Dimension X (1984)

Also from Synapse, the game this is an inferior copy of.

Name:Dimension X
Number:204
Year:1984
Publisher:Synapse Software
Developer:Synapse Software
Genre:FPS
Difficulty:4/5
Time:50 minutes
Won:Not possible

Is it possible for a company to bootleg their own title? Today, this question doesn't seem so absurd, thousands of games have been released which feel like they only share the names of characters and locations, exasperated by thousands of phone games which come and go like dust in the wind. Indeed some franchises like Might and Magic have basically consisted of a zombie wearing what once was like a shroud, often for 20 years, and even then people weren't too happy about things.

But back in 1984 this sort of thing was absurd. That's why Dimension X seems weird. It's almost like Encounter, a game they published the year before. Quite infamously so, as the author of Encounter had very unpleasant things to say about old Synapse. Could it be a bridge to far to suggest that perhaps Synapse gave one last screw you to an unfortunate Englishman? It seems doubtful that we'll ever know.

Steve Hale, the author of this, also wrote Fort Apocalypse, a knock-off of Choplifter. Just after this, he began work on a series of text adventures with the author of Shamus, at the request of Synapse, before eventually getting published by Broderbund after their buyout of Synapse. This I suspect is both people's finest work, and ironically enough probably a knock-off of Infocom's attempts, by 1984 everyone else was chasing the text adventure with pictures train.

What's revealing about this long development time is that there aren't that many reviews of the game. One negative, two positive that I could find. No mentions in a lot of magazines that you would expect to like this, just silence. You'd expect a magazine exclusive to Atari computers, for instance, would be talking up the cool new game. Almost as if they know it's crap.

First firing it up, the game is a perfect storm of classic game confusion. What's going on? Why are people shooting at me? What are these noises? If you left to make a sandwich or something during loading you would die once. Menus are activated via the Atari's function keys, in this case just changing difficulty. The game itself is controlled exclusively through the joystick, much to its detriment.

You move around like you're in a rail shooter, but you're actually in a true proto-FPS. You always move forward just a little bit, forward goes faster, back goes backward. The button fires, one shot from the left, then one from the right, at an awkward pace. Speaking of awkward, turning. You awkwardly glide around if you go left or right, but worse, you have a crosshair. Go left it goes to the left, go right it goes to the right. It isn't visible while you have any button pressed. Saying this is awkward is obvious, the very act of shooting enemies is a complete pain.

Enemies are generic flying saucers. They take some shots, if you can hit them. You don't move faster than them, so you're basically at their mercy. I have no idea how you dodge, that's not clear. It seems like they home in on me.

Once you take out all the saucers in one section, you may now go to other sections. You get a map for navigation. It's not apparent right away, but this map shows where you are and in what direction you're going. One flashing area is where you are, and another is where you're aimed at. Why we needed this instead of a simple compass is anyone's guess. When your map is eventually damaged, you can navigate via the planet's twin suns, they're always off-set of north. Which direction is actually north is a questionable thing.

It's slightly better in motion, sadly the crosshair blinks in and out of existence here.

Once you go to your chosen destination, you now get to deal with a classic rail shooter session of going through objects that damage you. At first it drained my health and was boring, then it was boring. Where they approach is tricky, but by the time you can tell where it will happen you have plenty of time to dodge. You're also supposed to stay between two lines, but this is a non-entity in the earlier stages so by the time it actually happened I got a few nasty tricks.

That's pretty much the game. Staying alive is basically just a case of dodging enemy fire and finding enemy ships until there are no more. This is somewhat tricky because the "Altered Perspective Scrolling" as the ad says, really throws off my perception of how the shots approach.

So, let's talk about what I do like. I like the skybox. Objects get larger as you approach the edge, and there's enough of it for seemingly 360 degrees. This, not the ground area, strikes me as the most visually interesting aspect. We've seen a lot of games like this, but dynamic skyboxes are rare.
Something that you won't notice unless you let the game sit after dying is a quite cool quasi-title screen featuring a very nice for 1984 title song. And that's about it.

Weapons:
Awkwardly off-set generic gun. 1/10

Enemies:
Hordes of generic flying saucers. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Featureless planes and then tunnels you have to navigate through. 1/10

Player Agency:
Pretty basic, but loses points for dodging being more tricky than it should be. 2/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Boring. 0/10

Graphics:
A few nice aspects dragged down by mostly ugly aspects. 1/10

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Confusing blips and bloops, with one nice menu tune. 1/10

That's 7, the lowest score in quite some time.

Next up, Commander Keen after a long wait.