Jill of the Jungle (1992)

There's no real title screen, just screens like this for each episode.

Name:Jill of the Jungle
Number:246
Year:1992
Publisher:Epic MegaGames
Developer:Epic MegaGames
Genre:Side-Scroller Shooter
Difficulty:3/5
Time:3 hours 30 minutes
Won:Yes (109W/78L)

In retrospect, it's kind of strange that Epic as a company would go from a simple flip-screen game that runs in text mode to a smooth-scrolling VGA side-scroller. It feels like there's a step missing, lessons not learned from the world of CGA or EGA games. Something which does show straight off, as the title screen isn't better looking than Apogee's EGA titles.

Jill insists upon herself, apparently.

The story is, Jill is a mysterious figure in the jungle. She is beautiful and brave and all adjectives you would apply to a heroine of a game. We get no backstory, like how she appeared in this world, how she can turn into animals, or what she's doing in general. Just a rhetorical question, 'who says a lady can't slay a few monsters'? Which in 1992 feels a bit pretentious to put in as your sole rationale for making a female protagonist.

Jill has an overmap, much like Commander Keen and certain other Apogee games. It's pure side view, so you're basically just walking between stages. It's a bit non-linear, but I feel like it should have been just a series of levels. You automatically enter anything you walk into, and there are the usual keys and doors. Later episodes shift this. Episode two has a more traditional series of levels, and the third has a standard top-down overmap.

The controls are you basic fare for the era. Shift jumps, alt shoots and the arrows move. There's seemingly no rebinding them. In comparison to a lot of the competition, Jill moves closer to the hero of a cinematic platformer. There's no climbing or anything, but there's a noticeable delay to most actions. Jumping is where this is most pronounced, with a very realistic build-up to jumping and landing. I dig it.

That said there is some issue with this, and it's that the game often forces you to time jumps fairly well. Jill has health, and health pickups are plentiful, but it would be nice to play a game where I don't have to worry about nigh certain injury. You also get no control over your height, but at least you can turn mid-air. At least there are infinite lives.

There are vines and chains that Jill can climb up, or if you press left or right, jump off a certain distance of. It's generally smooth, but like a lot of other things, the game plays around with this. Elevators and destructible blocks, which function like most others of the era. Step off the elevator, it drops down to the floor it originated on.

Behold, a destructible block maze.

Where this kind of falls apart is in the shooting. Rather than a gun, Jill gets various boomerang-like weapons. Unfortunately, she can only shoot standing up, and there's no easy way to handle enemies who aren't at head height. You just have to hope the game gives you a weapon that doesn't go in a straight line. Because even if you crouch after throwing one of those, it's still heading back straight towards you. Sometimes they even get stuck inside walls, and because you can't fire the weapon again until it comes back, you're screwed.

There are two weapons Jill uses. A dagger, which goes in a straight line until it goes a bit off-screen. This is useless against a lot of enemies, and you have to manufacture situations for it to hit them. Then there's the shuriken, which has a downward arc, bounces, and sometimes doesn't return to Jill, but it returns to her inventory anyway. Despite weapons with downward arcs being the stereotype of a terrible side-scroller weapon, this bucks the trend.

Jill, this isn't what they mean by Phoenix Force!

Jill can transform into various forms based on symbols you can find around. These are usually fairly obvious. The first is the flaming bird that's a constant enemy in the game. This can fly and shoot. Though if you shoot you also fly. Everytime you fire or press the fly button, you get a small burst of upward momentum. It's a bit tricky to get used to, and it's easy to get caught by climbing too fast, but it is possible.

Then there's the fish form. This only works in water, and thankfully you can't jump out of the water. (In her base form, if Jill lands in a body of water, she dies) Jump still moves you up, but not at a quick enough rate to be of any use. Instead you just hold up. Considering that from a player perspective, flying and swimming should be only slightly different, why the massive change?

The third form is a frog form, which doesn't have an attack and just constantly hops. Like Keen's pogostick form, just without the option to turn it on or off. I'm really not sure what the purpose of this is, since outside of one section where it can enter water, it just sort of shows up.

A game set in a jungle without a crocodile is a rare game indeed.

As to Jill's enemies, well, queen of the jungle she isn't. Every animal in the forest seems to want to kill her, and also demons from heck and lizardmen. Most of this can be boiled down to a few real types, the ones on the ground, the ones that shoot back. But there are certainly some unique enemies, not always for good reasons.

Each level is more or less self-contained. Even the hub world, outside of a few keys. This means that weapons, jump power-ups and transformations are all unique to that level. As a result, some levels are centered around regular side-scrolling action, while others are all about finding a clever way around enemies.

Surprised nobody in these games ever tries to harness the energy of a perpetually bouncing ball.

Most levels aren't very noteworthy. They're fun, but simple and easy to get through. Perhaps too easy at times. Level design is often very simple, A to B, with the occasional sidetrip which has point items. Maybe sometimes it's diagonally instead of sideways or vertical, but you go in one, straight-forward line of some sort.

That said, there were some outliers. Some good, and some bad. Like most games, there's this mistake of thinking a maze is automatically a good choice of difficulty. Because of the way Jill lands, this makes those mazes very tedious. Worse still, the most annoying one involves getting your weapon to destroy the right destructible blocks or having to make several precise jumps. Good thing Jill doesn't take fall damage.

One of the two levels the lizardmen, the evil enemies of the game, appear in.

Then there are the less straight-forward levels. These revolve around more puzzling layouts or just going through a level without a weapon. Despite the unusual movement and my distaste for the latter, I found these interesting. Jill has such an easy time with violence, since everything dies the second you hit it, that non-violence forces some cleverness on the player's part.

Like I mentioned at the start, the game's weird in the audio-visual department. It seems like they have little experience working against the limitations of earlier eras and instead made it straight to an effectively limitless palette and audio design. It's not bad-looking, it's just that the use of colors show that there's little thought about it. Look at all the pretty colors rather than thinking about what colors should be used.

Then there's the audio design. It's very impactful, distinct and matches actions well, but it's also distracting. Sounds are a bit loud and there's no volume adjustment in-game. They also sometimes don't quite fit, made worse by how every episode changes a lot of them around. Sometimes a sound will be reasonable, then in the next episode it'll change to something that is not.

This makes the game feel less like a DOS game and more like an Amiga game. Which in retrospect makes the game feel a bit out of date for 1992. Clearly, it didn't hurt Epic, but the second more obviously VGA games appeared on the scene, Jill feels more out of place. I still like the way the game is set-up, but I must admit that it has some problems.

"...the game series I would outlast. By three decades if you count that mobile game!"

One thing that rubbed me the wrong way was that instead of having a story, the game introduces various text boxes making fun of other video game heroes, which strikes me as overly presumptuous at the time. Now, considering that all of the characters being mocked had sequels at the time and Jill only ever had one unofficial sequel, well, I'm not terribly amused. Reminds me that impotent indie developer sniping isn't just limited to the 21st century.

At least, this is the story until the third episode. In the third episode, Jill now has to save a prince to prevent lizard men from destroying the forest to build condos. None of the shareware games so far have had an amazing story or anything, but it's odd just slapping in some half-hearted real story at the final part of the game.

It would have been nice if there was more variation than just huts.

In general the third episode changes a lot of things about the game. Suddenly, there's an overworld. Level design shifts from the mostly straight-forward levels of the first two episodes to something non-linear. It's an odd choice, considering that usually the shareware episode is the best. If it weren't for how the staff remains the same between the three episodes, I'd say someone new in this episode was better. Guess they just wrote all their levels in same order you play them.

There is some unpleasantness to this cleverness. Sometimes the game will allow Jill to jump down a bit of water which before, would kill her. And oh, the game loves dumping hundreds of spikes on the player. They kill Jill outright rather than hurting her, which is just great. It's about the only part I actually disliked in the final episode.

In most games centered around rescuing a princess, we don't find that part out 2/3rds of the way through!

Eventually, you get an epic two-part level where you free the prince. The game throws a text box at you if you try to exit without doing so, which is amusing, but otherwise the level is a bit disappointing. The final part is a straight-forward key hunt, and the ending is a joke that feels like it was added at the last minute to make some sort of point that failed to land. Onto the rating.

Weapons:
Despite some annoyances, the weapons have some clever unique behaviors going on which makes each feel different from the others and useful in their own way. Even if some can't hit some enemies. 4

Enemies:
For the most part, just enemies which go back and forth. The few which are actively hostile tend to be among the more annoying ones. At least they don't present an unbeatable challenge. 3

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Rarely bad, usually forgettable, never outright unpleasant. The third episode is by far the best, and shows that the people behind this were clearly improving. 5

Player Agency:
Jill is a bit of an odd duck. She leans towards the realistic side, but doesn't quite force herself towards a full cinematic platformer style. At times it feels like she's an imitation of a cinematic platformer hero. That said, I liked it, and generally the game didn't make you work around the flaws it had. 6

Interactivity:
The usual switches and destructible blocks. 1

Atmosphere:
The whole package is weird. It feels like it came out of the void with barely any influences on it or influences that at times seem impossible. All in a package that seems to exist with the barest interest towards what it's trying to do. It's a strange fever dream, an aspect that gets overlooked because for many, Jill was a seminal game. 5

Graphics:
Nice-looking, but generally overly soft. While I like the animation, it sometimes seems both choppy and smooth, and I can't place my finger on why. 6

Story:
Basically nothing. 0

Sound/Music:
Nice, well designed sounds except for one flaw. Too bombastic. The music is nice, but loops are just a bit too short and are likewise, sometimes too bombastic. 6

That's 36, about comparable for most titles we've seen in the shareware era. Basically middle of the pack.

The thing that strikes me the most about this game is how odd it is. We've gone directly from a top-down shooter which was a very simple template using text mode to a complex VGA game which has a lot going on. Maybe it doesn't always succeed at what it tries to do, but Epic is starting to feel like a company that goes for something absolutely crazy, even if it can't always hit that target.

Halloween is about to pop up, so it's time for something spooky and slightly out of the usual. Well, one of those things, anyway, in Welcome House 2.

MegaRace (1993)

Name:MegaRace
Number:245
Year:1993
Publisher:The Software Toolworks
Developer:Cryo
Genre:Racing
Difficulty:4/5
Time:2 hours
Won:Yes (108W/79L)

I know I said Streets of SimCity, but Streets is one of those games that works when it wants to work. Even if it does have a patch that mostly smooths out the bigger issues. This was not one of the times it wanted to work, so instead, it's time for MegaRace.

Welcome to the future. Reality is boring, which is why virtual reality is the best thing around. And the best thing in virtual reality is MegaRace. A virtual reality show where people like you get to drive in a supped up car against hordes of criminal speedpunks, who have disrespectful manners and threatening hairstyles. Pound them into the pavement!

He's referring to Factory Land, which is shown at night, so the desolate waste looks like water.

This is the way MegaRace's manual describes the game world. The introduction video, because it's 1993 and we get nice, shiny CGI graphics off a CD, shows that world. Not a world which is overtly oppressed. Not a world where jackbooted thugs are marching through the streets stepping on necks. A world where everyone is so bored by life. A world where safety regulations mean you can't actually have someone drive around shooting gangs of punks in supercars, so you have them do it in virtual reality.

It's a more down to Earth dystopia. There's even a joke prize where you're offered a book...until the host reveals its hollow. Which given modern trends and doomsayings feels about right, even if TV stations like the one broadcasting the in-game show are also falling by the wayside. On the other, as reaction channels show, reacting to someone else's shortcomings will never go out of style.

There's some clever worldbuilding going on from the moment you start the game. The framing device is that of a guy coming home from work to watch the show. Except that his personal robot turns the TV on before he's home. At several points the game implies there's genuine concern that there could be a robot revolution. One group of criminals is violently anti-robot, and a robot on the show is insulted, jokingly of course, but it does make me wonder if there's more to it.

He's talking about criminal speed gangs, of course.

But the thing about the guy is, all he does when we see him is watch the show and drink. There's not anything wrong with having some of the hard stuff while watching something, but the fact that he has his robot gets him a drink, and all he does is sit, watch and drink does suggest some unpleasant things about the guy. And I say this, being a member of the similarly sad eat food and watch something crowd.

The star of the show is host Lance Boyle, played by Christopher Erickson, an American actor presumably based in France. (His work is mostly French, so unless he's flying out every year that's a safe assumption) He pops up in the beginning to explain everything and in-between missions to compliment you and explain your next foes. This is his most notable role for reasons that are beyond me. Simply put, while MegaRace is a good game on a technical level, Erickson makes the game highly enjoyable.

Taken in screenshot form, Lance can look quite psychotic...when in motion he looks less psychotic.

For a long while, whenever I played this game, I kept thinking to myself how the portrayal of a game show host felt just a bit too skeevy. There's rumors about Richard Dwason, but in general the skeevier hosts were the kind that hid their skeeviness behind a false veneer of positivity. These days, it isn't uncommon for a game show to be less about the genuine skill of answering a question and more about how dumb they can make people look.

It helps that almost everything that comes out of his mouth is gold. I was spoiled for choice in picking out what I wanted to use as a screenshot from this guy. If I may sound biased against foreign games for a moment, I'm not sure why. French games generally aren't known for their witty dialog. In an era where translation usually fell to the guy who had the best grasp of the language rather than someone who knew what he was doing, this comes off as surprisingly natural. There's no writer listed, so we'll never know.

Now, if Boyle doesn't come off as too witty to you, you can easily skip his dialog with the press of a button. In a sense, this is why the game works so well. Yes, it's a FMV game with CGI graphics the rest of the time, but it knows not to take itself so seriously as to think you can't ever skip anything.

All the cars have Spanish names for some reason.

After the game finishes introducing the first city and gang, you get a selection of one of eight cars. Well, at first one of three. To unlock the other five, you need to defeat the five speed gangs. Each car has various attributes, armor, speed, weight, warning device, shield capability, number of lasers and missile capability.

Armor, speed and lasers are mostly self-explanatory. Damage, speed and how many shots come out when you fire. Guns have ammo, and I'm not actually sure if the car you pick changes how much ammo you have. The warning system tells you where the enemy car is. This is useful when it's behind you, because this isn't a race, you're just shooting other drivers. If a car is behind you, they can ram you from behind.

I'm not sure if weight has an affect on anything. One car ramming an enemy, or pushing it into the sidewall seems to be much the same as another. Guns have a far more dramatic and visible change. See, the last four items I mentioned can be changed by powerups on the track. You can get more or get them taken away. Unfortunately, I never got any shields or missiles. I did get my guns taken away, and that carries over between races.

The GUI depends on which car you use, which is a nice touch.

Once you get to the game, it's dead simple. Accelerate, stop, turn, along with a shoot button. The keys are rebindable, which is good, since by default, it's AZ<>. That's something I expect from a crummy ZX Spectrum game, not a DOS game from the 1990s. Unfortunately, you have to rebind them every time you start up the game. It isn't the worst default key selection ever, but not having them in a simple cluster always annoys me.

In each race you have to take out up to seven enemy drivers in three laps. That's it. Within about five minutes you have everything you could possibly need to finish the game. It's very easy to control and the game just plays so smoothly. It's to the point that until the later levels, I thought you had to work to actually hit the sides of the track.

See, the game's tracks are all pre-rendered CGI. It's less a movie you're just following along and more a series of images. Which I realize is just what a movie is, but it feels different. It doesn't quite feel on-rails even if it is. They did a very good job of making the game feel like more than what a lot of its contemporaries would do, which is expecting the CGI to do all the effort.

Some tastefully done self-advertisement.

Speed and aggression is the name of the game. The only time you're taking your foot off that pedal is when you've overtaken an enemy or you're on a narrow track. For the most part, the game gives you an incredible feeling of speed. The problem is that sometimes you're playing catch-up with an enemy car, and it feels like it takes forever. Which is a thing for the in-game audience too.

The thrillometer determines how much score you get from attacking things. In-universe, it's supposed to be a representation of how much you're exciting the audience. My issue is that it solely increases based on how fast you kill enemies. In one sense, this can work, seeing two cars going at 200 MPH and one is forcing the other into the side wall is cool. Just shooting the other guy? It's not that it's not action, it's just that it isn't that special.

It should reward tension more. Rather than raw violence, the outcome of the battle should be an unknown. "Is the Enforcer gonna take out Rabies or is he gonna run out of time?" Crashes and violence are cool, but you can't just throw endless, meaningless violence at people. There has to be tension. Victory should not be assured. Nobody remembers the nameless goons the hero fights, they always remember the ones they had epic fights with.

A nice view of an ammo down sign, because bullets are just too obvious!

Enemy cars are not the threat of the game, they're the target. The real threat are the tracks themselves. Not in the usual way. There are various power-up icons all over the track, ranging from mundane speed up/down, give/take points, ammo replenishment, the aforementioned gun, missile and shield dispensers, along with a skid function and various confusion effects. Then there are more exotic and hard to explain ones, like one that speeds you along a certain line.

At first, these are placed in such a way that makes it pure fun, then a bit of a challenge to avoid the bad ones. Once the gun removal starts, you start paying attention to the layout more. Then the game starts turning every icon (outside of the points ones) into traps. Speed ups in front of ammo or gun dispensers. Ammo removals in such a way that you have to go through one specific part of the screen. One particularly nasty level sets up the speed-ups so if you hit one, you'll be halfway through the track before you've stopped.

One of the nastier levels, which is narrow and constantly snakes around.

That said, there is one change to the enemy vehicles, it starts getting harder to ram them. It isn't like before where you could easily pound them into the sidewalk, reaching them gets tricky, and they start doing damage back. Never an amount that is noticeable in the heat of the action, but enough that it was frequent on the last few levels for me to die before reaching the end.

There are two sets of 14 tracks, making for 28 total levels. The game hides this by making the two sets based on difficulty. There's an easy and a hard difficulty, which correspond to how much the game decides you shouldn't have guns. I beat the easy set, and while the game does automatically start you on the hard set afterwards, it feels less like the game continuing and more like the game automatically put you in new game+.

There are two kinds of bonus levels. The first is a points level. The brakes on your car are disabled, you're shot forward at max speed, and oh, enemy cars are driving towards you. There's no penalty for dying, it just feels like filler. There's also one you get where if you lose in the middle of the game, but do so after doing some damage to the gang, you get a second chance. This is easier than the later stages, so chances are you'll see it once or twice.

While I make it sound like the game is complex, in the moment to moment action, most of this really doesn't matter. Unless there's a nasty symbol on the ground, I'm mostly just trying to get to the side of a car and ram it into the side of the wall or just shooting him. You just memorize the trap layout. It's well-designed enough that this doesn't feel too annoying.

In-universe, this is a tribute of NewSan to OldSan, out-of-universe, I can't blame them.

One issue I have with the game is that it constantly, and I do mean constantly, crashes. I sat down to one session and the game would either crash at the end of the first stage or the second I hit an enemy on the second. Or if I forgot to rebind the keys, it would hang on the score screen. These weren't easy crashes either, I had to restart DOSbox. Once you get past the second level, the number of these crashes drops off significantly.

It's been remiss of me to go through all this without mentioning the game's soundtrack, six slick techno tracks made by the same guy who did the Dune soundtrack, Stephane Picq. The six tracks correspond roughly to the six different locales the racetracks are set on. They fit thematically with the tracksets they're on, but I feel like they're lacking just a bit in aggression. This perhaps isn't quite a bad thing, since memorable is better than ear-splitting, but it feels more like a bad commute that fighting for my life.

With that, onto the rating.

Weapons:
You can ram into things, shoot them, or if luck is on your side, hit them with a missile. 2/10

Enemies:
There seems to be some level of AI variation, and gang leaders seem to be tougher than regular thugs. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
There's some decent variety, and difficulty being the only real cause of level reuse is better than a lot of alternatives. 5/10

Player Agency:
Simple, smooth and fun to use. Whether I've meant to or not, this is the game I've been mentally comparing all the racers around it to. 8/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Despite the absurdities, this feels like its own, full-fledged world, with dozens of little things hiding just behind the corner. I believe that one corporation made an underwater city, and that another company then hired some thugs to move there for entertainment purposes. 8/10

Graphics:
Despite how aged it all looks, for the most part its avoided the weaknesses of the era. Outside of CGI humans in the framing sections. There's still some spectacle here, when you can force yourself to look away from the action. Seeing this game in true, modern 3D would be really cool. 5/10

Story:
The charm here is more in the writing, but the different take on a cyberpunk dystopia is intriguing to me. Rather than overt violence, people seem to be complacent in their own oppression. 5/10

Sound/Music:
The sound design is excellent. I feel the pounding of my car against his, or the slow shredding of the side of a car against a wall. The music is very good too. 7/10

That's 42, which is oddly, the fourth such title I've given that number.

MegaRace is one of those games where what are its arguable positives can function as its flaws just as easily. The amusing commentator, the simple and easy to pick up combat could just as easily be someone else's annoying jerk and depthless spinning of wheels.

Next time, it's time for something else mega, Jill of the Jungle.

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.