TerraHawks (1984)

One of three things which could be called a title screen. None of them have anything to do with the show's logo.

Name:TerraHawks
Number:253
Year:1984
Publisher:CRL Group
Developer:Richard M. Taylor
Genre:Flight Simulation
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour 30 minutes
Won:No (113W/82L)

Gerry Anderson is a figure I'm sure is known to many British people of a certain age, and many more outside of that. Responsible for Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, series so popular once upon a time, that it was internationally popular. To the point that they likely ensured that puppetry survived as a medium much longer than it really should have. I don't think I've ever seen any of his puppetry stuff, I've seen a few episodes of UFO and Space: 1999. Very nice miniature work, but I wasn't really interested enough to continue watching.

TerraHawks is his last puppet show, albeit not the marionette-style he used before, instead a Muppet-style design. Never saw it, probably won't. It follows the usual format of his children's shows, a crack team of humanity's best face off against an extraterrestrial invasion force. In this case, the titular TerraHawks, led by Doctor Ninestein, so named because he's the ninth clone of a Doctor Stein. The invasion force are a group of robots who rebelled against their former creators and are now plotting to take over the Earth. Why is probably one of those things they couldn't mention in a children's show.

It's this sort of thing that despite not liking anything I've seen from Anderson, that I have to respect him on. He'll make a show out of some subject that rarely gets touched on outside of literature and commit to it. The robots think they're the good guys, not evil, even though they likely destroyed their old planet. C.S. Lewis once said that the worst tyrant was the one who mistook his own cruelty for the voice of Heaven. He was talking about a theocracy, but is a machine who mistakes his own conclusion for an objective good any better?

But it's 1984, and the work of licensed video games was usually given to developers with little interest in the subject matter and little ability to realize it well. None of the subtext matters. In fact, none of what I just wrote matters at all. There is nothing connecting this to the show beyond the name. This is, pure and simple, an attempt at exploiting British children for their hard-earned pounds.

I realize it's an old complaint about licensed titles. They tend to suck, but let's be honest, by having that license they have a higher standard than some random crap we haven't heard of. We have expectations. SkyRaven 2077 has no expectations. TerraHawks has some expectations. Namely, that at some point, we will be shooting at the bad guys of the show as one of the heroes from the show.

The manual, at least what World of Spectrum has as the manual, describes this as a pilot training program. This simulates a world within a revolving black hole. "The most demanding environment for a spaceship Commander known to the Universe." Fair enough, in theory. A lot of games have the veneer of being a training program, some of them are really fun and interesting. However, at no point does the manual mention anything that actually ties it into the TerraHawks universe behind just the name of the show.

The people behind this were a lot more proud than they should have been.

The game has a slick and well-designed menu system, which I normally wouldn't bring up, except that this is fairly well implemented for the era. You don't need the manual for the controls, you just need it to explain how to play the game. There's also a 2 player mode...testing the theory that all games are better with friends.

This is the game, baby.

Starting a new game, you are greeted by a space warp. This is just here for flavor, because after a half a minute, you're in the game. Flying across hordes of monoliths, as the manual describes them. What are you doing? Trying to find a series of arches to go to the next stratum. What's stopping you? Monoliths and your fuel supply. It's less ragged fight against a superior alien force and more a really odd adaptation of one of H.P. Lovecraft's stories about endless giant stone towers.

To start with, you can move up and down with 1 and Q, Q goes up, 1 goes down. Reversed Y-axis, no option to change it. 9 and 0 turn. Movement is strange, there's no speed control. You get a little icon telling you whether you're pointing up or down, in addition to to the height number going up or down. (And the monoliths slowly getting taller) But the game has a bigger variation on where you're going than it actually shows, as you can be going up or down even when you think you're level.

A set of monoliths in the distance.

Turning is also strange. Tap and you'll barely move, hold it down and you'll get a small delay, then a reasonable amount of movement, before it stops a moment. It'll continue, but it's something you have to work around when you're about to crash into a monolith. It's not the smoothest system, but I said strange, not unworkable. My problems do not lie with how you move, though this could be because you don't actually fight against anything.

You can shoot with enter. There's an ammo count in the lower right, near the time you've spent in the level and your score. All you do is shoot monoliths if they're in your way. Your beams are oddly stuck to where you are, shoot then turn and you shoot what you turned to. In a sense you can exploit it, but it's simpler to either shoot or turn, not turn then shoot. We're not exactly dealing with a complex game.

The objective is to find a series of arches to go to the next stratum. To do this, you rely on your rangefinder and when you're very close by, the radar. These tools are less helpful than they should be, because they work slightly less well than they should. The radar only works when you're within an extremely short range, and it isn't obvious right away that it doesn't turn like you do, it stays still.

But the rangefinder is weird, and didn't exactly work the way I expected. You're supposed to turn until you get a green light, then you start getting closer. Before I hit on the manual, I figured out that one way or another the rangefinder works for that, but went the wrong way. I thought that as the bar gets higher, you get closer, but it actually gets lower as you get closer. I suppose it makes sense, since it goes the same way as you lose fuel, but I expected it to be colored in.

It does look more like a tunnel, but this is your destination.

Once you get there, it's tricky to actually enter the arches. They're very low to the ground, something I underestimated. The first time I made it to one, I crashed into the ground. It's very easy to crash. The area around the arches isn't clear, either when you enter or you exit, so buildings could be around it.

And that's the game. There are nine stratums, at the ninth you can apparently fly into the black hole to go out into space. I made it as far as the fourth, there's no real change in these things as you go along. Once you've gone through one vortex, that's about it for the game's content. You just go on until you run out of fuel. I have no idea if fuel refills when you go through a vortex, I used a cheat someone made, wasn't risking that. The manual only mentions an additional shield every time you go through one, ammo is limited to the entire game.

There's no real world here, just endless monoliths. Sometimes a row of them appear, which is cool to see, but I'm pretty sure that this is all randomized. Even if it isn't, you're still looking at the same thing for hours, while a low droning sound plays in the background. What's worse is that I'm pretty sure that some monoliths are moving forward at a different rate than other monoliths. Which again brings to mind certain parts of Lovecraft's work, but I doubt this is intentional.

For some reason, there's an autopilot feature, as if what this game needed was taking more stuff away from the player. You go to the height and direction you want to be in, then press M. Whenever you have to turn around to avoid some monoliths, you press A to turn back to that direction and height. The thing is, where the light is green is not always consistent and you can always just...turn around to where it is. It's just there, it doesn't add anything, it's just another thing you can do.

Weapons:
Standard laser. 1

Enemies:
Behold, stone pillars! True terror! 0

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Endless monoliths most mundane. 1

Player Agency:
It works, but in such a way that it feels slightly off for the whole thing. 3

Interactivity:
I guess breaking stone pillars by shooting them counts. 1

Atmosphere:
There is something profoundly weird about this game that prevents me from entirely writing it off, I'll give it that. 1

Graphics:
It's kind of neat how many monoliths can be on-screen and in how many differing configurations, but sometimes you can get confused as to what is the monolith and what isn't. 1

Story:
This doesn't even have anything to do with what it's supposed to be licensed from! 0

Sound/Music:
Some occasional sound effects, then a low droning noise for background. 1

That's 9.

Normally, I wouldn't just play something like this, but it was the third game I tried to play this week and frankly, what it was doing felt offensive to me. There are a ton of licensed games which are bad, sure, but a lot are either generic action games which imitate something better or come out a bit janky in how they adapted the license. They might not be good, but they're trying on some level. This isn't trying, someone just took a completely different game and slapped another name on it. If I was a British schoolkid in the 1980s, I'd be angry.

Now, this isn't necessarily a bad idea for a game. I enjoyed it, but then, I'm coming from the position of someone who isn't paying for the name. The concept of having to chose whether to fly higher or lower for different benefits is a solid mechanic. It's an idea that could be improved upon in a game that isn't adapting a television show where I'm expecting epic space shootouts. Lovecraftian flight simulation would be a cool idea for a game.

Last week, I promised a Mobile Suit Gundam game, namely, Mobile Suit Gundam - Jet Stream Attack, a game published by Bandai themselves on the PC-88 and the FM-7. After about fifteen minutes of trying to figure out how the game works, I eventually quit. It's one of those space games where you get a big sector map where you go to where conflicts are. The problem is, I couldn't figure out how to actually fight anything, and just kept dying when a red dot touched me on the radar. I pressed every button on the keyboard and all I ever got was a strange status screen. Only enter did something there, and that was just closing it.

There was also going to be a Apple II game called Space Ark, but I also couldn't find a manual and while I figured out the controls, I couldn't really figure out how to do anything. With these two cut out, and this game out of the way, this actually puts 1984 down to 9 games, which means soon I'll be done.

Next time, it's a return to Wolfenstein 3D...in some form or another.