Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back (1982)

Name:Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back
Number:153
Year:1982
Publisher:Parker Bros
Developer:Parker Bros
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:4/5
Time:15 minutes
Won:Not possible

For some reason I had this game under 1983. Did I make a mistake? Did Mobygames throw something weird at me? I'll never know.
Star Wars. Its been said that Star Wars inspired the direction of the early years of gaming, what with all the titles set in space. Thus, its surprising that I haven't had much cause to play Star Wars. I played the arcade game based on the iconic Death Star sequence from the original, but didn't feel like I had much to say about it. There have been some misc games I don't really play like on dedicated handhelds, or various unlicensed games I don't care about, but today is the first real game. What's interesting is that this is directly comparable to a different game released a year later, Advance of the Mega Camels.

The Empire Strikes Back is based off the AT-AT scenes from Episode V, the ones that got taken down with the landspeeders. Just think about the big walker things from that movie if you don't know what I'm talking about. As we saw with The Dreadnought Factor last time, we're starting to see games that are like isolated versions of particular aspects of games from the future. In this case, the AT-AT scenes would be done in basically every Star Wars game they could fit it in in the '00s.

Right away the game starts with a bad sign. The Intellivision rendition of the Star Wars theme is quite possibly the worst I've ever heard, and that theme has been covered everywhere. Its either too high for the sound chip or the dumbass who programmed it here put the volume up way too high.

The game begins and it isn't much better. You can't tie the legs of these things together like in the movie, so you just shoot at them. Its not a very good experience for one thing, because movement is awkward. It feels a bit delayed and at lower speeds it doesn't feel like you're moving much at all, which isn't the worst of it. At high speeds you're uncomfortably close to the edge of the screen. While you do get some safe hits, this is the kind of game where dodging is paramount to you surviving the game. Not off to a good start.

Fighting an AT-AT is of course, bad for those reasons, but it gets worse and slightly better. You can dodge shots easily, but they also shoot homing missiles. You have no way of telling which is which. You have to shoot these things something like 20+ times, more because my shots didn't always register. If you're lucky you can shoot a special spot, which instantly kills them, but owing to the shots not properly registering, I feel like I got robbed on some occasions.

At this point, I would have normally quit, deleted what I wrote and then started looking at another game. But I didn't since there's another game like this. So, I got to thinking, since there's another version. What if the Intellivision version is being emulated poorly, possible or they sabotaged that release...for some reason. This isn't Atari, so they don't necessarily have a reason to do this. More realistically, they screwed up porting the game to the Intellivision and nobody really cared.

And you know what? The Atari version was better. I'm not just saying that because when I first started I had collision turned on, and accidentally flew straight into an AT-AT, damaging it and destroying myself. That was the most fun I had all game, that realization. No, it genuinely controls and plays better. It feels smooth in a way the Intellivision version didn't. I still wonder what I'm doing playing this, because its not fun.
To save myself some trouble and to avoid repeating myself, let's also talk about Jeff Minter's unofficial port Attack of the Mutant Camels, AKA Assault of the Mutant Camels, on the C64 and other systems. Keep dodging that guy, but I guess he had to sneak in eventually. His games are basically the same as your usual shoot 'em ups at the time, except they're on home computers and control well. And they all involve weird animals like the llama.

Now I say that, and that's all there really is to this. Shoot a giant camel 100 times while dodging their shots. Unlike the actual game I'm supposed to be playing, you don't get any shortcuts, you just shoot this thing 100 times. Minter knows how much distance you should have, because at worse when you're accelerating, you're halfway through the screen, and when you aren't, you're on the exact opposite end of the screen. I had absolutely no problems dodging the enemy's shots. Its good for the kind of game it is, as in tedious as hell and something I want to stop playing right now.

Weapons:
Generic lasers. 1/10

Enemies:
I guess it was mildly clever in how you had to avoid their attacks, but they feel really disappointing. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Endless enemies walking towards a single point. 0/10

Player Agency:
While you do outrun the screen, it controls well enough that otherwise its okay. 3/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
It doesn't really feel like Star Wars. 1/10

Graphics:
Crude imitations of iconic vehicles. 1/10

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Simple sounds that I have no strong feelings about. 1/10

That's 9. I would say for Attack of the Mutant Camels instead give 1 for enemies and 4 for player agency.

Interestingly, the infamous Harlan Ellison was one of the reviewers at the time, whose criticisms included that the game had no win state. Calling it a dreadful life lesson for children and an analogue for the myth of Sisyphus. That is the Greek mythological figure who was cursed to push a boulder up a mountain for all eternity. Yeah, that feels about right. I should use that one quite often. Feels like a somewhat apt metaphor for blogs about these old games sometimes. I'd hate to have been the poor kid who asked for this back in the day.

Apologies for the incredibly boring title, but I wanted to focus on Galactic Empire. Speaking of which, the next entry on that game is going to be very interesting. Very, very interesting.

1982 in Review

I feel like I can encapsulate my feelings on this year with a game I didn't cover, TSR's Dawn Patrol. A flight sim set during WWI, one which only has a deathmatch mode. Despite sounding promising, its slowness and practically non-existent graphics kill any interest I have in the game. 1982 is, to steal a tagline from Top Gear, Ambitious but rubbish. The hopes and dreams are here, but the technology just isn't.

Space Vikings

Games have managed to be proper space sims, proper flight sims, everything. And the problem is that a lot of them are nigh unplayable. Space Vikings is one of the first games I played, and it is quite possibly the first space sim as we think of them. Unfortunately, its frame rate can be measured in seconds per frame, completely unplayable. Its not difficult to see why we place the originator of these genres to later games, because all but the most dedicated are going to brush over it completely. As such, it falls upon the more easily done games, the side-scrollers and the top-down shooters.
For a lot of these, the games are simply not very interesting. It doesn't really help that this is the year that started the crash, where it was difficult to tell which games were good and which games weren't until you played them, and there were a lot of games that weren't good. I didn't really find all this too exciting, mostly just frustrating, and at times, tedious.

Time Pilot

Very little wowed me. The higher end graphics all seem focused on what people can do with wireframes and space. Space...how I've come to loathe a little bit that endless darkness. Though we are seeing in some places the beginnings of what would be the 8-bit era of sprite-based games, albeit wrapped up in an arcade shell. Sound on the other hand, has run from simple blips and bloops to early voice clips.

Shamus

The cost of gaming at this point seems to have enacted a terrible gameplay effect, nearly every game leans towards the difficult side of things. To the point where you have to play the same opening level hundreds of times to get the gist of it. Wonderful if you're ten and you have five games. Awful if you're an adult and you have thousands. Its not necessarily that I don't like difficulty as much as I'd like a better difficulty curve between warm-up and incredibly difficult. I have beaten later games that match these titles difficulty, but then I had the time to play one game for a long period like that.

I would be remiss in not mentioning the endless technological issues games this year have caused me. Every time I've had to do something in BASIC I've had to frantically search the internet for whatever command I need to load something, to my immense frustration as I never manage to find the commands I'm missing. Its gotten so bad on some systems, like the TRS-80 computers, that I've effectively given up on them. This is to say nothing of bad dumps or emulators crapping out. This entry is much later than I wanted it to be simply because MAME stopped responding to any keyboard or joystick commands. If this continues there will be some interesting consequences for some games.

As I don't want to delay this any further, here are the awards for 1982.

Game of the Year: Sinistar
Well, its not really a surprise, but Sinistar was one of the few games that really made its arcade setting work. Instead of being some happy-go-lucky setting about something or another, Sinistar is about you fighting against an unstoppable force that has effectively already taken over the universe. Desperately trying to fight off the endless hordes of smaller ships that make up Sinistar's legions, you mine crystals to make the tools you need to defeat him. Its very often, in the heat of a desperate battle just reaching a handful of crystals to hear that dreaded sound, RUN. Its amazing what this game can do with voice sounds so simple.

Underdog of the Year: Night Stalker
A big piece of nostalgia for me, and one of the earliest home-exclusive twin stick shooters. (for a lack of a better term) Despite having a few mechanics that would feel tedious in other titles, like a constant background noise and a one shot limit on the player, Night Stalker somehow makes it work. The gradually growing hordes of robots, the supposedly safe room in the middle.

Technological Advancement of the Year: Wayout
As I said above, I've often encountered predecessors of genres that lacked in every way imaginable, be it speed or quality. But Wayout's use of a Wolfenstein-style floor layout on a system that rarely astonishes was something of a surprise. Oh, the game using it as a simple maze game without any real combat is hardly impressive, but to see an idea executed well, that is at a reasonable speed, years ahead of time is sometime I so rarely get to see. We even get one enemy wandering around. Considering that games for years afterwards would struggle to reach a double digit framerate, this feels like something special, especially since it was originally released on Atari computers, a platform long since forgotten.

A game I played so long ago I didn't even bother cropping out the sidebar

Worst of the Year: Submarine Commander (Apple II)
There were many games that were incompetent this year. And there were many games that were unplayable. But few that displayed the gross incompetence of Submarine Commander on Apple II, not to be confused with the generic shooting gallery that was the Atari 2600 game. Its not often that you play a game where it seems impossible to ever find another ship, but somehow Submarine Commander managed to do so on top of having an awful control scheme.

I can't say I have too much else to say about the year. Perhaps I've made a mistake in playing all these games. I don't really feel there's much exciting things to talk about, or even awful things. In the end I had an average of 10 points, not accounting for Black Widow. Despite having a rule stating I'm free to ignore obvious trash, I still had an average of 10 points. That and the highest rated game, a 20, are up from 1981, but its not exactly an exciting number, is it? I know that harping on about how awful games are is not a fun thing to read about, but I am supposed to be partially doing this for fun.

Now comes for a different part of the year in review, where I expound upon games fitting three categories. Obviously good games, games of historical merit, and my personal favorites. Shamelessly stolen from the way Jason Dyer over at Renga in Blue does it. Good games are titles like Doom, historical games are important or interesting in historical context, but not necessarily fun outside of that context, and ones I liked, but might not be your cup of tea. Just went ahead and added games from previously done years.

Good Games:

Well, years are early yet.

Historical Games:
Asteroids (1979)
Berzerk (1980)
Castle Wolfenstein (1981)
Defender (1981)
Robotron 2084 (1982)
Wayout (1982)

I know I didn't blog about Asteroids, but that's not by accident, I don't have anything worthwhile to say about it. I've played it, or at least a clone of it, at some point or another. It is of course, important and basically the first game I think of as a shooter. (there are earlier ones, not the point) I don't feel like criticizing it is very fair, its like criticizing the person who made the first written language for having a poor grasp of grammar.

Personal Favorites:
Bosconian (1981)
Night Stalker (1982)
Sinistar (1982)

I didn't add Tempest, because I can't really see myself playing that again, but I think I might just play Bosconian again. Interestingly, both games I really liked this year have horror elements to them.

The year ahead, 1983, consists of 87 games, though I've already started on things. Which sounds like a lot, but keep in mind when I began writing this summary, around Gravitar, there were 96. I might just be able to finish this year in under a year's time. I don't hold any illusions that I'll ever reach today or even really mind, but I am interested in reaching the '90s.
As will be usual from now on, if you happen to know of any games that fit my requirements and I missed, feel free to suggest them to me. I can only uncover so much.
I also plan on redoing some of the games I played early in my blog. This is going to be more related to titles from later years, as I don't think I'm going to replay any 1983 games.

Black Widow (1982)

Name:Black Widow
Number:141
Year:1982
Publisher:Atari
Developer:Atari
Genre:Top-Down Shooter
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour 10 minutes
Won:Not possible

One of the fun things about doing this is that sometimes while researching one game you discover another. Fun isn't always the operative word. In this case, the word is mild annoyance. Gravitar, having not done well, presumably for reasons I explained, was soon designated the target for a conversion kit. Feels fitting that the title to do so is Black Widow, a game about killing insects, as such things often take host in unpleasant places.
Now, I had some trouble with MAME since Gravitar, as it wasn't registering any keyboard presses. This has happened before, but usually just for one day. So I eventually decided to play Atari Anniversary on PSX, since I couldn't play it otherwise. Today MAME started working again, so I could finally play it properly. In the future, I'm not going to wait to play the arcade titles until the end of the year.

So...the money signs are sliced up beetle larva?

The plot of the game is that you're a spider who can spit poison/shoot things, and now most of the insect kingdom has decided they're going to kill you. Protect your web from their endless onslaught. Typical twin stick shooter stuff. To me, this really needs something special to differentiate itself from what Robotron 2084 did.

Your character moves and shoots in 8 directions, and can have 4 shots on-screen at once. You can move within the confines of the web, but not through any parts that are currently red, which also reflects shots. Throughout the waves walls variously turn red and green. I couldn't tell you what green walls did and even red walls didn't seem to work consistently. You only get one hit per life.

Enemies come in two ways. First, they spawn in a limited quantity each way and come in off-screen. They're mostly simple minded, either wandering around or chasing straight after you, with little complex thought behind it. When shot, most enemies drop a $, which gives you points, the sooner you get it, more points. It is advisable to do so, because sometimes enemies walk over them, creating an egg. Some enemies spawned are normal, but others are are invulnerable to your attacks. Eggs can be pushed off the web. Gradually, enemies start doing things like exploding if you shoot them, or chasing after other enemies to turn them into rockets that shoot after you.

Despite the effect being similar, these do not seem to be explosions

Every 4 waves a series of flying cursors, presumably intended to be a giant centipede, comes spinning around, chasing after you. Should you die, kill all the cursors or they simply make enough twists for them to decide to leave, the stage advances.

The bug slayer being the thing on the right

This is where the unique aspect of the game comes in, which is called the bug slayer. He kills every enemy, eats everything from $ to eggs, and is also invulnerable. Unlike your foes, he does not hurt you at all. If I'm not mistaken, this is chronologically the first time an actual ally has shown up. He's not the best, since he's only here if you've screwed up and he steals points from you, but it is something.

Not too far from an egg, note the color, which means this one is invulnerable

There were two things about this game that prevented me from enjoying it, which I think is more based in how I played it rather than how it actually played. Eggs have to be pushed off the web, which I just assumed meant I had to push them off the edge. You can also push them off the interior hole. For a while I was having to frantically push them out of the center into the edge. This is because the yellow enemies sometimes create the unkillable bugs, so I had to shoot in such a way that dropped $ didn't easily fall into their path. Even so, moving the eggs isn't fun because pushing them diagonally is seemingly impossible and they have a smaller hitbox than you'd think they should.
This is not a very smooth game. Now, part of this must be attributed to the strange choice of emulation, but having eight directions feels wrong for this game. It needs smoother directions than that. Thing is, its not a very smooth eight directions. In practice I had closer to 4 about half the time. This is solely due to the PSX emulation, which is hot garbage.

The green-winged red enemies here do explode, and are quite deadly

At this point, MAME was working again. I wasn't really expecting much...but as it turns out, I should have been. Which is funny, since its supposed to be a perfect arcade port. The game is noticeably slower and I can actually aim diagonally. Its not amazing, but I can actually see how someone might enjoy playing this now. And the funny thing is, the changes are strange. Speed is one, as if the game was done with the wrong framerate. I also died in different ways, primarily to the more generic enemies and never lasting longer than 11 or so waves.

The weird rocket enemies

But in MAME, I didn't do that as much, thanks to the speed. Instead, I was dying to the later enemies, the exploding ones and the rocket creating things. The latter, simply because I wasn't reaching it before, but the former was having larger explosions. I suspect these changes are tied together, but its amazing how much you can screw up a game without meaning to. And yes, this is with the same settings across both versions.

Weapons:
Generic weapon. 1/10

Enemies:
I like the variation in theory, but in practice it lacks something. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
Hey, someone who's actually helping me. I'm shocked! 2/10

Levels:
The web design is interesting, but each wave having some weird selection of blocked sections is not. 1/10

Player Agency:
The 8 direction moving/shooting isn't as smooth as I'd like, but it works for the most part. 4/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
This game really makes me feel small and blind. I don't care for that. 0/10

Graphics:
Simple wireframes, nothing exciting. 1/10

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Pretty generic, but I guess its high quality for the era. I barely remember what it is after finishing playing it. 1/10

That's 12, which is indeed an improvement over Gravitar. Just stay away from any versions in a compilation, its practically guaranteed to be garbage.

That's it for 1982, for real this time.

Gravitar (1982)

The title screen rapidly moves in and out, which even if I wasn't taking screenshots I would find annoying

Name:Gravitar
Number:137
Year:1982
Publisher:Atari
Developer:Atari
Genre:Side-scroller
Difficulty:5/5
Time:1 hour 35 minutes
Won:Not possible

One of the funny things about playing games on the internet is finding titles you didn't realize ever existed. As an American, its not really shocking for European, Japanese or the rest of the world to have games I don't know about, but it is when its an American game, released in arcades! It was even in a movie I've seen! There are reasons for this of course, the game didn't do very well, and if you're paying attention to what kind of game someone is playing in a movie, you've either watched that movie too many times or its a crappy movie.

Gravitar is a game along the lines of Asteroids, except that now gravity plays an important part in the proceedings. You can rotate left or right, accelerate, shoot and use a shield/tractor beam. Its a game that starts off very unforgiving, with gameplay requiring constant adjustments as you try to figure out where you're going, where you're shooting, and where enemies shots are going. It doesn't feel like it ever lets up for long.

I almost forgot, fuel plays an important part in things, and hoo, boy, that's a lie, because you will never forget about fuel. You cannot afford to forget about fuel. If you forget about fuel, that's it, game over. Fuel is consistent throughout your lives, and running out of fuel means that the game bypasses whatever lives you have remaining. You can shoot and turn without using fuel, but that's all the concessions the game gives you. That tractor beam? You need that to get more fuel. Also the tractor beam? Every second you have it going costs 100 energy points.
Which leads to the obvious flaw in the game. Its very much possible to play Asteroids well. I believe I've done that at some point. Its also possible to play Lunar Lander well. But at the same time? This is basically what the game asks of its players. I'm not up to that task, but I tried at least to win one round. The game has three different sets of levels and four different universes, that is, the level set is the same, just the fundamental rules are different.

The game, as much of the game as most people are likely to see, consists of 5 planets and a star. The star exerts gravity, slowly dragging you towards it, as gravity is wont to do. You only have to take out one planet, in theory, a reactor planet which is in the middle left, but the others are good practice.

Once on the planet's surface you have to take out all the ground turrets, not crash, not get shot, and pick up fuel before escaping back out again. This is a bit difficult at first, since you shoot in the same direction you move forward on, so shooting and thrusting is never a good idea. This is unfortunate because your enemies are very, very eager to shoot at you.

And make no mistake, the game makes it very difficult to fight back while you're shooting at these things. You get one area that's normally designed before you're off dealing with weird planet designs. You practically get no way of testing your abilities before you're forced to engage in all sorts of aeronautical trickery. I guess this would be easier if you played Lunar Lander beforehand...to a point. I'll get to why that's not going to help too much.
Rounding off the planets is a reactor planet, without any gravity, the only level of its kind. You have to fly in, shoot the core, fly out in a certain amount of time. Holy crap this thing is precise, and its strange suddenly flying in the game without gravity, because that's basically this game's gimmick. Later versions of this level are supposed to have less time to clear it. I won it...eventually. Only, I didn't get back out. Since I read that clearing the reactor planet is supposed to advance to the next set of levels I suspect either someone is lying or by not getting out in time it didn't count. But since I still survived its a positive!
I'm unsure if these problems are because I'm just not that good at this kind of multi-tasking or if the game generally has problems. The last time I played a game along these lines, was A-10 Tank Killer back near the beginning, which I did indeed crash a lot in. However, I'm not about to say that was due to anything but my own hubris, even if it had a similar problem to this game. (and now that I think about it, I probably should have flown slower whenever I was shooting at something on the ground) This is less clear. My ship has the aerodynamic profile of a misshaped rock, so there's a lot less momentum than there should be.
Despite all this, there are several flaws in the game that aren't necessarily related to the brutal difficulty loop.

On the overmap screen, two spaceships constantly spawn out of the reactor planet. Not fast enough to necessarily be a problem, but fast enough that taking one out while also getting shot is a net loss. But the real problem is when you accidentally touch them. Rather than killing you like a sensible game would have, Gravitar throws you into something out of Spacewar. It just feels so completely pointless. This is the one time the boundaries of the screen act as a sort of bouncy wall. Killing him, which isn't that hard to do, takes you back, but its like all trips out of the planet. That is, you have to wait before you can start speeding away again. Wasting time and possibly resulting in you being in a worse place for it.
I also found that sometimes the lower left planet cannot be reached without practically draining your fuel to get there.
I had a particular problem with one level, an asteroid. Now, planets have had normal gravity and worked like planets, go left and you'll eventually return to where you started. This is different. And it doesn't quite work like it should. Oh, being left or right slowly drags you towards the planet as you expect, but it feels wrong. Like the events that are unfolding aren't quite right.

So at some point I decided to go around the planets from hardest to easiest, and something funny happens if you do that. Planets that previously had only one or two enemies there now suddenly have many. Which means that this approach isn't really all that helpful. It feels like at every turn the game is preventing you from doing anything that might make your live easier.

I can win them individually, but it seems like if I try anything more than that the game is too difficult for me to even have a chance. And I think this is why the game didn't do too well. I spent what would be quite a bit of change fruitlessly trying to win even one round, and I couldn't do it. I eventually reached the second round with save states. Barely. MAME's bookkeeping mode tells me I spent about 12 dollars in quarters, which seems to me a colossal waste.

Weapons:
A very standard weapon. 1/10

Enemies:
Very basic enemies. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
They do a lot with such a simple concept, even if owing to engine limitations it often doesn't quite work out. 2/10

Player Agency:
I felt like I was fighting the controls every step of the way. I feel like if you're going to do a concept like this you should be a twin stick shooter or offer more than one attack. 2/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
There's a constant, despairing sinking feeling. The game plays like you're in a constant fight against the forces of nature themselves let alone those who have decided to fight against you. I'm not so sure that's a positive. 2/10

Graphics:
Simple wireframes, I've seen worse. 1/10

Story:
I'm not even sure they even pretended. 0/10

Sound/Music:
Not your typical blips and bloops. No, here we get a very annoying rocket thrusting sound, and a power generator sound on the main screen. Yugh. 0/10

That's 9, or roughly comparable to the rest of the arcade titles I didn't like. Good concept, awful execution.

Something that had me curious, despite me reaching maybe 20k points once, there are people who have reached not only 800k, but millions upon millions of points. What the hell? So I look on Youtube for a longplay, and oh, MAME is doing a somewhat poor job of emulating this here title. The outlines are much brighter and the sound is less annoying. I'm not sure that it plays better though.

There is one last game for 1982, that I didn't even realize existed until after researching this entry. Its something I was genuinely surprised to find. This might take a little while, since MAME's been acting up.

The Alien (1982)

An entirely original creature, since its a centipede centaur

Welcome back to a surprising return, to Avalon Hill's The Alien. A game I certainly didn't expect to see again, but here we are. So the difference between then and now, is that the manual exists, a modified version rendering some of the controls easier to use, and most importantly, a challenge to finish this. Like I was going go enter here again without a challenge. Being easier to control for this game is akin to saying a new Japanese pistol is less lethal to the user, yes, I believe that's true, but I don't believe that its now good.
Anyway, I doubt I'm going to say anything The Wargaming Scribe hasn't said ten times more intelligently than I. I only came across this game in comparison to early survival horror game Nostromo, which was hardly anything related to survival horror, and offered this as a slightly better point of comparison. I believe one of his commentators, Porkbelly, got the manual and then fixed up the game.

The actual story of The Alien, as opposed to something else you might be thinking of, is that among the alien creatures picked up on a routine creature gathering expedition, is a very deadly, mutating creature, which, naturally, breaks out of its cage, freeing the rest of critters, and begins wrecking havoc on a spaceship. To paraphrase The Gauntlet (1977) "a nothing creature from a nothing expedition". Now, the objective is to recapture or kill the creature. Scratch that, we're killing it. Not even metagaming here, if it broke out once, it'll break out again, shoot to kill.

Not even pretending to be any different in-game

Unfortunately, there are a few things preventing me from doing this. My crew starts the game disordered, scattered among the rooms of my ship, and the man, that is space regulations, tell me I can't kill this thing until its no longer "relatively harmless". Also, there might be a robot on the crew who is ordered to bring it back alive and will refuse to attack it. Its a testament to something that this actually fits the series so well, considering the first official Alien game was a Pac-man clone!

Ah, the garish Apple II color scheme, how I missed you so

Starting off, the game sends you to various screens where your crew are, and a list of whatever objects are in the room with them. Don't be fooled, you can't actually do anything the first time this happens. Its on this screen you can attack The Alien, put something in a cage, and interact with various static objects. You can attempt to do these things, but unfortunately the check to see if that's a valid action happens AFTER you select it. It doesn't affect anything, and that character can still do something else.
The crew is a varied bunch. There are the two command staff, who can allow entrance to certain areas of the ship, work the computer and activate the self-destruct. Then there are two scientists, who can also work the computer, but are the only ones who can do anything with the cages. Finally, three engineers who can build things. Like a flamethrower and possibly other things.

Yes, aliens, plural, because he can clone himself

The first time you can actually do something is on the map, where you can move around, take and drop objects, and construct things. Yeah, I'm just constructing flamethrowers. My plan is to have everyone as equipped as can be, possibly put all the escaped critters back in a cage, and if possible put The Alien in the cold storage room. If I can't do that or kill him...uh...I don't think using the ship's self-destruct mechanism and escaping on a shuttle or something is going to work.
For now all this means is everyone except two of the engineers walk towards the armory, while those two stick in maintenance to build themselves a flamethrower. The problem with this is that the game makes this just so tedious to accomplish. What should take a minute at most now takes a few. You have to press the right arrow to cycle through every possible action or destination. At least for the later it takes out places you can't go. Remember, this is the improved version where the controls actually work.

You can only construct something if you've done nothing else that turn, luckily the other two engineers built the flamers

Unfortunately, there are only two lasers, so I'm going to have to dole out two dart guns. And I can only build 2 flamethrowers, so one person is going to have to use a cattle prod or something. It was nice knowing him. Since The Alien is unlikely to come to us, I decide to do something really stupid and split up. I have one of the scientists begin locking up the creatures, while the captain and the other scientist work on the computer. Apparently the computer has info on this creature and its on a need to know basis. We don't need to know, but one can break the computer.

That was easier than I expected

After building the flamethrowers, one of the fresh wildlife makes his way into maintenence, so I have someone capture it...and it works. I think it might be weird, but no, its completely normal. What is a problem, is trying to lock up a creature when someone is all alone, with two items in their inventory. Like a gun and a cage, which you'd think was necessary. No, the person who grabs the animal is just stuck there until someone brings a cage to lock in it. Or they drop it.
Since doing anything with the computer isn't going well, I have the commander help out with the wildlife...and he's met The Alien. Time to shoot this thing with the dart gun...and he's dead. Looks like its time to stop playing around and start shooting this thing?

"Should we deal with The Alien?" "No, let's talk about how this makes us feel."

OH, I'M SORRY, I DIDN'T REALIZE MULLING OVER HIS DEATH WAS MORE IMPORTANT THAN SHOOTING THE ALIEN! And they dropped all their items! Okay, new plan, the second-in-command is going to stay on the bridge, along with one of the engineers with a flamethrower, while everyone else is going to explore the ship and deal with the creatures. As only the command staff can cause the ship to self-destruct, and neutralizing The Alien is my only objective, whether he lives or dies is irrelevant to me.

I don't think it adapts to attacks I make, but I doubt it'll be vulnerable for too long

One of my squads captures some wildlife, but unfortunately The Alien walks onto the bridge. Good thing that flamethrower still works, but knowing my luck it won't next time. I gather my men back onto the bridge, and The Alien takes out the engineer with the flamethrower. Worse, the lasers don't work on it. Without any other option, I have the second-in-command activate the self-destruct sequence.
The escape out to the shuttles is mostly uneventful, save for a close call one of the engineers have. The laser might not have done any good attacking, but it'll drive it off. Once inside the escape shuttles. Then the long wait, while every turn the Apple II's horrendous speaker makes a beeping sound. I really can't do anything except wait for every single movement sequence the game forces me through, while the ship slowly prepares to destroy itself. The Alien isn't on either shuttle while this is happening. So did I win...? Technically?

  

 A brilliant light show occurs...

I wonder if someone ever said yes on this screen

And I won! Yes, I think this went well enough to call a victory. The crew's superiors are probably going to be immensely butthurt about all this, but I think that's a small price to pay for victory. Never did figure out who the robot was, probably the captain or one of the scientists. Although, I have to admit, this was the first time I went through the game in its entirety, I didn't exactly know what I was doing or how long it took The Alien to mutate and I still won. I suspect this is entirely because The Alien never managed to make its way to either shuttle, so I'll attribute this to luck.
It does seem like there's very little skill in the game. You're basically just hoping you can reach The Alien before it turns invulnerable. Its incredibly easy for the game to end with the PCs all dead. I was thinking about how you could improve the game so it'd be fun, you know, beyond improving the interface. Expanding the early game time for one, since it seems like you barely have any time at all in this game. Not having the game stop because a crew member got killed for another. Might as well strip naked and slather yourself in bacon grease if we're going to do that. I was thinking you could have 8 people play the game together, so that at the correct time the robot could start killing the humans while The Alien tries to survive, but crap, getting 8 people together for this kind of gameplay sounds horrific.
I'm not going to give this a rating and a number, simply because this is crap. Its ugly, its slow and tedious, and any fun to be had is buried so far beneath its awful presentation its not worth finding. Frankly, everything I've played from publisher Avalon Hill has been a waste of a good board game brand. And that includes a few titles that I decided not to cover. Talk about an annoyance. Still, because I don't really want to return to this again, let's also talk about the Japanese version, released a year later, by porter Kiya (who basically just did Avalon Hill titles) and publisher CRK Research Institute. You've heard of the later, under the name of CRI, yes, those people. The ones credited in nearly every game over the past two decades.

Usually the Japanese title screen is more impressive, not so here

Its very slow to load, only coming on a tape file. This version is actually quite easy to control, press a button to select your character, then press a letter to perform an action. I'm going to go over the relevant information, in case you too are foolish enough to play this. Because you should at least play the nicest version.

I haven't translated everything, because not everything is important

ダレデスカ？
Who do you pick?

@ナニモシタイ (Do nothing, in the FM-7 version, you have to press the key right of P, whatever that is on your keyboard)
A:ケージ　ニ　イレル (insert in cage)
B:ドウブシ　ヲ　ツカマエル  (capture animal)
C:エアロック　ヲ　アケル (open airlock)
D:エイリアン　ヲ　コウゲキ (attack alien)
E:エイリアン　ヲ　コウトロール (capture alien)
F:コンピューター　ヲ　ソウサ (operate computer)
G:ケンキュウヨウケジ　ヲ　カクニン (laboratory confirm, probably inventorize)
H:フネ　ヲ　ハナレル (leave the boat)
I:ケンキュウヨウケージ　ニ　ウツス (describe the captured animals)
J:ジバクソウモ　ヨ　ソウサ　(operate self-destruct)
カノジヨ　ハ　ナニヨシマスカ？ (Pick one)
 

This ship looks like a failed Star Trek prototype

The ship is more simply put together than the last one. You can correspond the locations to the ones used in the Apple II version.

Items, in the right box:
レーザー (Laser)
マスイジュウ (Dart Gun)
ドクガス (
カエンホウシャリ (flamethrower)
ホウデソバリ
ケージ　(cage)

1:オパーリン　センチョウ
Captain Oparin (That is the actual name, A Russian composer)
2:ピアジェ　コウカイシ
Navigation officer Piajie (Piaget, apparently)
3:ソンダク　コウカイシ
Navigation officer Sondaku
4:イェイツ　イシ
Doctor Ieitsu　（Yates or Yeats)
5:ルルス　ケンキュウイン
Researcher Rurusu (Lois or Luis)
6:ブラウン　キカンシ
Engineer Buraun (Brown? Braun?)
7:ウィナー　ギシ
Engineer Uinaa
(0 skips to the next possible scene)

The interesting bit here seems to be that the game doesn't quite match up with what the original version had as its crew. Couple of things to note, I have no idea what the cast's names are. I guessed on some and looked up others on the Japanese Wikipedia. I literally have no idea what some of these names could possibly be. I thought that Oparin might have been O'Brian, but I realized I just misread the word. Then looking at some of the translations, I realized two things. These were all decidedly not Japanese names, and secondly, they all had taken names from poets, scientists and composers.
Oparin is a Russian composer, fairly obscure. (EDIT, I misremembered back when I first wrote this, he's actually a Soviet biochemist)
Yeats is an English poet, who you probably actually know.
Piaget is a Swiss psychologist.

What the heck? There's another Japanese-made game, whose name escapes me, which had as its NPC portraits images taken from a book on Nazi Germany and the Golden Age of Hollywood.

0:ナニモシナイ (Do nothing)
1:イドウ (move)
2:モツ (take)
3:オク (drop)
4:ツクル (construct)

Anyway, I'll do what I did last time and have my officers grab lasers and hopefully then track down The Alien before it becomes too powerful to deal with. Just move to the armory, which is L, with Oparin.

Oh...I can't. At least I think I can't. Arujaanon is a bit above my pay grade, but mausu is something very obvious. Mouse. Except...huh? Does this mean that there's a mouse in there or that its poisonous? Surely the captain can enter the armory! Well, I try Piaget...and that O corridor is poisonous. Okay. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. The other officer can't move either. Maybe I need to reset the game?
No, I can't move. At all. All 3 officers refuse to move anywhere, giving various statements, about the alien, about cages, its all so strange. I suspect one of three things is happening, the emulator I'm running this on, xm7dash3452a130423, which I got from the Neo Kobe emulator collection on the Internet Archive, is glitching with this game. The other two involve the game, firstly that it got damaged in the preservation process, or that its copy protection acted up in the preservation process. Either way, I've done all I could. Looks like The Alien part 3 might just be in my future after all.

I think another strategy game is going to be in this blog's future. Based on a different 1970s film that has been ripped off so many times. You might be able to figure out the movie, but you'll never figure out what it is I'm going to be playing come October. Next up, Gravitar and the conclusion to 1982.

Frenzy (1982)

Name:Frenzy
Number:136
Year:1982
Publisher:Stern
Developer:Stern
Genre:Top-Down
Difficulty:4/5
Time:30 minutes
Won:Not possible

It feels like forever since I've played Berzerk, but it hasn't been much further away than this sequel was released in reality. Funny how that worked out, I doubt I'll ever get that lucky again. Frenzy is advertised as much the same as the original, ton of evil robots, shoot them, watch out for big nasty bad guy Evil Otto. Simple, but hopefully effective.

The dotted walls are shootable while the others reflect shots

Starting the game up, I'm actually struck by how surprisingly bad the game. A major arcade game that's still a single stick shooter? What madness is this? Just wander around some rooms shooting at things to get a highscore. Compared to the other hits of 1982, this feels downright boring. Wow, two different enemies types along with a special boss monster that instantly reappears, how interesting. Shootable walls that don't kill you, just like Snipes. And I'm out of interesting things to say.

If its not clear, I don't think very highly of Frenzy. It just feels like it brings nothing to the table. While credit must be given to the original Berzerk for its important place in gaming history, Frenzy feels like a rehash of the original. Other people had expanded quite well on the formula since the original's release as titles like Shamus and Snipes, while not the greatest games ever made, tried to create consistent level design and expanded on the random level design respectively to some success. Frenzy has four variations on single-screen mazes and those variations don't actually do anything, though you could be tricked into thinking they did.

I've seen difficulty suggested as to the reason why people dislike this game, and I think that's a load of baloney. Sinister and Robotron, both harder than this, but they had a key element. They were exciting, dying felt frustrating, and Sinistar was terrifying at times. I feel mild annoyance at having died in this game. Don't get me wrong, I don't feel like I lost in a fair fight, but at the same time, I don't care all that much. Its not fun and it doesn't add anything to the formula.

Weapons:
Generic laser weapon. 1/10

Enemies:
Two different sprites for a slowly approaching enemy that shoots at you, along with Evil Otto, who just runs at you, through walls, and can now be shot and killed. He just respawns and returns faster. You no longer die by walking into enemies, but that's something that so rarely comes up I'm surprised anyone ever noticed. Interestingly, the enemies shoot much the same way as the player. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
You'd think a level where you can see a giant Evil Otto would be special, but no, all that happens is that if you kill Otto four more pop up. Otherwise the design of this game feels like it puts the player in unavoidable deaths an uncomfortably high number of times. 0/10

Player Agency:
It is a pain to shoot diagonally in MAME. I have died quite a bit because I meant to shoot diagonally, but couldn't, or didn't mean to and did. I do feel like the aiming in this game is slightly crap in general. You don't get a proper center for things, so you aim quite offset from where you should be aiming in some directions. To add insult to injury, the player moves at a slow pace. 2/10

Interactivity:
You can shoot some walls, while others reflect shots. This is universal among you and the enemies. 2/10

Atmosphere:
None.

Graphics:
Its depicted simply but effectively. Which should be the end of it, but for some reason the color of everything changes between levels and it drives me up a wall. 0/10

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Simple, flat 8-bit or so sound effects. 1/10

That's 7, which is actually 2 above Berzerk and about equal to the game I said was better in some regards, Shamus.