Electro Man (1992)

Name:Electro Man AKA Electro Body
Number:256
Year:1992
Publisher:Epic MegaGames
Developer:xLand
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:5/5
Time:5 hours 40 minutes
Won:Yes (115W/83L)

Electro Man is another of those strange shareware games that I remember playing as a kid before not really getting far and deciding something else was worth my time. At the time, it felt like one of Epic's worse entries. Of course, this was in the days when I didn't quite understand that these companies weren't just doing it all in-house outside of ID. No, Epic was publishing games they got from people all across the world. In this case, a Polish game.

Polish video games are weird to me. Not necessarily because of anything to do with them but how I see them. I didn't think of CD Projekt Red and I didn't even realize Blooper Team was Polish. Instead I just thought of very late Atari 8-bit computer games and assumed there was some game from the '00s I had forgotten which was vaguely of an eastern European flavor. I mean, there probably is, but that's not important.

It makes sense to me that a shareware game could hide it's origins like this. It also doesn't surprise me that it was beloved in its native country. This doesn't change how I'm a bit reluctant to play this game. In ye olden times, I didn't make it very far and thought it wasn't very good. It didn't help that because it had two names it tended to show up twice on some shareware disks. 

After we get a rocking tune on the title, the game begins. An echoy Christopher Lee-type says "We have to be careful, this is an emergency area". Not sure why, but that's probably something I should be doing anywhere. Not sure why the PC is such a blatant rip-off of Robocop, but that's a bit of a theme. Controls are simple, left and right arrows move, up jumps and down uses teleporters. The numpad is appreciated, because home and page up jump to left and right. You don't need these, but they are helpful. There is no air control.

The gun is weird. You shoot it with space, there's no aiming beyond left/right. It needs battery power, but it's closer to a weapon which overheats. As you get more batteries, it does more damage, before eventually starting to cut through everything on-screen. Oddly, some settings are less useful than others. The one that cuts through everything is the second highest power. The highest is just a wave that stops when it hits something. 

Screens are all flip-screen, much like an 8-bit computer game. There are three important things on-screen, assuming the flashing object didn't screw me. The battery is for your gun, activated with space, more batteries means more power to your gun. There's no ammo, fire too much and it overheats. The thing with the arrow over it is a teleporter. The phonebox is...something you have to shoot, as far as I can tell.

You can shoot some scenery objects. Some, like what appear to be videophones, which attract the eye. Others seem to be bits of the background. No matter what they are, there seems to be little point to doing so, outside of wasting ammo. Some of them will tell you in which direction you need to go...or they may tell you where another battery is.

What makes Electro Man hard is that your guy dies in one hit. Just if he touches most enemies or gets shot. He can fall for a thousand feet and be fine, touch a little guy who looks like the mech from Robocop, and dead. You respawn at the nearest respawn point and all your progress since last touching it is gone. Really, the only thing that truly carries over is general location and what key cards you've picked up. If you save your game, F2, and then reload after quitting, F3 at the start screen, only this is saved. 

There might be another name for them, but these are keycards. You need to get three of them to win the level. Otherwise, when you reach the end of the level, you're going to be stuck. There's no real going back once you've reached a certain point, so don't go downwards without making sure you've got nothing of value left on that floor. Because of the save system, you can very easily screw yourself, so this should not be considered an idle point.

The first level, once you read the manual, does a good job of introducing all the factors in the game. Once you've read the manual, without understanding the save system, it's pointless. Mechanics are done simply, here's how to get used to the teleporters, how to jump around, and here's something safe to shoot. 

The first level has two types of enemies to start with. Two-legged mechs which walk across the screen with variable speeds and occasionally shoot a shot. Not at you, just a shot randomly. They die in one hit or you could just jump over them if the fancy takes you. The others are turrets, they too, randomly shoot, which is unfortunate, because these tend to be ones that you can't always shoot back. That said, you do get some leeway once they've made a shot.

There's a third enemy near the end. Moving turrets. They go across rails...and actually they're not much worse than the regular turrets despite the change. I went across a screen full of them and wasn't in danger.

Despite being 1992, on DOS, this feels very much like an '80s microcomputer game. It's not really a game of skill as much as memorization. Remember where this is, jump over this, do these things in this order. Skill is involved to a certain degree, but mostly, you just do things as you remember them.

You're not doing every level from scratch, these are checkpoints. The problem then lies in how these checkpoints eat up all your batteries. That means that every time you pass a checkpoint, every battery you have just disappears. The game thus encourages you to take out enemies, even if they seem irrelevant. Because you might just have to go back across an area you've already been through, now without any weapons.

It should also be pointed out that these are big levels. You don't really move around swiftly, so it's probably "only" something like 50 screens a level. Individual screens might not be that tough, but combined they can get quite tense.
 

Level 2, when I finally got there, starts getting annoying. Starting off is a significant chunk of level where you just avoid things like mines and slowly appearing and disappearing barriers. The latter are very annoying because you have just enough time to get through. There's a lot of just hoping you get enough right to make it on through here, very tense, but also very annoying.

Let me tell you, the game gets absolutely every single variation they can out of these two components, combined with the mechs from the last level and sometimes a new, horizontal turret. Though the latter two are nothing compared to the variations the first two can get up to. Having to time a jump up is easy compared to timing your jump past a barrier and a landmine next to each other. In both configurations.

Then, the game sees fit to put a teleporter maze in front of you. You've never been able to tell where a teleporter goes before, but this section makes sure to make you suffer for not knowing it. The last bit is especially annoying, because after making a leap of faith jump into what might be nothing, you are forced between two choices. One leads back to the start, the other leads forward...to another teleporter maze. I have not seen a single card yet and I'm starting to get worried I've screwed myself along the line.

The final section at least, does have all three keycards, but there's a worrying trend here. The screen right of the checkpoint needs to be jumped into, or you step on a landmine, and there's already weird multiple screen jumps going on. This is the second level, if it's this bad now, what's next?

Level 3 is an office. Gotta say, very nice visual design here. Doesn't distract me from how odd the level design is. If you go down, there's nowhere you can go. It's even worse because if you do go down there, it teases you with a battery that you can't get. Once you're in there you need to kill yourself by jumping on a barrel with a glowing top. I didn't realize any of this at first, I went the other way and found out after doing some risky stuff that the barrels were deadly. Some of these plants look dangerous, and I can walk past them.

And this is not necessarily a problem limited to optional ways to get screwed. Certain sections of the game have areas which are blocked off by glowing barrels at the top and at the bottom. Some of these are your only way out and I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to get past them. One of the keycards is before this area, and naturally there's checkpoint afterwards. Unfortunately, wherever I go, I'm going to have to come back. This is where the exit is. 

There is a map, at least, in the game world. If it's correct, I've gotten the one in section A and the other two are in section C and D. I just need to go over a lot of glowing barrels. And ceiling tiles that fall down. At least I'm getting an idea of how possible it should be to get past barrels on both the ground and the ceiling. Not at all, even with my character's generously small hitbox. I think it's as wide as his legs are, which considering how tedious this game is otherwise, is a nice touch.

Seriously, you don't want to know how many times it took me to make it through the one corridor from section A to section B. At least the teleporter maze that is the next section didn't kill me. The difficulty is less actually difficult bits and more tedium. Find out the right way through and hope you don't do what you've already figured out wrong. Now onto section C and the second keycard and...

Oh...no. I've been dreading this. Your character's jump arc is a U-shape, so in theory it should be possible to get past this. I try a few times, but keep hitting the ceiling barrel. But the last section had a ton of batteries, enough for the wide shot. That got me to thinking, is that the intended method of progression to get through here? I spent more time than I'd have liked getting all six, to find out that this is in fact the answer. You can shoot land mines with the wide shot. Designing your game around an inability to include a crouch button.

After a considerable amount of tries, I finally make it to level 4. This does not feel like level 4. You have not known suffering until you have reached this level. This introduces a few new components, barriers which kill you if they aren't green or yellow shifting to red, and crushers. The problem isn't these new components, it's that they're used in a section which has zero batteries, quite a few mechs, and if you mess up once, it's back to the start.

At this point, leaps of faith to someplace off-screen isn't even a dirty trick, it's just another way of getting through the level. You've just gotta do it. Better hope that it leads to somewhere else, as opposed to killing you. The number of times you can actually foresee this and avoid it is very small.

This is a very confusing level. To the point that even after a long and tedious series of jumps and crushers, I still didn't know if I was heading the right way or going for a red herring. Is this respawn point a genuine help or is it just going to put me in a situation where I'll have to deal with worse going back than I did going in?

One of the keycards on this level is behind a mess of green floating windows. And mess is the right word, you've got to shoot through dozens of them. It's odd, because while it isn't exactly fun, it does feel like a welcome reprieve after the mess I went through to get there. It might just be because after so much that tested my limits, something this easy feels a lot better than it would in a normal game.

Somehow, I'm only halfway through the game, and Level 5 continues the game. Somehow there is more to it, and it doesn't just feel tacked on. It's just an easier level, like someone throwing softballs at you after shooting a 50 cal machine gun at you for twelve minutes. There are just electrified floors and some barriers. The first keycard is just a few screens to the right. Which would be pretty bad if you didn't go that way first.

To a certain extent, this is a bit of playing dead. This level is a full-blown teleporter maze. There are about four different variations of the same screens, and each teleporter takes you to a different variation. The thing is, these variations keep the keycards in the same place. I think, there are more than three keycards around, because I had three when there were still some around. One is obviously in an unreachable location if you take the minimal amount of teleporters to go through the level.

The game also throws in enemies which are either invulnerable to your shots or just invulnerable to weaker shots. As per usual, it's easier to just walk around them rather than figure them out. I imagine later these will be trouble. For now, they're just a moving obstacle.

Level 6 is interesting. It follows on the same principles as Level 4, but on a more manageable level. I'm not dealing with quite as much difficulty, though the game does throw out blocks which appear and disappear. You'd think these were those disappearing and reappearing platforms, but they kill you instead. As per usual, I wander around, trying to figure out what's going on, until...

I fell to a place full of those barrels. This is a trap. A trap I fell for completely. The glowing red things are landmines. If I jump left I land on one, if I jump right I land on one, if I fall to the right I land on one. So...I can use cheats or restart the level. Which I didn't actually realize I could do until after figuring out the cheat codes. It does take considerable wind out of my sails though.

Remember how I said it was more manageable? I didn't yet look at a map. There hasn't really been one of these since level 3 or so, and yet here it is. In all its horrific glory. This just tells you where they are, even if there are usually teleports to the floors above a pathway up. It's how you get here to begin with.

The keycard on the lower left is the easiest. Getting it at least. You just need to make a careful jump from above it onto a platform one screen below the keycard. Oh, there's a respawn point left of here, I'll use it...and I've just screwed myself. Remember saving and respawn points are different. Now I have to go through a gauntlet of invulnerable enemies and barriers.

Only...the way out is through the lower left side of the screen. This is the only way up, the far right is a trap and there's no up from the keycard. If you accidentally save down here, it's going to be a while before you get back out.

The second keycard is easier, because it's "just" a matter of going past the very swiftly firing laser beam barriers to reach it. There's a bit of trickery once you reach the teleporters up, they take you farther than most others do, now that leaves the final one in the upper left.

The third one, thankfully, wasn't that difficult. Naturally, you have to go from farther to the right, then stay on top until you reach the upper left. The game fakes out a path on the left, but of course, it's a fake. Oddly, I had to use the level skip code, going through the exit just caused the level to repeat.

Level 7 turns into a far more normal level. That is, we're just getting more normal hazards, landmines, turrets you can destroy and regular mechs. No mazes, if you go the wrong way, you'll end up at somewhere with no exit and the option to jump on a landmine. It's still not easy, but at least it's difficult in reasonable ways rather than a confusing mess of stuff you're lucky to ever get out of.

That said, it exploits the hell out of parts of the screen you might assume are just part of the scenery, but actually lead to massive chunks of the level. Or in one extreme case, to the end of the level. At least by that time, I already had three of the four keycards.

Level 8 just outright flips off the player. A long line of jumps with these strange turrets, which shoot slow missiles. Though, by this time, you're probably used to this enough that you just sigh and go through it anyway. There's no finding keycards, they're just in your path. This is all the mercy you're getting. Because every new screen comes with it new and horrible challenges that it's entirely possible that you've already made too difficult by just standing around.

There are lots of little bits of crap throughout the level. My personal favorites were the times you had to jump up from the edge of a platform to reach the next platform because if you jump like you think you should, you fall down onto the bottom of the screen and die. Oh, and the game really isn't built for this kind of jump, so enjoy dying a lot. Too many screens involved this at some point. The absolute worst though, is this one. You're right on a respawn point, every should be fine, right? No, you have to time your jump so you land while the pillars just land, then jump again before they pop out to reach the exit. I died a lot despite using the invulnerability cheat half the time to prevent myself from tearing my hair out.

The final part of this level, the stretch to the level exit, is probably something I should have done without cheats, but at this point, I just wanted it to be over. It's a whole lot of just going through bits in the shots of turrets you can't destroy with the occasion hunt for a battery because now that's a precious resource. 

The game ends with the player being declared an invulnerable space hero. I know ending screens like this get some decent jokes about them, but I think it's fitting. Even if the game managed to fit all of Citizen Kane on a small floppy, it wouldn't be a worthwhile ending. No ending cinematic is worth that effort. Ending a game with a screen effectively saying that everyone who would try to fight you is now going to run away, screaming in terror? That's fitting, because only a madman would do so.

Weapons:
I enjoy the way the game makes it so that once you get two batteries, each improvement has its own advantage that you could use in some situations. Even if it would be better to just let them be their own options. 2

Enemies:
Basically props that you have to avoid and move around. 2

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Some levels are reasonable. Some are obtuse mazes no sane person would want to deal with. And the last one is...not fun. 3

Player Agency:
A lack of an use key hurts this game. You're basically a stiff block who jumps around in a strange arc. What's worse is that while this wouldn't be bad if the game were built around it, it isn't. It's built around you being able to stand precisely on some point at the edge of a block and jump over an otherwise impassable area. 4

Interactivity:
You can shoot a lot of random parts of the background. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. 1

Atmosphere:
This game seems to set itself up as a quite mundane experience, before sort of abandoning any pretense of being anything more than a collection of strange places and experience. 2

Graphics:
Nice-looking and nicely animated. Our protagonist almost has as many frames as a cinematic platformer hero, and enemies have a similar level of animation. That said, there's not as much variety in a single level's tileset, so a new level usually feels a lot better than it should on first glance. 4

Story:
What's going on in this strange game world? Why am I going through emergency areas with some Robocop-looking dude? Why are these levels done in the order they're done? Why is the last level on a random planet? 0

Sound/Music:
Everything, including your footsteps, is peppered with effective sounds. From your gun, to an enemy about to fire, everything has its own unique sound. While I wish there was in-level music, it does mean that you can more easily hear the sound of an enemy firing. 5

That's 23, which is quite fitting considering my initial reaction to the game so long ago. It's the kind of score I'd expect a shareware title that both Epic and Apogee rejected for being ass.

Curiously, reviews are pretty bad. And these are mostly Polish, with some German. Guess us Americans aren't made of stern enough stuff to play through this one. Considering that even the Poles aren't giving this above 7s, I suspect some of this good reputation came in retrospect rather than in truth.

I also note that so far, Epic is developing a bit of a theme as a publisher. That theme being DOS games which feel an awful lot like Amiga games. This one in particular feels like it could easily be one of the weirder Amiga games with the strange use of sound and the interesting music...when it shows up.

xLand, the team behind this, did two other games which Epic published, Heartlight and Robbo, which are Boulder Dash-clones. I think I've played Heartlight, but I may be confusing it with Hero's Hearts, which is also a sort of Boulder Dash-clone, but only in the puzzle game sense. The same general team would also form Chaos Works, who may show up here.

That said, while looking up the people behind this, I found something amusing. My point of reference for Polish games are those odd late-Atari 8-bit games and CD Projekt Red titles. So, the two primary developers, Janusz Pelc and Maciej Miąsik, worked on titles in those respective places. I feel like this is like me playing Skyroads, bringing up Disco Elysium because both games are Estonian, and then finding out that one of the people behind Skyroads worked on Disco Elysium. Sometimes, the world is a smaller place than you think it is.

Next time, the Gameboy Color version of Resident Evil.