Cad-Cam Warrior (1984)

Name:Cad-Cam Warrior
Number:257
Year:1984
Publisher:Taskset
Developer:Andy Walker
Genre:Top-Down Shooter
Difficulty:5/5
Time:1 hour
Won:No (115W/85L)

Another game from the world of weird gravity, which somehow is a theme with developer Taskset/Andy Walker. We've seen him before on Gyroscope, and while I didn't know it at the time, Taskset published the more well-known Bozo's Night Out. Note, published, since Walker himself was the developer of all but three games currently listed on Lemon64.

And I have to say, that despite all of them coming out in three years, that's some impressive work. All of them have something uniquely interesting about them, even if they probably aren't as good as one might think. Cad-Cam Warrior is in the middle, probably not too far away from when Gyropod was made given the whole gravity focus.

Cad-Cam, which is supposed to be CADCAM, or Computer Aided Design Computer Aided Manufacture, is a type of processing unit in the vague future of the game's very long backstory. Seriously, this has a lot of pages for an action game from 1984. A fancy, newly designed one has stopped interfacing with humans, and it's up to the player to figure out why. You play as a robot, Micro Assembly Droid 2 sent inside the CAD CAM, trying to reach screen 8192. By defraging every screen you go through with a gun or something that makes sense.

After the title screen, you're thrown into the first of many of these screens. Controls are simple, they just use the joystick, move and shoot. It's very stiff, but I don't know if that's just me using a keyboard instead of a gamepad. One shot on-screen at a time, and nothing I encountered takes more than one hit. By the same consequence, so do you.

The big gimmick the game has is the split-screen level design. The top half and the bottom half are linked by various holes, go in one, you come out the same way you came in. Once you go in, you're locked in until you finish the animation going out. Because of the nature of this, it's very easy to accidentally get yourself into a loop of going back and forth. If an enemy does an inopportune movement, it's over for you.

Enemies are weird. I think there's a difference between the four kinds, but in practice I'm not sure I've ever seen any do anything differently. There seems to be a bit different in their behavior, but it's mostly variations on randomly wandering around. They all shoot and just move to their whims. There are also meteors which pop up after certain amounts of time to hit the location you were at when it spawned. Hope you weren't pinned down. 

These factors combined make getting very far in the game difficult. It's hard to not die on a screen, and each time you do, the screen restarts completely. Every enemy is back. I can't use save states to store my process. Which means, this game expects you to play all the way through, in one session. There's no pausing either. Hope you don't need to pee halfway through the game.

Levels aren't just variations on where the holes are, there's actual different elevation. Unfortunately, all this means is you walk up to one edge and jump up to it. Nobody can shoot over it, and because touching means your death, this is actually to your disadvantage. I didn't feel like the controls were smooth enough to handle this sort of thing, I was just gambling that I'd get lucky and an enemy wouldn't camp out near an edge.

Normally, at this point, I'd say how far I got, and then talk about how it had an interesting idea but just couldn't do anything with it. There's some genuine tension to having the screen divided up like this and having to multitask. It's just that you're so fragile and the controls are so stiff that there's no reasonable way to do this without cheating in some manner. The tape I got offered unlimited lives, which I naturally took advantage for.

This actually allowed me to reach somewhere I wouldn't have otherwise reached. The second zone, which is at about the thirty level mark. At first, nothing seems different, then you fire and a mine drops on your current position. This will explode if you or an enemy step on it, no friendly fire avoidance here. You seem to be able to use an unlimited number of these at the same time.

The thing about mines in most games is, they're a specific item in a game full of useful tools. Most people won't ever really use them properly, and otherwise just use them quite simply. Exploit simple AI so you can take them out without really thinking about them as traps. This doesn't work here, because the AI is too random to properly bait. You're spamming this in the hopes it'll take one out. One badly thought out level and you could very well be stuck forever. 

This was about as far as I could get just casually picking it up, and a dedicated playthrough would have to be a one time affair. More than one, and frankly, I'll just find the game far more annoying than it should be. But it's on this playthrough that something interesting happens. I start picking up the random letters that spawn in sometimes...and it starts revealing information about the level I'm about to go to. Two of these are dedicated to it, one to the rules and another to other information. The ability to understand what screen you're about to go on is a power-up so obtuse you might not even realize it exists.

Despite feeling like I was going to be stuck there forever. I get to the third zone quickly enough. More interesting, there are paths. This is connected to another power-up, the branch. A third power-up, zapper, functions as a smart bomb, killing everything on-screen. Not sure what the others do, but the manual helpfully tells me that I'll need to write down passwords and the ilk soon enough.

Zone four switches up to a stun and drag attack. You stun an enemy, then touch it and bring it to a hole. Good thing I had the information icon, or I'd take a while to figure that out. It's a very finicky method. Hitboxes are small for very good reason, and if an enemy is on the edge of anything, like one of the holes or a raised area, you won't be able to reach it. At this point I could either fight through this tedium or give up. Guess what I chose? Both, actually, I gave up then but tried again. 

And finishing that rewards me with an advance to the next larger grouping of levels. This time with broken graphics which I believe are supposed to be bigger holes. Which means I get another set of levels with plain old shooting to kill, then another mine, and so forth. Then repeat it again and again and again. There aren't any new levels at this point, each smaller grouping repeats the same levels. I suppose something changes eventually, but I was disgusted at this point and just gave up.

This is a very frustrating game. I could never see much consistency to the enemy behavior, and the gave loves throwing you in situations where you can't easily get out of their path or just stuck behind a hole. If the game didn't have an infinite live mode in the version I played, I never would have gotten anywhere in this game. Not that there was much point in doing so, but at least I saw something.

Weapons:
Basic gun, except when the game forces you to use mines. 1

Enemies:
I'm still not sure what the difference between the different enemies is. 1

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
A hundred versions of ten levels. It's like Lemmings if the developers were very limited in what they could do. 1

Player Agency:
I can do everything I expect from a game of this style, but not very well. 2

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
The game has a real sense of get up and go thanks to the fact that you're always on a timer. On a level, not just with how many levels you can go ahead, but also avoiding meteors. In-between levels, because if you wait too long, you gradually lose your place on the circuit board. It's especially frantic because if you aren't using infinite lives, you basically get no rest. 2

Graphics:
There are graphics and animation. I had no trouble distinguishing anything. It didn't look very nice though. 1

Story:
None in-game.

Sound/Music:
Simple bleeps and bloops, with one very strange heartbeat mechanic whenever an enemy gets close to you. It doesn't really add much, but I guess it's something. 1

That's 9...the exact same score I gave the last 1984 game. Huh.

From what I saw, reviews could be described as "Hey guys, the check from Taskset cleared" or "Putting the eh in meh". Most of them were short blurbs, so I guess this went by mostly unremarked.

That's about it for Taskset. I was thinking about covering Seaside Special for the sheer oddness of a political game from the early '80s, but decided that I wouldn't have much interesting to say about that.

Next time, something I really should have started a long time ago, Black Crypt, Raven Software's first game.

Gyropod (1984)

Name:Gyropod
Number:198
Year:1984
Publisher:Taskset
Developer:Taskset
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:5/5
Time:40 minutes
Won:Not possible

Gyropod is a very strange game. Depressing music plays in the background before you start the game. It's not that of a sci-fi game, it's a funeral dirge. (perhaps I'm wrong, I don't recognize the classic piece it's inspired by) My version is quite cursed. To start it up, you need to switch from a P2 joystick to a P1 to get past the pirate intro, but the game itself only works with P2 joystick. Then you need to go to the options menu so you get more than one life. I'm not kidding, by default I got one. You can get 8 or you could just activate the trainer and play as long as your patience allows.

The story is that you're just going around killing aliens and destroying their planet. You're not exactly the good guy here. You do this by shooting down all the alien ship defenders and the rest is mostly automatic. This is not some grand reversal of The Dreadnaught Factor, you are, in fact, completely outclassed. You get shields, for the ship itself. Enemy ships automatically crash into it. (this doesn't kill them because this game hates you) It's even divided into two parts, one for the pod and one for the rim. Your gun dies in one hit, and you have limited ammo. Very limited ammo, basically one planet's worth. Oh, and if you die, all the enemies you killed respawn.

The control scheme is the novel part about this. You can completely rotate around the ship. Movement is very loose here. It really feels like you're sliding around, movement keeps happening even after you let go of the joystick. Shooting is way too fast for a game that puts a harsh limit on your ammo. If it wasn't for the fact that it seems to be designed around the ammo limitation, I'd swear it was added really late in development.

When you inevitably need more supplies, you can go to the planet by pressing left left right on the joystick. If you didn't have the manual you're screwed. This puts you in a weird Lunar Lander sequence. It's weird because you don't move, you just control how slowly you descend by holding down the fire button. You're always going down, it never stops you or takes you back up. There's some trick to this, because the second you get here you seem to be on a timer until an enemy also lands.

This introduces an aspect that makes this part seemingly impossible. You have to grab crates to bring back to your ship to get supplies. This is reasonable. Enemy ships fly down; one gets out and shoots at you, you can shoot back. This is reasonable. One pops down left and another one on the right. That's also reasonable. What's unreasonable is that you can't kill them, you just push them back with your shots. This breaks the central concept of the game for me. I can understand having a high difficulty curve, but this gets simply unmanagable. You're basically screwed.
The trick, in as much as there is a trick, is to just speed through it. Go down as fast as you can, grab a crate and fly off. You can go back to the planet as many times as you want and the crates will respawn. Fighting them is a losing battle. It's not great, but at least you get something out of it. Considering how bizarrely stiff this second feels, this is about all you can do.

Getting back to shooting down enemy ships. Enemies fly around quite a bit, so it's not easy to get a shot on them. They also disappear and reappear sometimes, not a cloak, just going off to the side. Which, when you think about it, is a bit goofy in a space game. Where can they disappear to? You shoot down all but a couple, and you keep missing. They dodge a lot, they disappear a lot. But it's at this stage that I see the cherry upon this crap sundae. They have such a tiny hitbox. You can't hit the wings, no, you have to hit the body and just the body. I could figure out how to master the game's sliding turret, it's very loose but I could get it eventually, but I'd rather just quit.

Weapons:
Bog standard attack. 1/10

Enemies:
I didn't get that far, but the only enemies seem to be ships with annoying AI and ground soldiers which are invulernable. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Generic outer space and weird planet. 1/10

Player Agency:
Loose and awkward, with obtuse actions for anything more simple than moving and shooting. 2/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
I like the way this game implies there's much more to it than there really is. 1/10

Graphics:
Not terrible, but very limited. 2/10

Story:
It's a mildly interesting twist on the usual space game, but it feels less like galactic conqueror and more space terrorist. 1/10

Sound/Music:
Nice, but really short loops of music and the usual sound effects. 2/10

That's 11. Tried to find something interesting about this one, but there just isn't much.