature of how it works, it's easy to accidentally press space before an action finishes and then have to take off again. What's weird is if you get shot while on the carrier, you get knocked off.

A bomber going after the carrier.

The carrier is not a static object, it constantly moves slowly upwards. To prevent you from forgetting where it is, the game includes an arrow which points back to it. At later stages, it gets annoying when you might have to worry about enemies attacking you over it, but it's manageable. It can also be attacked by black planes, which the carrier either regenerates from when not under attack or takes so long to destroy that you have plenty of time to deal with it.

And here's a fighter...doing something as I try to bomb a factory.

Your primary target is the six factories. You might think, having nine bombs on your helicopter, that this would be easy. You can hover over the factory and just unload. Thing is, factories have weak points where you can destroy them with less than nine bombs and points where you need more than nine. Which means a trip back to the ship and hoping you get back before the factory repairs itself. It can and does get very annoying at times.

There's a secondary target of a battleship the Bungelings are building. If it gets completed, it goes after your carrier. The thing is, it's broadcasted to you when it's nearing completion. So I never actually had to worry about it moving around, I could always send its progress back to zero.

It's fairly easy to figure out where everything is, simply because there are three factories on islands to the left of the carrier, and three to the right of the carrier. The battleship is on the left island off the start. Everything loops, but generally you don't need to loop around horizontally outside of extraordinary options.

There are three enemies who pose a threat to you. Turrets, which have difficulty actually hitting you, to the point that you could stand still and they'd miss you. Hits they get feel like bad luck rather than bad movement. The planes, meanwhile, are harder to deal with. The don't exactly have perfect aim, but sometimes they can get a shot on you despite it feeling like the result of random luck. It's hard to take them out sometimes owing to the whole turn and shoot things. The radar helps, but because everything hostile is yellow, isn't foolproof.

Then there are missiles. They appear and chase after you. Hitting them is hard, because they're usually so close to you that dodging them is the only thing you can do. You basically have to just outrun them until they mysteriously disappear. Which is a thing that happens with all enemies, sometimes they just mysteriously stop chasing you when you cross off/on an island or approach the carrier.

As you take out factories, or as time goes on, more enemies and defensive measures pop up. The manual says it's as time goes on, but it seemed more tied into how many factories have been destroyed. This is a hard thing to measure, as there's no reason to take out the defenses of a factory without taking out the factory and things which don't shoot back are unimportant.

The game starts off quite easy, but by the time you're taking out the last factory the sky tends to fill with planes and the ground with turrets. You actually do get to see these things being built and try to take off, with the option to destroy them before they become a problem. It's a nice touch.

Sadly, winning the game results in you just getting a text scroll along the bottom saying that the enemy has surrendered. Then again, this was relatively easy for the year, so I shouldn't be counting on too much.

Weapons:
Basic weaponry. 1/10

Enemies:
Fairly simple variety, some turrets, a few chasers, cannon fodder, static targets and something that goes after your base. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None as such.

Levels:
The area is described as over 100 screens long. Not sure how true that it, but it's certainly a big place. I don't feel it's that special though. 3/10

Player Agency:
Very smooth, if still janky in a few places. 5/10

Interactivity:
None, as such.

Atmosphere:
Feels like a lot of classic top-down shooters, but doesn't necessarily distinguish itself. 3/10

Graphics:
Nice, clean, simple. Pretty nice animation too, even if it's just machines going around. 3/10

Story:
Basically none.

Sound/Music:
Simple sound effects. 1/10

That's 18.

Raid on Bungeling Bay is a fine game, but it doesn't really feel all that exciting. It's competent, but it doesn't really have much going for it beyond that. I sort of struggled to find the time to play this one despite starting off really well and still struggle to find interesting things to say about it.

Next week, we'll see Catacomb Abyss again as we get through the very last of 1992.

Strontium Dog - The Killing (1984)

Name:Strontium Dog - The Killing
Number:237
Year:1984
Publisher:Quicksilva
Developer:Channel 8 Software
Genre:Top-down Shooter
Difficulty:5/5
Time:1 hour
Won:No (104W/75L)

Put another point for the '80s being the era of weird licensed titles. Strontium Dog is a series by the creators of Judge Dredd about a mutant named Johnny Alpha, who is a bounty hunter with the ability to see through objects and read brainwaves/telepathy. It's not weird that this is adapted, since frankly guy with gun who commits violence is the perfect form of media to adapt, rather that it seems to me to be a blip on the radar in terms of popularity.

The Killing is one of two Strontium Dog licensed games that Quicksilva made in 1984, and was released only on the ZX Spectrum. The game has a bit of story, which is just that Johnny has made it to some contest where the galaxy's most vicious murderers are in a contest to the death. Kill people, get money. Surprisingly, there's quite the epic introduction. Let me show you what I mean.

With the man on the slab, it looks less like an organized competition and more like a cult.

This is animated, and shows three figures crossing before the king here states that the killing has begun. Now, this would just be a cool, short little screen before the game proper were it not for one thing, this is an awful lot like the opening screen of Zelda II. It's amazing what coincidences you find sometimes.
 

Controls are the usual Spectrum nonsense. QA go up and down, OP move left and right. M shoots, one bullet on-screen. I must be getting used to the crap factor here, because it seems better than usual. You stop on a dime and move quickly, and shooting is fast. So much that it took me a while to notice it was one on-screen at a time. Johnny dies in one hit and has no real sign that he has any abilities beyond good with gun. I imagine if I read the story beforehand I would be ticked off. It's always disappointing whenever you play a game based off some superhuman comic character and you might as well be playing as a random guy.

Note the multi-colored electrical field, it shifts quite rapidly.

The oddity of the game continues when you reach your first opponents. You've got to kill 93 murderers, and it's not just simple slaughter. It's puzzley slaughter! I'm not saying I dislike the idea, but I'm pretty sure these guys were going for Robotron 2084 and were severely hamstrung by the ZX Spectrum not being built for that. On this first screen, which becomes a reoccurring room design, there are two guys who pass by behind the electrical fields. They shoot shots which go diagonally, bounce off walls and just sort of hang around in an ever tightening circle. So you can't just camp out hoping to hit one. 

Nothing says the future like a short Elvis impersonator.

The other common type of enemy room is a series of doors. Like ye olde light gun games from around this time, but in a way that I don't think anyone really finds fun. Enemies pop out, sometimes they shoot down, sometimes diagonally and you just have to get lucky. This, along with just moving through a series of corridors, seems to consists of 90% of the gameplay. 

Now of course, these corridors aren't always free of trouble. Often the walls kill you on touch, but just the glowing ones. Then there's this rainbow barrier. It's just sort of there, it's not tricky to avoid. As I've said, I haven't read the comics, but I know that British comics tended to have gritty, black and white illustrations. This feels like the exact opposite of it. Really, this is one of the reasons why games tended to suffer until the Amiga/VGA-era. Because if you're limited in the colors you can use, but not to the degree that it's pure black and white, you tend to overcompensate rather than just drawing better.

He certainly looks like he needs medical attention.

The big thing breaking up this are the Medi-Centres. Here, you throw a flare in with X, lest you get shot and die. Throwing a flare in causes a bunch of shots to ring out inside, and then a two-headed creature pops up and just shoots in a triangle pattern. Constantly. Your bullets don't take out other bullets, so you just have to get lucky. Did I mention you only have three lives and no saving and loading? I really can't imagine getting too far in this without save states.

That is likely where most, if not all players gave up. The Medi-Centres are chokepoints in progressing through the game, and you aren't getting much higher than 10 kills if you don't go through there. But afterwards, it's more of the same. Kind of. At first there's a sign that it's getting more difficult, more enemies, but then it just sort of eases up. Enemies shoot slower, and more and more rooms are just empty. I think, because enemy appearances are random, sometimes quickly popping up, sometimes taking forever to appear.

The second Medi-Centre is no different to the first. It's appearance does not mark anything positive. I know the number of kills I must make and the number of Medi-Centres I must go through, three, yet the two don't seem anywhere close to what they should be. Is the game just really backended? Or is it just really slow on some screens?

This is actually quite the annoying screen, when it has enemies on it.

Eventually I find some new stuff. There's another door shootout area, this time the doors are not flat but sort of criss-crossing. The first two don't have enemies to engage with, but I might have killed one the second it appeared because my kill count went up on one of these screens. Although later I discover another phantom increase, so maybe someone else is killing others?

I didn't know Strontium Dog had a tarot motif!

Then there's the hanged man. At first, you might think, oh, forboding, and mindlessly walk across it. Yep, it's another trap. He's hung himself or something. Just get lucky when you shoot him. The manual actually mentions him, just saying you need to shoot him. Which, to be fair, if it didn't say so, I would have genuinely assumed it was impossible. Now, you might think this is some sort of thing blocking off further progress. Yes and no, since there's a Medi-Centre not long after this. And the area opens up after this. Which considering the maze structure of the game isn't nice.

At around this point I just lose interest in going any further. It's no longer a case of just going to the side roads then returning to the main path, no, it crosses off in a large way, two massive areas past a crossroads. Then enemy groups start getting massive. Like 5 at a time. I applaud the game for having that many on-screen in a Spectrum game, but it's just another stark reminder that this game has limited lives, you have no way of getting any more, and you had to complete the whole thing in one sitting.

Weapons:
Basic blaster, one shot on-screen. 1/10

Enemies:
There seems to be a dozen different types of enemies but I can't tell if there's much difference. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Make a map of a seemingly endless number of the same room which display no regard for geography or logic. The more puzzle-inspired levels that the manual implied are a blip in comparison to just dodging enemy shots. 1/10

Player Agency:
It's solid. You need a light touch to move small distances, which you kind of don't need but is somewhat annoying when you do. But, this at least comes with the boon that it's very smooth to play. 5/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
The game certainly makes an entrance, but quickly loses it thanks to constant padding. 1/10

Graphics:
On one hand, I can tell they tried. On the other, they ended up with a very garish looking game. Animation is surprisingly nice though, which is something that's struck me as beyond the capability of the machine. 3/10

Story:
I don't think "kill everyone" can be said to be a story. 0/10

Sound/Music:
Typical blips and bloops. 1/10

That's 14, seemingly quite in the middle for the year.

This is an odd game. It's not good, but it shows that it had potential as an idea. I would not be adverse to this if the game was just not as strict as it was. It shows that the Spectrum can be made workable as far as action games go and isn't just the cheap computer that barely functions. It isn't the game that shows that it will work, but it shows that it's possible. And that, despite a quite lackluster design and performance, is what strikes me as interesting about it. There just needed to be someone with a better idea of how it should be balanced rather than just throwing more crap at the player.

I know I said I was going to do The Dam Busters, a WWII flight sim but I could not figure out how the game operated even with a manual. I mean, I could go around, shooting stuff, but in a game where you have to drop a bomb on a dam in a specific way, not knowing how to drop it is a pretty big problem. Which, if you haven't seen the movie, involves lowering the plane to a certain height. In the movie, one person looks down while the pilot lowers the height. This is a game that you take all the roles at once, which presents a problem.

Next time, I think it's time I finally bite the bullet and get on with Ashes of Empire.