First Impressions: Novatron

Novatron is a DOS lightcycles (tron) game released by VeriSoft Works in 1982.

There have been quite a lot of lightcycle games through the years–MobyGames lists 10, though I suspect it’s missing quite a few. The most recent that MobyGames lists is for the Xbox 360 (Tron, 2008), and the oldest is for the Intellivision (Snafu, 1981). Novatron is a fairly old example of this type of game, and it shows.

Though the graphics are fairly nice, and the controls responsive, Novatron is quite difficult to play. The keys used to control your lightcycle are F9, F10, Insert, and Delete, which are poorly placed. It’s been a while since I’ve seen an original IBM PC keyboard, but I don’t recall that they would have been in ideal positions on that keyboard either. Positioning aside, I kept confusing which of Ins and Del turned which direction, so I lost quite badly. Too, I found it difficult to tell just how much space I had left before running into a wall, probably due to the viewing angle.

In short, the game isn’t terrible, but isn’t really worth playing when there are so many better examples of the type. Personally, I’d recommend Armagetron Advanced.

Donkey

After far too long a break, a new game. Or, rather, quite an old one: Donkey, written in 1981 by Bill Gates.

Donkey was written¹ as a way to showcase the capabilities of the BASIC programming language which shipped with new IBM PCs. Therefore one might expect it to be a very simple game–and simple it is:

The object is to avoid the donkeys in the road as you drive. The controls consist of only a single button, the space bar, which is used to switch lanes. Each time you successfully pass a donkey, your car moves a bit closer to the top of the screen, so that it will be more difficult to switch in time to miss the next one. If you hit a donkey, the donkeys are given a point, you explode, and you start over:

Every eleventh donkey that you pass, you are reset to the center of the screen and given a point. The game keeps track of the score, but there’s no particular reward for reaching any certain score; the game just continues until you exit. As simple and unrewarding as this game is, that’s likely to be fairly soon after starting.

Update: I’ve added a video demonstrating the gameplay below.

Download the game here.

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1. According to Wikipedia, which has a lengthy article, if you’d like to read more. ↩

First Impressions: A Ressha de Ikou

A search on Wikipedia tells me that Maxis released this game in the US as A-Train, and it is a simulator in which you build a railway system.

Well, I like the old SimCity games, so I like Maxis, so I should like this, right? Let’s see:

Well, it doesn’t look bad so much as it doesn’t seem to have any interface. Playing with the buttons didn’t seem to do anything, but not to worry; there is a help screen:

Unfortunately, the help screen isn’t very helpful. Still, I persevered, pressing buttons at random on the theory that a million monkeys playing a million copies of A-Train will eventually figure out the controls. The biggest change I made was causing it turn turn to night:

Actually, I’m pretty sure that that was either timed, or just based on how many buttons I’d pressed, rather than any particular action of mine. I couldn’t work out what to do with this before my patience ran out, so I quit. Japanese people play pachinko games too, but that doesn’t make them good games; it’s no surprise that this game was a dismal failure in the US, despite its huge success in Japan. Avoid it.

First Impressions: 8 Eyes

This game is like Castlevania, except much, much harder.

When the game begins, you select which country to play in first. I understand that it’s something like Megaman: play in the wrong order, and the game is much harder.

The game really looks quite a lot like Castlevania, and plays similarly, too, with one major difference: in 8 Eyes, you have a falcon with you, and some enemies can only be destroyed by the falcon. Unfortunately, you only have control over the falcon when there are two players–the second player controls the falcon. With one player, the falcon just flies left and right, and your control is limited to telling it to swoop down to attack or return to your shoulder.

The result of this lack of control is that the game is way too hard with one player, and I can’t imagine why anyone would play it just to control the falcon. Give this one a miss.

First Impressions: 75 Bingo

A horrible slots game by Sachen, the company that gave us Tasac and other gems.

I don’t have much to say on this one, since I don’t see the point of these games that are totally luck-based gambling simulations.

Verdict: Like other Sachen games, and other gambling sims, just don’t bother.

First Impressions: Brickout!

A foray into other consoles with the Intellivision’s ‘Brickout!’. It’s clear just from the name that it’s a Breakout clone, but is it a good one?

Short answer: No.

It’s very simple. You get 20 lives, you move the bat along the bottom of the screen, the ball destroys the bricks it hits. This wouldn’t make it a bad game, by itself; it would only make it an overly simple one. The problem is that this game has such bad collision detection that the ball will slide through the corners of the bricks occasionally. It will get stuck in a row and take the whole row out. Not bad things, right? They make it easier, yes? They do, but I’d prefer some challenge.

But the game does provide that. Since the game is old (I suppose), its controls are somewhat lacking, and the framerate is just bad. The ball is minuscule in comparison to the bricks or the bat, so it’s not that hard to lose track of it. It’s not too clear, when the ball is moving at a shallow angle, where the ball will be when it is on a level with the bat. Now, perhaps these things are minor, and I am just bad at the game, but either way, I won’t soon play this again.

Verdict: Arkanoid is better in every way. Play it instead.

First Impressions: 3D Block

A falling blocks game, which appears from the title screen to be an adult game. Is it? See inside:

I’ll answer now, to spare you any anxiety: if it’s an adult game, no one will ever know, because it’s impossible to get anything done.

It’s not too hard to rotate the shape when it’s at the top, but once it gets further down it’s nigh impossible to tell how it’s oriented. Furthermore, it’s very hard to tell at a glance what the levels below the top are like.

And what is that box on the lower right? Is it supposed to help me guide my blocks? It shows four blocks per level. There are sixteen blocks per level in truth. I don’t know how this is meant to help, but it’s about as useful as dictionary with every other letter missing–you know there’s more to it, but it doesn’t do you any good.

With all these faults, the only thing that let me complete the first level was the the blocks fall slowly–painfully slowly. You can press start to drop the block all the way, but there’s no way to move it down just a bit. When the second level comes, though, this isn’t a problem. Where the first level was far too slow, the second level is impossibly fast. The blocks fall completely in about a second, which is nowhere near enough time to orient them, much less position them accurately. So, we get this:

And the game is thankfully over.

Verdict: This game shows why 3D should not be done on an NES. The 2D Tetris games are pretty good on the NES, so if you want falling blocks, play those instead.

First Impressions: Tasac

Tasac is a vertical scrolling shooter by Sachen, and it sucks.

The title screen looks pretty cool, so one might expect the game to have decent graphics, or something. Most of your in-game time is spent in a position like this one:

There’s no real challenge in this part, except that the laser-like weapon you start with sucks, and the upgrades suck even more. When you get to the end, the boss appears.

But you can’t kill it yet. In fact, you can fly right over it. Why is the boss there before you’re able to interact with it? I don’t know. But the game carries on just as if the boss weren’t there. In fact, it carries on the same way even once you can fight the boss–the random enemies keep appearing, there’s just a boss on the screen at the same time.

Although the boss shoots a pretty large number of projectiles at you, they’re not hard to dodge. If the weapon weren’t so stupidly slow and hard to use, they boss wouldn’t be even slightly difficult. As it is, the boss just takes a little longer than it ought to.

The second level was just like the first. I think that the boss was slightly rounder, but I don’t really care to recall.

Verdict: Pointless. It’s just a below average vertical scroller.

First Impressions: Flying Warriors

Yeah, it’s out of order. I hit ‘random game I haven’t played’ and I got this:

Flying Warriors. It sounds like some kind of shooter maybe. Airplane game. That’s cool, I liked 1943. So, what do I get? Castlevania if it sucked and had a boring training sequence. But before training, some important wisdom:

Okay, on to the training. Since the designers went to all the trouble of putting in training, this game must have some complex controls, or something. Let’s see:

Yes, that’s right. Toward automatically blocks at the right level, and B automatically punches at the right level. You get to practice these complex manoeuvres several times before you grasp them fully.

Yes! I am a master! I can now go out and make the world a better place! But, first, a practice match against sensei. Well, sure. I’m a master now. Piece of cake.

So we fight and… he beats me down. Badly.

So it’s back to training. Never mind that training couldn’t possibly help me, and that a monkey could manage these controls. So, we train again, he declares me a master again, we fight again, I lose again. Repeat. Repeat…

Finally, I win. So we get a scene change.

So, the game begins with an exciting… empty screen! I have to move off it to an entirely different scene to get to the actual game. What was the point? Why waste my time putting this scene in if there’s nothing here? The next scene is some kind of mountain area, which kind of matches with the description, but that does not explain what the point of this last scene was.

So, after that painfully long training and practice fight, we expect challenge, yes? But the enemies all die in one hit! The hardest part is managing the movement controls, since it seems to be impossible to make Rick (our hero) jump the way you want him to. After a couple of screens full of these zombie-like wimps, we enter a cave, filled with more of the same, as well as the far more dangerous bottomless pits.

In fact, these pits are so much more dangerous, that they even kill the enemies, who just jump off like lemmings. But, remember how I said that jumping correctly was the hardest part?

Yes, I too jump off like a lemming. The game tells me that Rick doesn’t let this stop him. Fortunately, it does stop me.

Verdict: You can’t skip the long intro, you have to go through boring training and practice fights, only to get to a game that acts like a bad rip off of Castlevania. Better to leave this one alone.