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.