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: 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: Text Editor

Original title: “РЕДАКТОР ТЕКСТОВ”. In Latin characters: “REDAKTOR TEKSTOV”.

Broken, probably. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to do, but it just shows several screens of text then loops. Nestopia complains about bad header info, or something. The first and last screens are:

And that is that.

Update: According to the BootlegGames Wiki, this program needs a printer. I wasn’t aware that such a thing existed, but apparently some Famiclones had a printer port. The more you know!

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.