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.

Obitus (1991)

Name:Obitus
Number:243
Year:1991
Publisher:Psygnosis
Developer:Scenario Developments/Tech Noir
Genre:Action
Difficulty:5/5
Time:1 hour 30 minutes
Won:No (107W/78L)

For the second time in a row, I've come across a game that really tries my general ethos that there's something of value to any game. That no matter how crappy it is, there's a lesson to be learned from it. Any such lessons that could be learned from Obitus are so obvious as to be a basic building block of the idea of making a game. It's that bad.

The story is, a long time ago, a king was unable to find a suitable bride in all the land. The search went on for long enough that a wizard, who hid himself from the world, heard of it. The wizard hated the king a great deal, and created a bride for him. Not a good bride, but one born with a spark of evil.

The king and the bride meet through convenient circumstances and they fall in love. Four sons are born, and when the king dies, they start to war among themselves. It goes on for a while, and the land becomes a hellhole. A strange device appears in a tower in the middle of the land, and each son takes a piece of it, which allows control over the populace. An uneasy, oppressive peace falls over the land.

In the present of the 1990s, a history teacher by the name of Wil Mason, driving his Volvo, crashes during a thunderstorm. He wanders until he find a glowing light which leads to a strange tower. With nowhere else to go, he sleeps, and finds himself teleported a thousand years in the past.

The first problem with this game is that most of this doesn't really matter as far as the game is concerned. There are supposedly four figures in four castles you need to kill, but this is about all it matters. Mason might as well be a baker for all he matters to the story, since as soon as the game begins he becomes a silent killing machine, capable of shooting a bow with unnerving accuracy.

I'm not arguing that this backstory is bad, it just doesn't matter. The game doesn't have an actual story as much as a series of cryptic statements from people you're probably about to kill. It'd be one thing if Mason being a history teacher was relevant or if the machine is relevant as anything other than a treasure hunt. They aren't, you could say any of a thousand different backstories and they'd be true.

I didn't realize that the game had VGA graphics at first, so I played a bit in EGA.

You start off in the tower with a key on the floor in front of you and four doors around you. Something a text crawl helpfully tells you. The way things work is not obvious. Oh, you get a GUI with information on it, but that information is not necessarily obvious to the player. There are nine actions which are mostly self-explanatory. Mostly.

Info is weird. The manual tells you nothing about it, but obviously you can use it on items to get information. This tells you the various stats of items, from the straight-forward and useful to the more vague. Weight and nutrition have direct effects, you have a weight limit and nutrition is how much an item heals you. Mystic and value don't seem to have much direct effect in gameplay.

For a long while, I didn't figure out that you can use info on characters in the game world. Here, you can trade with people. I want to repeat that the manual mentions nothing about any of this. This is where value sort of comes into effect, because presumably trades are based on the value of items. The theory then, is you trade the most expensive item you can find, then work your way down.

This makes Info the closest the game has to a look function. It's more illuminating than a regular look function in theory, telling you all you'd ever need to know about an item. In practice, a list of statistics with very little to go by beyond that is very unhelpful. Everything requires you to guess as to what it does and how you use it.

Which is a problem with puzzles, which all involve guessing what item you have to use on which hotspot. Hotspots are tricky to click on, which is odd because the mouse cursor doesn't seem like it should cause any issues with this. When you have many keys and don't know if you use them on the door or the lock and have no indication of which is which, you have a problem. When things start getting less blatant, it's very troublesome. There is no indication that you're doing something right or wrong until an action happens, be it a key in the right lock or you accidentally shooting an arrow at nothing.

This leads to a sort of new section, the maze sections. Technically the maze is the same as the section you just came from, except you can actually move forward and backward. Controls are customizable and imitate a single button joystick, but you still need to use the mouse to click on things. You can use an actual joystick to, which seems like it would be interesting for a few moments.

The big draw of the game is the shiny, first-person parallax graphics. It's very nice, some of the best first-person 2D work you could find. Except that it's also quite confusing. Turn and you track in one of eight directions. It's enough distance that you would turn in real life, except that when turning it doesn't feel like you're properly turning, just sort of side-stepping.

So you have to rely on the GUI to tell you where you're pointing. The most obvious problem is that looking at the GUI to figure out where you're at kind of ruins it, even if it has a compass. You're looking at a map, not the game, in a game where the graphics are the selling point. The less obvious is that the way thing on the compass is a man, so the two ends of it? Those are the sides. Took me a while to figure that out.

Moving is no less confusing. Unlike turning, there's no locking, you just keep moving until you hit a wall. To help, there's no turning unless you're on an octogon, to name a tile. If, say, there's a octogon you can turn around on in-between the octogon you started on and the octogon that's at the end of your walk, the only way you can find out is by looking at the GUI.

This gives the game a very empty feeling. Not as if they forgot to populate the game world, just that you're doing the bare minimum for it to be called a game. You walk around, click on things, pick up items, then use them when relevant. It's just a game, not anything you could actually do with that, nothing special.

In order to navigate around the game, you either need to make a map yourself or take a map someone else made. I'm thankful that maps already existed, because that's just not a rewarding process. To start with, you're mapping eight-sided tiles, which is something you're going to have to figure out how to do yourself rather than take advantage of anything preexisting. So you have to figure out how you're going to map it, then actually go through the large and confusing area of the game, in a game that has more trouble than the usual dungeon crawler in making areas feel distinct.

Combat is dead simple. Have a weapon selected, and if you're in a first person section, click on what you want dead. Then keep clicking until it dies. Strategy consists of using a different weapon if it doesn't die and you have to reload. Side-scrolling sections add a little strategy, sometimes you can jump into an enemy to kill it.

But there is a curious aspect of this. Some enemies don't attack you. You can talk to them. They're obviously hostile, because this game doesn't do subtle. If this game had clever writing, you might think this was foreshadowing that the player isn't a good guy. Then the game makes you kill an obviously non-evil NPC to advance.

I'm not saying that a game can't allow you to kill innocent characters, but I expect it to be acknowledged. Tell me I'm evil for doing it. Acknowledge that it's not the act of a hero. I can believe that a British history professor, when push comes to shove, will kill someone trying to kill him. I do not believe that one is going to kill a defenseless old woman. Especially not when he could just walk around her!

Eventually, there's a path out of this area, leading to another new type of gameplay. A side-scroller section. It's dead simple, you go from left ro right until you reach a dead end or another area. Enemies occasionally pop up to stop you, but as far as I got, they weren't much trouble. Hell, you can just jump into them and they die.

Much later, there's yet another style of gameplay, sort of like the side-scroller, except designed like a game with more traditional screens. It's built off part of the last game from the lead developer, The Kristal, most visibly with being able to go into the background and the foreground to simulate depth. It's the part that most feels like a game, though this could be because this is a boss dungeon, at least in theory.

It's at this point that I gave up. Oddly, this is because the game finally throws something at me I feel like isn't just me randomly clicking and things happen, because there are traps. Traps that are very hard to avoid. Up until this point, the difference between getting hit and not getting hit felt very small. You have a lot of health and most enemies don't do that much damage. Traps are different, they take a big chunk of health and it seems almost impossible to dodge them.

Which means I've been playing it wrong and I need to do everything right in order to make it to the end. Since the difference between dodging and getting hit is barely noticeable, that's not very easy or fun. Healing is limited to items. Sleep is just busywork, a fatigue bar periodically fills and you need to rest lest you lose more health.

I did look up the ending afterwards. Wil just sort of ascends the opening tower, and then goes on further adventures in other worlds? I mean, that is a valid idea. A history teacher who is suddenly capable of fighting monsters and wizards like some sort of knight? Yeah, I'd want further adventures too. But considering everything else the game has, I'm just left wondering about it all. To the rating.

Weapons:
They differ in power, but otherwise they might as well be the same thing. 1/10

Enemies:
It's a bit odd that the only real difference between enemies is if they attack you when you get close to them or if they attack you after you attack them. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
The difference between and enemy who doesn't attack you and a NPC is usually how fast they die. 1/10

Levels:
Mazes intended to extend the length of an already questionably long game. 1/10

Player Agency:
Outside of hotspot issues, I had zero problems with the mouse and keyboard setup. It could have used some quick select keys for actions, but otherwise I can't see how this aspect could be improved. 7/10

Interactivity:
Only the most important actions do anything, otherwise you might as well be clicking into the void. 1/10

Atmosphere:
It's certainly an alien and mysterious fantasy world, but this quickly disappears when it becomes clear that they just didn't make much of anything. 3/10

Graphics:
The parallax is nice, but the spritework seems quite limited in many ways. Most characters just move to attack, so animation is extremely limited. It's also very samey within an area. 4/10

Story:
A barely important wall of text which could have added so much if the developers actually had some writing in-game. 1/10

Sound/Music:
Passable music and some forgettable sound effects. 3/10

That's 23, which is what the numbers add up to, yet it isn't anywhere near the passing grade that would describe. With a wave of the magic wand of boredom, I shall call it 13. Still feels like a higher number than it should get, but I guess between the graphics and the way I had no complaints with controls, it has something.

Obitus, as a game, is terrible in every regard. It does three genres, each so poorly that you have to wonder what the primary focus was. Having tech demo visuals is a selling point for a tech demo, a game needs something more. This is just nothing, a black stain on Psygnosis's library.

The only thing interesting about it is how some enemies only attack you if you attack first. If it was used by someone more clever, it could make for some interesting gameplay. A different take on getting around some enemies. Or perhaps make it so that attacking an enemy who isn't hostile has consequences.

And the reviews, back in the day, well, quite a few praise the game. I can only hope the check cleared. There are a few reviews that point out that the game is boring and pointless. The SNES version was actually named one of the ten worst games of 1994 by some magazine I've never heard of.

From a technical standpoint, the DOS version I've just played is the worst version. Other versions of the game include lighting mechanics, where you have to use torches and lanterns to see in the dark. Technically, it still exists here, but because the game is in 16 colors even in VGA mode, it never changes.

The SNES version is the best, since apparently resting actually heals you there, even if it comes at the cost of random battles and having to do mouse tasks with a gamepad. It's still not good, but at least you can win without feeling like you're torturing yourself.

Next time, we'll see Skyfox, one of the games I've been looking forward to in 1984.

Obitus: Lost

Something I didn't realize when I was playing the game the first time is that there actually is a VGA mode, which looks nicer, but is still 16 colors. It also has an animated intro. Which is not very informative.

The mines are still very visually nice, and it makes the whole limited number of possible exits from any given section a lot easier to swallow. Since it's basically just a passage carved out of rock. A new enemy type are dogs, which actually attack as opposed to waiting for you to come around.

I wander around for a while, finding more ammo and food, along with a rope, a light key and a gold bar, until I meet this guy. He says some cryptic stuff, which I am supposed to parse as, give me a silver bar and I'll give you a heavy key. Since I'm not making my own maps and using ones that I've found online, it mentions the whole trade thing. Except there is no trade option, and I can neither use nor drop items to perform an exchange.

After flailing around for a bit, I assume that I'm going to have to call this one lost, until in a fit of insanity I use info on him. It works. It freaking works. The manual says nothing about this at all. To trade you cycle through your items, then click trade, then on the item you want. I'm not sure how you're supposed to figure any of this out except through trial and error.

Going through more of the area, I then end up talking to this guy, who is in the way for one of the other areas. He has a lantern, but that isn't what's interesting here. Instead, you're supposed to just kill him. This random, inoffensive and non-violent guy. In order to continue through the game, kill an innocent guy. This is a level of unawareness that I haven't seen in a while.

There are two ways out of this place. The first is through a hole, which seems to be a one-way trip. The rope is used here, except that you actually use it when you're on the other side. Figure that out. This leads to the catacombs, a giant place under all four castles. It's a very large and confusing place full of more items which I collect just for the sake of collecting.

There are more enemy types, which of course, are not at all very different. They're just sort of there. It's basically just more and more busy work until at one point, I find that my stamina is rapidly draining. Not because of any hostiles, but because I just picked up too much stuff. Not really sure how I'm supposed to work around that considering how obtuse this game is so far and how picking up items and killing hostiles is the only gameplay this game has.

I do discover that if I click on the left side of the GUI I get this screen. Not sure how helpful it is or how I was supposed to figure out out. I can't sleep yet and eating doesn't really do much, so, uh, that probably would have been helpful.

The other way out is to Drakehurst Castle, which is like the side-scrolling sections, except with the adventure GUI. I've seen other games like this before, pretty sure those are a lot better than this one. It's easier to spot when an enemy is going to pop out, but there's not much looking around. If it isn't part of the wall, chances are you can pick it up or shoot it.

Oh, I didn't realize this was built off The Kristal's codebase. You can go to the foreground and the background. Not sure why we needed that. So, the whole puzzle aspect of this section is basically, use the right key on the door. Only in order to reach the boss there are six doors, and I seem to only have six keys to open that kind of door. Go the wrong way and you've lost. The worst thing about this, there are items in some of these places.

The correct path is full of unavoidable enemies and traps, to the point that once again I get pretty low on health. So, healing, food items heal you, as well as potions you can find. Sleep meanwhile, doesn't seem to do much of anything. It just lowers a fatigue meter which has been gradually filling since I started the game. So, health items are very limited and there's not much you can do to heal yourself.

This is about as far as I'm going to get. I can't make it to the proper end of the area without getting dangerously low on health. And that's with using all my health items. There's no boss fight in this version, but there is in the SNES version, apparently. At the end of it are some magic powders, one of which kills the knight from the opening forest.

At this point, there's nothing for me to do but restart and try to optimize the hell out of my actions, or chest. As I'm not enjoying this, I'm doing neither and just ending it here. A disappointing ending to a disappointing game. Which just leaves a disappointing rating.

This Session: 40 minutes

Final Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

Obitus: Intro

A very impressive EGA image of the Psygnosis logo.

Welcome to Obitus, a quasi-RPG published by Psygnosis and developed by Tech Noir. Psygnosis needs no introduction, being the very model of cool and mystical Amiga games which don't always stick the landing. Tech Noir, meanwhile, is known for this game and an unproduced sequel. The developers had a hand in The Kristal, a game I played over at TAG, which was terrible. I do not blame them for that, since they were being led by someone who lied about himself to make it sound like his work wasn't trash. It's possible they could make something good unshackled by a madman.

Oddly, this is the first Psygnosis game I've played here that fits into the classic image of Psygnosis, previous titles I've played, including another FPS I couldn't get past the opening screen of. I've played several before off-blog, of course, but this is, in my mind at least, the first proper Psygnosis game.

There are Amiga, Atari ST, DOS and SNES versions. I'll be playing the DOS version because the Amiga version is a bit tricky to get working and the SNES version is a bit odd. Especially since this is a game that makes extensive use of the mouse. The DOS version is EGA only, but has Adlib music. I have played the opening bits of this before and found it to be a video game of general description.

The backstory is, once there was King Cirkassia, who was a great ruler and the kingdom of Middlemere was doing great. Alas, he couldn't find a suitable wife, so he had no heir. The evil wizard DomaKk [sic] hated the king and the land, so he snuck into the castle as a loyal member of the realm and cast spells promising the king a wife and children. The wizard gave him a wife and soon there were four sons. Because the wizard spawned the wife, the children were full of envy. When their father passed away, the four brothers engaged in a war, tearing the land apart. DomaKk left for another plane, his evil complete.

One day, a mysterious machine appeared in the center of Middlemere. Everyone feared the machine, even the four sons. Nothing happened, it just existed. The sons began to explore the machine, soon realizing they could take the parts of it, which allowed them to rule their subjects easier. They feared the machine, even a small part that the sons had. A truce was made, and the land was divided into four.

In our modern day, Wil Mason, history professor and Volvo owner is driving in the rain, crashes his car trying to avoid a branch. Leaving to find someone who knows how to fix a car, he finds a mysterious light and heads towards it. Finding himself in a strange tower with four doors, he enters. Protected from the rain, he sleeps, and finds himself in another world.

The game gives you a message telling you you're in a tower with four stone doors and then throws you in it. The backstory does at least feel important even if it isn't likely to mean much. The game is controlled by a combination of mouse and keyboard/joystick. The keyboard controls are entirely selected by the player, movement in four directions and a fire button. In this case, the arrow keys duplicate the directional marks on that dial. In addition, we get nine actions. There's no looking, what you see is what you can use.

There's a key here, which opens the northwest door. Note that the while the compass itself on the GUI is nice and large, the direction it points is not entirely obvious. Because it's showing a person from an upward view. The direction you're pointed in lights up, at least.

This leads to Falcon Wood, a maze if ever there was one. A maze with a purpose, as the game's claim to fame on Amiga is the incredible parallax graphics, which is still incredible in EGA. It's some of the smoothest and incredible pixel art in motion. The inevitable but here is that you turn around in eight directions and move slowly around in a circle. Movement forward, while smooth, gives you an unnecessary amount of freedom.

That's the key word, freedom. It's still technically tile-based, but every tile is eight-sided. In motion, you have to turn around a lot, and while it is accurate to how little you would turn to go from east to northeast, in a video game that's too short. It's disorienting, especially since while the parallax is nice, it's about all you're getting visually. Forward and back slowly glides along, and I'm just left wondering why it couldn't be tile-based.

The starting area around the town consists of a loop with two exits, one inside and out outside. There's some arrows and an apple. The arrows function as a weapon, use while you have it equipped and you shoot whatever's in front of you. Each quiver gives you more ammo, no bow required. Apple is food, which I think is somewhere between health and a hunger meter. I haven't seen the later, the former's on the lower left.

A knight is the first enemy you meet. You can try talking to any character you meet, but some are less helpful than others, like this knight. I don't have enough arrows for him, unfortunately, so I die and restart. When I returned later, he was still too tough for me, probably a puzzle enemy.

Killing an archer, who doesn't actually start shooting me until I get close, I make my way to this random guy. Or woman, I'm not sure, I started looking at online maps pretty quickly and it called the sprite a woman. Either way, she gives you a key when you talk to her. It's at this point that I discover that talking works in weird ways. Some characters have more than one piece of dialog, but to get it working, you need to save and reload to get it.

Exploring the rest of the area is more or less just going around and clearing it out. Most enemies outside of the archers involves you attacking first, sometimes you can even talk to them. I feel like if this game had any sign of a decent story, this would be foreshadowing that you aren't the good guy. At the end I've gotten a page, a red potion, a silver bar, a flask (food), a roll, "Firebrand" (a stick), and a blue gem.

There's a gap in the woods leading to another area, where this guy blocks it. He, like everyone else so far, gives a cryptic message, this one about the knight I couldn't kill yet. The knight is someone I'm going to have to come back to later, even though I have daggers now, I'm not sure how dangerous they are.

Going into the gap leads to a side-scrolling area. Enemies hide either in the bushes or in the branches above. Bump into them or shoot them, and they die. You lose a little health from bumping into them, but it's more economical to do so that to shoot them. There are a lot of guys. Also, if you run past some, they just randomly die. This is very weird.

There is a bit of a pattern to it all, since you can jump at the right moment to dodge. There is an obvious pattern to it, you're not just frantically doing it against razor sharp margins. It's probable that this is going to change at some point, but for now these sections seem to be easy.

At the other end of the straightforward side-scrolling section are the Eldon Mines. I'll stop here for now despite not having gone through much. It's a very point and click approach to FPS, if I could say that. There's just not much of anything going on here. Be it as an adventure game, a FPS/RPG or as a side-scroller. To say there's style over substance so far would be to imply there's substance.

This Session: 50 minutes

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.

Secret Agent (1992)

Name:Secret Agent
Number:241
Year:1992
Publisher:Apogee
Developer:Apogee
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:4/5
Time:5 hours 30 minutes
Won:Yes (106W/77L)

Apogee's gone through some rather unusual places so far. We've been on Mars, dealt with a bootleg Indiana Jones, stopped a mad dictator, mined crystals and helped a child who got lost for a considerable length of time. If nothing else, Apogee has been content to go through a wide spectrum of thematic genres. Which brings us to Secret Agent, a game where you play as a spy.

Using the Crystal Caves engine, you play as Agent 006 1/2 (Which is inconsistently used, sometimes it's just 006), who has to stop the Diabolical Villain Society after they stole the blueprints to a defense satellite. Take them out and retrieve the blueprints before they can destroy the world. Some defense satellite. Oh, and the villain of the opening episode? Dr. No Body. It's so lame I'm not surprised they didn't get sued.

Being Crystal Caves 2 in essence, it plays out much the same way. Arrows to move, a jump and shoot button. Up and down do not look up and down, sadly. Once again there's ammo. There are improvements. You have to push a lot of blocks around, but if you push it into the wall, it gets pushed away just enough so you can push it from the other side. On platforms, if you approach at certain angles which shouldn't allow you to reach the top, it places you on top. 006 can take three hits before dying and you have unlimited lives. You get bonus points for going through a level without getting hit.

Doors require you to find the usual colored keys, with the door out requiring you to find dynamite. But before you can leave a level, you need to destroy a security radar. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that it looks like a satellite dish. You need to clear out every radar in order to reach the final level, where the blueprints are.

Various power-ups include the usual point items, mostly themed around spy fiction, the usual letters, which if gotten in the right order give a bonus, this time spelling SPY, glasses which reveal hidden platforms, gun power and a speed boost. Gun power is a misnomer, it really gives you more bullets on-screen. Otherwise you and everyone else has just one.

Everyone has one shot on-screen. At least, until you get a gun powerup. Enemies and traps are limited as well. At first, it's fair. As a result, it's fairly easy to exploit things if you're careful. Most enemy shots are not faster than you, so assuming you can outrun it, you can exploit this.

The help function doesn't mention it, but there are also power-downs. Confusion, which reverses your movement keys for a time. Slowdown, which slows 006 down for a while. Basically, just wait them out.

One of the final components that makes itself known are floppy disks, computers and lasers. Find the floppy disk, bring it to the computer, then deactivate the force field. It takes a few levels for this to show up, but when it does, levels tend to center around it.

The primary enemies are No Body's security force. Five different humans who, as you shoot them, turn into a human of a weaker rank. At the top you get a thug, which is a reskinned version of your blond hero with the ability to shoot, to a ninja master, who can also shoot, then three varieties of enemies which can't shoot. Finally, you get a tombstone which you can collect for extra points or shoot for less points. Ammo isn't at too much of a premium after the first few levels, but I seem to recall shooting the tombstones having a chance of creating a ghost.

The robots are more varied. You get sliding ceiling and floor guns, which you can take out with three shots, in contrast to side guns, which are just traps. Then there's a robot dog, which just requires a few shots. Every other robot has something odd about it. A giant cyborg where you need to wait for it to stop so you can shoot it in the face. A big robot you have to shoot in the stomach. A seemingly ordinary robot which goes back and forth which shoots out ghosts horizontally when it dies. A big robot which extends its head out when it stops and has to be shot in that head then.

Basically, a lot of enemies are about jumping up or being one block above the floor they're on. Despite how this sounds like it could be annoying, I felt like the constant focus on positioning 006 and shooting the enemies with various special conditions gave the game a lot of variety. Whenever you had to deal with an enemy was never the problem.

Traps are mostly typical, spikes, wall guns, water. Then there are odder ones, moving robots which float one tile above and shoot electricity into the ground. Slowly moving fire, which you can jump over, but are generally placed where this is inconvenient. Ceiling fans, basically permanent ceiling spikes, but I must admit I thought it was clever for a jumping man to hit his head on a ceiling fan.

Each episode has a small overworld, more tilebased than the freeform of Keen's worlds. There's a final level you need to solve the other levels before you can reach it, and several blocking off other levels. A lot of the time, it's not entirely clear where you can walk, because sometimes tiles imply gaps you just can't go through.

For the first episode, most levels are of the fun, short, but unmemorable category. A level where you're going back and forth across a series of jump-thru floors with blocks on either edge is fun in the moment, but not exactly mind-blowing design.

There are a few levels where you have to go back and forth through large swaths of the level. At this point, it's becoming the big Apogee issue. Need to pad out a game some? Just add a level where you have to climb to the top, go over to the other side, then fall down and repeat three times.

But the truly awful levels are those that require you to guess or go through them multiple times just to win. In a sense, there's no level that technically can't be won on the first try, but a lot rely on the luck of knowing that a sudden drop isn't going to place you on a landmine or down a pit you can't escape from.

Once you get all the rest of the levels, the final level is one of those where you have a bunch of hills you just keep jumping up on. Despite the odd enemy in an inconvenient position, it's not that hard or special. Just get the usual three keys and dynamite, then the blueprints are right next to the door out. Really? The blueprints couldn't be somewhere else? Lame.

Episode 2's closest level, thus the one you're likely to start with, starts the episode off on the wrong foot. In that the most obvious route the player will take will likely result in them being in an unwinnable situation. There are two pathways at the start, one behind a blue door you get the key for right off, and a jump to a floor below. You don't know these lead into each other or that that key you got could be used to allow you to open all the doors you need to in a moment, with the third blue key being at the end of a long walk.

Continuing to not endear me to the episode, the map is setup in such a way that continuing is not obvious, kind of an issue for what should be a straightforward map with no secrets. Some levels are getting to Arctic Adventure levels of annoyance. Gotta jump over one-tile pieces, some of which have spikes, and everything is over an acid pit!

Now, I don't want to imply that this is nothing but heartache. It's easier than most previous Apogee titles, especially the smaller tile-based ones. I picked up a lot of full health bonuses on these levels. The game gets a lot of mileage out of its enemies and forcing you to jump around them or jump in time to shoot them. It's just easier to complain about constantly having to reach the limits of your jump yet again.

The final level of Episode 2 is disappointing. It's very mundane. There is nothing special about it, no challenge, you could replace it with about half the levels from before and there would be no change. It just exists.

Episode 3's intended first level takes advantage of the lower starting bullets to put you in situations where you really have to decide if shooting some enemies are worth it. It's nice having to make every shot count for once. Unfortunately, the starting section is very difficult to get out of without getting hurt, and the dynamite is located on spikes, not the kind that come out of the floor, the kind that kill you when you land on them.

This continues for a while. It's actually cool. For the first two episodes having practically unlimited ammo encouraged you to not worry too much about successfully jumping and hitting something, because you could always get it on the second attempt. It's a bit disappointing when you get enough ammo to render it all once again a non-issue.

It feels fitting for a third episode, like every piece that's gone into the game until now has been building up to it. A level here or there with a trick that now that you've been doing everything for a while, feels like a natural end result. One particular level requires you to hold off on pushing a barrel until you find the invisible platform seeing glasses.

One fun level near the end was one where you're jumping across clouds. You have to find two sets of keys to open the door at the bottom, at which point you may discover that getting a key of one color when you already have one causes one to disappear. It might just be a series of long jumps, but it's the way the long jumps are set up that make them more interesting. Having to figure out where you need to go to get up is more interesting than the dozens of flat jumps over water in previous levels.

The final level, once again, is quite mundane. Long, but nothing about it feels special other than it being the last level of the game. It does sort of go over everything previous levels did, but that isn't special by this point.

The ending text is quite mundane, just an expanded you won screen, but the pictures. Oh, boy, the pictures. At first we get a surprisingly mean-spirited image of our hero blowing up Dr. No Body, who is a brain on top of a robot. I mean, blowing him up is fine, but chaining him up and then setting off explosives in front of him? Are we sure we're playing the good guys here? I guess it's supposed to be a reversal of the typical Bond villain trope, but man, that's a mean-spirited way to do it.

Then we see an island explode. Which seems to have a suspicious resemblance to Australia. Congratulations, you won, basically. Onto the rating.

Weapons:
Despite the rare extra shot power-up feeling very nice, it's still ultimately just your basic gun. 1/10

Enemies:
An interesting variety of enemies, each of which require different tactics to deal with. That said, I do wish there was a final boss. 5/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
For once, the game doesn't feel frontloaded. Instead, we get cool and interesting levels as we go through the episodes. 8/10

Player Agency:
Simple, straightforward, smooth. 6/10

Interactivity:
Basically just limited to pushable blocks. 1/10

Atmosphere:
The humor in this felt kind of flat, like it was just there because if they did a serious spy game they'd get sued for some reason. That said, the spy theme itself did feel unique, if underutilized in a standard platformer. 5/10

Graphics:
Despite being small and goofy, there is some decent detail in it. In retrospect, this is also one of those games I'm impressed is EGA and not VGA. Not quite as much as ID's games, but it doesn't bring to mind the usual EGA problems. 5/10

Story:
Go to three islands to pick up three sets of blueprints and oh, I can't be bothered. 1/10

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

That's 33, Apogee's current best in-house game.

To a certain extent it could be nostalgia, but this does play a lot more competently than previous Apogee titles. The tedious focus on throwing as much crap at the player as they can handle is gradually going away and making challenges that have to be worked around. There were only one or two levels that made me question the game's design, for the most part even the hard levels just felt hard rather than annoying.

There is an expansion/remake that turns the game into VGA and adds a boss fight against Dr. No Body in addition to another episode. Looking at it, the visuals seem to place it into that category of VGA game where the graphics don't quite feel like an upgrade and instead feel like the colors you're using because you can use VGA. It's...odd.

Next time, the other Strontium Dog game from 1984.