Mischief Makers

In 1997, video games began to see graphical advancements like never before. Everywhere you looked, home consoles were setting new standards for game play. Rendering polygons and 3D graphics was all the rage, with every company trying to “1UP” each other with the most realistic-looking graphics - while we all suffered from motion sickness! Read more

Galaga [Retrograde]

It’s the classic arcade game that no one thinks of, yet everyone’s played. It’s also a sequel that was infinitely better than its predecessor.  It’s name:  Galaga.  

It’s easy to forget just how successful Space Invaders was.  In 1978, it was the game that you would pump quarters into endlessly until you were forced to come home.  Namco released Galaxian the following year as competition.  Analytically, you could say that Galaxian was better than Space Invaders in every way.  In color, with richer sounds, it had more motion and pizazz.  Yet, take my word for it,  Galaxian was always somehow low rent.  It was what you played only if there was no other machine available.

Galaga changed all that.  

If there’s a single word that summarizes Galaga, it’s “polish.” Everything has been honed, refined, and subtly improved.  The view is tighter, increasing tension.  Enemy ships fly into formation at the beginning of each round, rather than simply appearing.  One of the keystones of playing well is learning to pick off enemies before they form up.  Also there’s the capture mechanic:  the player’s ship can be captured by one of the ‘boss’ enemies, then if the boss is later destroyed, the captured ship “docs” with your new ship, providing you with double the firepower but twice the target area.  (I personally always found that docking made my game shorter and more brutal, but I always went for it anyway.)

Perhaps the greatest addition to the game is the idea of the “challenge stage”, which mixes up gameplay by providing you with a comparatively non-dangerous stage on which you are able to focus more on score than on survival.  Remembering the first time I got a perfect score on a challenge stage still gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling.  Having the “doubled ship” helps increase your score on the challenge stages significantly.

The success of Galaga ensured the survival of a Namco tradition of creating sequals.  As a contrarian, I actually prefer the sort-of-but-not-really sequel Bosconian, a game which transported the Galaga fighter into a war zone where its goal was to destroy space stations. The “official” sequel, Gaplus, never appealed to me (nor, if my surveys are accurate, to anyone else.)  Galaga, in the end is all about polish and balance.  The failure of similar games to prove similarly addictive demonstrates how razor-thin the edge of greatness is.

Despite being a game with no plot and no characters, people get surprisingly emotional about Galaga.  This is the ultimate proof that art is only partially about subject matter.  It is also about craft.  Galaga is not remembered for what it was, but for having been a well-crafted example of what it was.  The next time you stand in a store and deliberate over which of the HD-laden, fully 3D, online multiplayer extravanzas you want, ask yourself this question:  “Will it be as much fun as Galaga?”

But don’t blame me if asking that question makes you go home empty-handed.  Blame Namco.

Ecco the Dolphin [Retrograde]

There’s a wave of nostalgia – pun intended – when loading Ecco the Dolphin for the first time. It’s been fourteen years since this charming swim-em-up enthralled Genesis/Mega Drive gamers across the world. Released under the banner of the Sega Vintage Collection, Ecco the Dolphin is a welcome inclusion to a growing range of titles perfectly pitched to a generation who grew up with Sega, myself included. For me, this was the game which prompted the purchase of a Mega Drive all those years ago.

For those of you who missed it the first time round, the story goes like this: Ecco is a happy-go-lucky dolphin until the day a mysterious whirlwind rips his pod and most oceanic life from the seas. Alone, the young dolphin must travels the seas, explore the past and even travel to another world to rescue his family. He must find an ancient whale, battle alien denizens and the sentient ancestor of life itself before going one-on-one with an alien queen. Powerful stuff, eh?

For the most part, time has treated Ecco well. While the graphics and music are true to the Genesis incarnation, it’s a shame to have to say that for this re-release the graphics were not at least upscaled. Like Sonic, the game is played against a blue border, and modern HD TV’s manage to make each pixel painfully clear. This is the kind of game where you don’t sit too close to the screen, but it is still well worth purchasing.

Ecco remains one of the best examples of mid-nineties gaming. The plot is strong, and the levels are a genuine challenge. The XBLA incarnation even offers the ability to save the game, mid-level, a blessing to anyone who had to try and remember the passwords the first time round. Like most ports to the 360, Ecco comes with Achievements, although in this department, they are painfully lacking and oddly random, from completing the Undercaves to finding hidden statues left over from the original game in Jurassic Beach. However, playing Ecco is not about Achievements, and anyone who does unlock one is bound to be more interested in their ocean adventures than in a few measly points. Where else do you get the chance to explore Atlantis, travel through time, and listen to the song of the ocean?

Ecco’s biggest pull is with its previous audience. Given that, I’m pretty sure it won’t be too long until more Genesis titles including the even more gorgeous sequel hit Live Arcade. If you remember Ecco then this will be gaming heaven, and if you don’t, it’s high time you tried this true unsung classic.

Roadwar 2000 [Retrograde]

We were just outside of Pittsburgh when the mutants attacked.

We’d seen them tailing us since DC.  Well, smelled them more than seen, you know what the mutants are like.  They picked off three of our escorts in the first wave, but then our commandos and bodyguards brought their firepower to bear, and we tore them apart.  They only caught us because we had lost two of our hardtop sports cars just north of Bethesda, where some penny ante local gang got lucky with a few shots on our tires.  Fortunately, Pittsburgh is the steel city, and we made up for the losses by bolting on armor to our bus at a foundry.  We also found a few construction vehicles.  Those will come in handy for hauling our supplies.  It takes a lot of food and gasoline to keep a gang like the Rum Runners mobile, and we’ve got a long way to go before we get to the ruins of Chicago.

Roadwar 2000 is a strategy game that borrows the trappings of the Mad Max and Road Warrior movies to simulate life and combat in a post-nuclear apocalypse United States (or, in the case of Roadwar Europa, a post-nuclear apocalypse Europe).  It’s a world where abandoned cars, guns, and ammo are plentiful — and death is just around every corner.

Life in Roadwar is nasty, brutish, and short.  Every turn you can decide to move (if you have sufficient fuel), or search for loot, vehicles, or people.  The people you meet might be weak refugees, willing to join you in exchange for food, or they might be seasoned gangsters, eager to either join or kill you.  Every possible stereotype has been thrown into the blender here, and it works well.  Mutants, Communist invaders, born-again Christians, Satanists, renegade National Guardsmen, and other groups all pick on the corpse of a devastated continent.

Your job is to survive, and as they say, the best defense is a good offense.  As you travel around the country, you’ll acquire vehicles and gang members, and even take over a few towns if you’re lucky.  Become strong enough, and you may be contacted by a secret underground network, the remains of the legitimate government.  They want you to … well, that would be telling.  Let’s just say you’ll want to stock up on gasoline.

The graphics are serviceable but sparse – think Ultima II – and the user interface is daunting, one of those “a different letter for every function” approaches that dominated the mid-80’s.  Print out a reference card from the internet and keep it near your keyboard.  Complicating matters is that the game offers not one but three different systems for resolving car-to-car combat.  There’s a full-on turn based tactical combat (similar to Steve Jackson Games’ Car Wars).  There’s also “quick combat”, which is somewhat faster and requires fewer decisions, and “abstract combat” which is even faster and requires no input at all.  Early in the game, you get a bonus for winning a full tactical battle (your gang can manage an additional car), so it’s worth going for the gusto.

For being so hard to beat, Roadwar 2000 is wonderfully approachable.  It has a wonderful setting (Fallout fans will feel right at home) and crisp, if sometimes arbitrary gameplay.  It’s not for everyone, but I have been playing Roadwar 2000 off-and-on for 20 years now, and I don’t think I’ll be stopping anytime soon.  If you’re handy with an emulator and willing to get your hands dirty, give Roadwar 2000 or Europa a try.

Roadwar 2000 and Roadwar Europa by SSI, for Amiga, Apple II, Apple II GS, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS.  Occasionally available on eBay.

FreeCol [Freeplay]

In 1998, director Gus Van Sant remade Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in a particularly unusual manner: he filmed a shot-for-shot remake. Critical opinion was divided on whether Van Sant’s work was an homage, a rip-off, or simply an exercise in pointlessness.

In the world of video games, the equivalent to Van Sant’s work are the free versions of classic games. FreeCiv is the most well known, but there are efforts at free versions of X-Com, Master of Orion, and the subject of today’s column, Colonization.

It’s fairly easy to be snide about this. “Wouldn’t it be great to have a game that is just like this other brilliant game, only I didn’t have to pay for it?” Truthfully, though, these games don’t exist just out of a desire to save money. Largely, they originate because the developers wanted to play the games on some non-Windows platform.

Like its cousin FreeCiv, FreeCol suffers from a user interface that is somewhat clunky, unattractive, and only minimally planned out. A slightly more central problem, however, is that the original Colonization wasn’t that great a game to begin with. Most of its charm was in its graphic design and implementation, very little of which makes it into FreeCol’s implementation. So in this case, it’s as if Gus Van Sant decided to remake Herbie The Love Bug.

The game is a faithful remake of Colonization, and so it clearly met its own objective. From my perspective, though, the tragedy is that they didn’t take the opportunity to move beyond a simple reimplementation, and actually improve on its inspiration.

If you’re one of the seven people who were addicted to Colonization in the mid-1990’s and want to play it on a modern system then FreeCol is the answer to your prayers. For the rest of us, however, it is more of a curiosity than a work of art. But then, I didn’t like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho very much either.

FreeCol, for Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and any platform that supports the full Java 1.5 VM. Free download from http://www.freecol.org.

Qwak

Addiction can be a terrible thing. It’s ruined lives and torn families apart. So it’s strange how many games have the term ‘addictive’ bandied about so easily when it can have so many detrimental affects. Qwak, from Team 17, the creators of the stunning Alien Breed series, is one such title that can only be labelled as obscenely addictive.

Released on the Amiga way back in the early nineties, it reminds us of that Taito classic, Bubble Bobble. In much the same ilk as that much fondly remembered title, Qwak was much more fun in multiplayer mode. Across 80 stages, your task was simple in essence, but devilishly addictive in practice. Tossing eggs around with the kind of eagerness you only come to expect from the young ‘uns at Halloween, your duck avatar had to collect keys in order to progress to the next more challenging level, as well as bagging as much fruit as possible to up your score. What else would you expect from, erm, ducks?

Simple? Certainly. Easy? Not on your nelly. Though the 80 stages spread across 8 levels were random within each collection of 10, the jump to the next step on the ladder most certainly was not easy. That’s not taking into account the various ways to up your score, the most notable of which was a hefty points bonuses you’d achieve for “peacefully” beating the level.

The levels certainly didn’t lack style, with a sublime explosion of colour adorning each and every stage through the game’s hefty length. There might not have been any of the immense graphical trickery which was starting to make an appearance on the powerful 16-bit consoles of the time, but that never stopped Qwak from being quite an exciting sight to witness in action.

The graphics never mattered though, and matters even less so now in these heady days of quad core processors. What made Qwak was its astonishing ability to keep you coming back for more. You might have failed at a single level a dozen times, but you’ll still find yourself loading it straight back up almost the instant you switched off your Amiga. It’s so good, that a recent mini re-release has appeared for the GBA, which you can find out about at www.qwak.co.uk. It’s firmly restricted to 300 copies however, so you’d better be quick.

To nab the words of Matt Broughton in the original review found in issue 62 of The One Amiga, Qwak is “brilliantly simple, simply brilliant.”

A Breath of Fresh Air

Breath of Fire II, the first sequel to Capcom’s premier RPG series, has arrived on the Wii’s Virtual Console. This marks pretty much the first traditional RPG available on the service, and while this oft-overlooked role-playing title may not be the most glamorous on the Super NES, it still beats getting another 2D shooter. Oh yeah, and it happens to be a pretty fun game too. Read more

The Last Metroid is in Captivity

While most Nintendo fans are currently diving into the third installment in the Metroid Prime series, why not take a moment to download Super Metroid from the Virtual Console and experience arguably the pinnacle of the franchise?

Debuting for the Super NES back in 1994, Super Metroid was the third Metroid game to be released, but chronologically it’s the sixth installment in the series. Taking place after Metroid II: Return of Samus for the original Game Boy and before Metroid Fusion for the Game Boy Advance, Super Metroid has Samus Aran once again returning to the planet Zebes to battle the sinister forces of the Mother Brain. At the time of its original release, some considered it a remake of the original Metroid for the two games shared a similar premise, locales and even bosses. In truth, though, to compare Super Metroid to the original NES game is like comparing a Van Gogh to a self-portrait your little brother drew with a box of crayons.

Super Metroid begins with Samus - in a rare speaking moment - lamenting on her previous adventure on the Metroids’ homeworld of SR-388. Upon killing the Queen Metroid, Samus stumbled upon a lone egg which hatched to review a baby Metroid. Rather than attack Samus, however, the baby accepted her as its mother and aided the exhausted bounty huntress as the two of them made their escape back to her ship. Upon handing the hatchling to scientists at the Ceres Space Colony, their research concluded that Metroids are actually docile by nature and, if left uncorrupted, their powers can be harnessed for the benefit of mankind.

Unfortunately, right after leaving the Ceres Space Colony, Samus is forced to turn around after receiving a distress call from the colony. Inside, she finds all of the scientists dead and the fire-breathing pterodactyl Ridley clutching the baby Metroid in its talons. Try as she might to recover the hatchling from Ridley, he escapes after a brief fire fight and Samus is forced to pursue him to the planet Zebes in order to rescue the last remaining Metroid.

Technologically, Super Metroid is a cut above most Super NES games. At a beefy 24-megabits, SM had the biggest-sized cartridge for the console and was capable of visuals and audio nearly impossible to match on any other 16-bit platform. Backgrounds are lively and extremely detailed, many times containing effects that were rare for the time such as rain and thunder, and screen-blurring steam in areas with heavy lava concentrations. The audio is also masterfully scored, with music selections that have been heard in many a Metroid game since.

Gameplay-wise, Super Metroid took all the aspects of the original Metroid and improved upon them exponentially. The new planet Zebes is divided into six regions, several even divided into sub-regions. Now that you have a map for the first time in a Metroid game, you can actually see where you’re going and backtracking is relatively pain-free. Secret areas are not highlighted on the map, though, making achieving that 100% collection rate more challenging than in many future Metroid games.

Among some of the old tools Samus will be using are all of the classic beams (which you can combine), the Screw Attack and the Morph Ball Bomb. Some new tools include the debut of the Speed Booster, Power Bomb and Grappling Hook. There are also items exclusive to Super Metroid including the X-Ray Scope, which lets you scan an area for hidden secrets, and Reserve Tanks which store extra energy and can be manually or automatically activated anytime you’re in a jam. Super Metroid was also the first Metroid to contain hidden abilities for Samus. Not just the bomb jump and Shine Spark, but beam shields, as well as the elusive Crystal Flash, a life-saving energy-restoring technique virtually impossible to pull off without help from a friend or the internet.

All in all, there’s a reason why Super Metroid is number one on so many gaming publications’ lists of top 100 videogames of all time. It’s fun, and if the Super NES had any technological limitations, SM sure doesn’t make it seem like it. You could release this game today on any gaming platform and it would still probably go on to sell close to a million copies. And in case you weren’t aware yet, Super Metroid contains arguably one of the most shocking and dramatic last boss battles of all time. You got 800 Wii Points? Use them to download this game from Virtual Console.

Metroid For Virtual Console

Kicking off Nintendo’s “Month of Metroid,” the very first Metroid game was released for the Wii’s Virtual Console on Monday. While no one will deny that the original NES Metroid is a classic in itself within the legendary sci-fi adventure series, is it really worth 500 Wii Points? Read more

The Summoning

There are games that everyone recognizes as great. There are games which initially bask in the glory of adulation and then, through the passing of time and technology, glide gracefully into obscurity. Then there are the lost ones. Games which never got their due. Games which, though superb, never received any recognition. This column is about one of those games: Event Horizon’s remarkable role-playing game, The Summoning. Read more

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