Washing-Up Software Projects
(Frontier/Gametek 1993. DOS)
Nine years passed between the release of the original Elite and that of its sequel, but we only had two years to wait for the next entry in the series. I had caned Frontier: Elite II on the Amiga, but now I was at college studying Software Engineering and had reluctantly acquired a PC, ostensibly to do coursework, but of course I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to explore the world of DOS gaming. My 486 SX 25, with its 4 meg of RAM and 120mb hard drive was hardly a powerhouse even by the standards of the day, but above running Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic for college it could do a respectable job with stuff like Wolfenstein 3D, and could just about cope with Doom, albeit with some slowdown and hard-drive thrashing.
When it was announced that the third game in the series, Frontier: First Encounters, would feature full texture-mapping of its 3d models, as well as planets with actual terrain instead of the smooth pool-balls of its predecessor, of course I was excited. That it would be a PC-only release was sad but not unexpected, these being the final days of the venerable Amiga. The requirement for a math-coprocessor was a bummer, though, as that was something the "SX" flavors of the 486 processor lacked. Still, I was living at home rent-free, so I set about raiding piggy banks for unspent birthday money and checking down the back of the sofa. (I was one of the last generations to receive a government grant to pursue higher-education in the UK, and while it was fairly paltry I can't honestly claim that none of it went towards this most noble of causes as well. But it was a long time ago and my memory is hazy.)
PC duly upgraded - fortunately it was a drop-in replacement for the CPU that was already there and didn't require a new motherboard - release day came and I breathlessly installed and launched Elite 3.
It was technically impressive all right. True enough, all the spaceships and stations now had textures applied to them, giving the impression of more detail, and the planets now featured mountains, coastlines, and valleys that you could pilot your ship down. That was cool. And it was more Elite! Sure, space was still that obnoxious shade of blue, but there were more mission types, more spaceships to pilot, and the return of the alien Thargoids, nominal antagonists of the first game that had been suspiciously absent, bar one well-hidden easter egg, in Elite II.
I dove in, and while I did play it for many hours, something niggled at me. Several somethings actually. Those texture maps and fractal landscapes I was so jazzed about? They might not have been possible on my Amiga, but man, were they ugly! Those nice clean polygons ruined by a smudgy low-resolution mess, like they had been badly vandalized, graffitied by a teenager with a spray can. I realized then that the previous game had a minimalist beauty that was perhaps less realistic but somehow felt more real.
On top of which, First Encounters was buggy. Crashes were all too common, of both your real-world computer and your in-game ship when entrusted to an autopilot that liked to slam it into the sides of space-stations. This being some years before digital distribution became commonplace, providing patches for the game post-release was a matter of offering them on floppy disks to affected customers, and I dimly remember my copy having one such disk in the box already. It would later transpire that publisher GameTek was on the verge of bankruptcy and forced Frontier to release the game in an unfinished state in a desperate attempt to bring in some revenue, much to the chagrin of David Braben and his team.
None of which is to say that I didn't enjoy my time with First Encounters. I did, but I was left wondering what could have been, with just a little more polish and some different creative direction. Still, it was a much beloved series of games, so surely Elite IV would be along soon, right?
#gamesilove #gamesidontlove #elite #frontier #frontierfirstencounters #msdos
(Gametek/Konami 1993. Played on Amiga.)
Ignoring rereleases such as Nintendo's continual repackaging of Super Mario Bros et al, few games saw as many official ports over such a long period as the original Elite. Released in 1984 on the BBC Micro, it lived well into the 16-bit era, with versions for the Acorn Archimedes, PC and NES all coming out in 1991. More powerful computers meant better framerates, solid 3D graphics and more custom missions, but the core of the game remained essentially unchanged. It wasn't until 1993 that a true sequel arrived in the form of Frontier.
By then I was rocking a newly acquired Amiga 1200, and Frontier was just the killer app to justify my defection from the Atari ST (which did get a port, but it ran slooooowly). As soon as the intro cinematic started, all rendered in-engine and including nothing that you couldn't actually do yourself in the course of the game, I knew I was in for a treat. Check it out:
I still think it looks cool today and really sets the scene for the kind of deep-space adventures that await you. (Though I don't know why the ships bob up-and-down like rowboats on the ocean.)
Although keeping the same basic gameplay loop of flying around, trading between planets, fighting pirates and upgrading your spaceship, Elite II brought an unprecedented level of realism. Solar systems no longer consisted of a single star, planet and space-station, waiting patiently in space for you to visit. Now there were binary star systems, gas giants, icy moons and a variety of different orbital outposts, all of which moved through space according to some convincing orbital mechanics. Planets could be flown over and landed upon, whether or not they were populated with starports and cities. (That these were rendered as a handful of grey cubes didn't matter one jot.) One of the starting positions found you parked on the moon of a gas giant, and it was a joy to simply sit and watch it rise over the horizon while the wind howled around my cockpit.
Where once you were confined to a stock Cobra Mk. III, now with enough capital you could purchase a range of ships from tiny little shuttles without even room for a hyperdrive to enormous, lumbering space-freighters. As well as the trading, piracy, bounty-hunting and asteroid-mining of the original, a variety of mission types, from simple deliveries to risky assassinations, provided ample opportunities for a young commander to earn that cash.
It wasn't simply the planets that moved realistically. Your ship was now subject to proper Newtonian physics, whereby pointing in a direction and firing your engines would send you off in that direction until you applied the opposite force. No longer could you turn on a dime in pursuit of an enemy, and the joystick-focused control of the original game was out in favor of a mouse-and-keyboard approach to orienting your ship. This insistence on realism, while admirable, unfortunately turned dogfighting from a fun Star Wars-like affair, to a dull jousting match where you and your opponent lined up with each other, firing lasers and accelerating before flashing past one another in the blink of an eye, flipping over, thrusting, and repeating the process until one of you died. Later in the game, when you acquired larger, less agile ships with gun turrets that could be manned by AI crew members, combat became a matter of sussing out your opponent and deciding whether to flee, or wait for them to be automatically turned to space-dust by your defenses while you sat back and watched.
FTL travel was limited to flipping between star-systems. Travel across those systems to get to your destination occurred at realistic sunlight speeds, which in practice meant setting your autopilot and hitting the "fast-forward" button to accelerate time until you got there, sometimes passing in-game days or weeks in the blink of an eye.
To this day, then, it baffles me that a game which prides itself on its scientifically accurate portrayal of interplanetary travel would choose to render the omnipresent background of space as blue instead of black. Was the intention to suggest nebulae and the like that the platform didn't have the power to render in detail? Whatever the reasoning, it was a partly immersion-breaking choice for me, that bugs me to this day. In fact, I used to play it with the brightness on my Commodore monitor turned right down in order to get space as close to black as possible while still being playable.
I may not have put as many hours into Elite II as I did the various incarnations of its predecessor, and I can't honestly tell you if I made it to Elite combateer status, though I know I did own the largest ship in the game and was making bank hauling vast quantities of expensive cargo between star systens. For all its faults, though, it's still a formative, fondly remembered game that presented an immersive vision of space-exploration that to this day has rarely been beaten.
(Acornsoft / Firebird 1984. Played on ZX Spectrum and Atari ST)
Christmas 1985, I'm about to turn ten years old, and Father Christmas has left a 48k ZX Spectrum for me under the tree. I was delighted but a little surprised, as it wasn't something that I had asked for. Clearly it was a gift for my dad as much as me. He had bought a Spectrum over a year prior, but by getting me my own he would finally be able to use the thing without having to pry me off of it with a crowbar.
Alongside the Speccy was a large, black box with a bright yellow crest on the front and the word "Elite". This was a wonderfully tactile box of delights, containing the game on cassette, a thick manual, a novella that fleshed out the game's universe, a poster displaying all the different spaceships one might encounter, and a curious lump of plastic called a Lenslok.
Lenslok was a copy protection mechanism. When the game was loaded it would display a garbled mess of blocks and wait for an input. You would take the Lenslok and put it up to the screen. Looking through it would "unscramble" the image and allow you to read a code that, when entered, would start the actual game.
It was certainly ingenious, though its flaws were obvious. Should you lose or break it, your game would be unplayable forever unless you could somehow source a replacement. Plus, although there was an option to adjust the size of the image to better align with the plastic lens, some sizes of screen were simply incompatible with it. It was only ever used for a handful of titles and many of those scrapped it in later re-releases.
When I finally loaded up Elite and got past the copy protection... Well, I hated it. I had no idea what to do. Up until now, games had presented fairly obvious and intuitive goals. Shoot all the aliens. Collect all the keys. Here I was presented with an impenetrable maze of menus and keyboard commands. I could launch my spaceship all right, turn around, crash into the space station, but the rest seemed beyond my grasp. I fiddled with it for ten minutes that first day before putting it down and playing something more accessible. We already had a load of (mostly pirated) games. My dad didn't care for them (except for Heathrow Air Traffic Control, which seemed interminably dull to me), so they all went in my room. I do remember loading Elite up again at least once just to play the "use the Lenslok to unscramble the code" game, then turning it off again straight away.
I don't know how long it was - weeks or months - before I decided to knuckle down, read the manual, and try to figure this game out. It wasn't long before the scales fell from my eyes and I realized what a wonder Elite was. Here was a game that dropped you into a spaceship with just a single laser and 100 measly credits to your name, gave you a pat on the back, and sent you out to make your fortune and reputation as an Elite space combateer by whatever means you chose. You were free to trade, smuggle, bounty-hunt and pirate. The spaceships, planets and stations were simple wireframes that moved at a single-digit framerate, but that was irrelevant. No game had ever felt so real. I wasn't controlling Miner Willy or Monty Mole. I was me. A much cooler, futuristic space-adventurer version of me.
As I played I began to get good at it. I was figuring out the best items to trade between neighboring planets of different economic types, using the profits to upgrade my ship with deadlier weapons and defensive capabilities, and honing my dogfighting skills against pirates and deadly alien Thargoids. And when I was having a shit time at school, I could run home and immerse myself in a world where I was competent, powerful, and (I imagined) respected. Even when I wasn't playing it, I would fantasize about waking up one morning to find a fueled-up Cobra Mk III conveniently parked in my back garden, waiting to take me to a new life among the stars.
I did, eventually, achieve Elite status, a feat requiring the player to defeat some 6400(!) enemies in combat. Then a few years later I upgraded to an Atari ST, and was excited to start the journey over again on my futuristic new 16-bit computer. The ST release of Elite featured solid 3D graphics and a framerate that was silky smooth compared to any of the 8-bit versions. I enjoyed the new docking and launch sequences that gave you a glimpse of a hanger inside the space station containing other parked ships, and the way the docking computer would actually fly your ship (accompanied by a chiptune rendition of Strauss The Blue Danube, a-la 2001: A Space Odyssey) rather than just teleporting you to your destination like the Speccy version. Some of the colour choices seemed a bit garish though, and I was disappointed that exploding ships seemed to just disintegrate into pieces. The Spectrum version used the simple but effective technique of drawing a solid red circle for a frame or two to simulate the flash of an explosion, which was far more satisfying. But these minor quibbles didn't stop the ST version from consuming many more hours of my teenage life, though not quite as many as the Spectrum one, and I'm not sure I ever made it to Elite.
Elite originated on the BBC Micro, but I didn't know anyone who had one of those at home. They were expensive, and seemed mainly fit for boring educational purposes, lining the walls of our high school computer lab. It received a ton of ports through the 80s and 90s though, including a surprisingly capable version for the NES. And there are the sequels, of course, but I'll come back to those. They add much but aren't as accessible as the original. If you want to try it today you can fire up an emulator for your 8- or 16-bit computer of choice and almost certainly find a port for it. (The Acorn Archimedes version is particularly well thought-of.) Or, if you prefer something with more modern graphics but the same classic gameplay, Oolite might be just the ticket. But the monochromatic slideshow of the Speccy version will always have a special place in my heart. A special place only accessible via application of an awkward, easily broken plastic lens.
(Hidden Path Entertainment, 2008. Played on PC and XBox 360)
I'm not sure what this says about my personality. Possibly something unflattering. But while I like playing an active protagonist in a video game as much as the next guy, if I can find a way to say, trick a zombie into walking off a cliff rather than shoot it in the head, or lure an opposing army into an ambush rather than engage it in an all-out assault, I find it much more satisfying. For example, I always enjoyed building elaborate defenses for my settlements in Age of Empires and watching my opponents dash themselves against them, or carefully placing traps in Dungeon Keeper for the hapless heroes to bumble into.
Is it the abdication of responsibility that appeals to me? I can't be blamed for killing all of those soldiers - they did it to themselves by trying to attack me! Or does it just make me feel clever for having set up a mechanism that allows my victory to play itself out while I sit back, sip my drink and observe the carnage?
Whatever the reasons, the whole point of the tower defense genre is to satisfy that particular impulse. Waves of enemies march on your base, and it's your job to cleverly arrange the available defenses to ensure that the horde is destroyed before they can overwhelm it. It's a simple enough formula that depends on the careful balancing of enemy types, towers and their upgrades. For my money no other tower defense game has gotten this so right as Defense Grid. (Or Defense Grid: The Awakening if you're nasty.)
Set on a distant planet, far in the future, Defense Grid tasks you with fending off an invasion of aliens intent on absconding with the valuable "power cores" that are found on every level. When they enter the map they will follow the shortest available path to the power core housing, grab one (or more on later levels), and then make their way to the exit, either back the way they came or by a different route if the exit and entrances are not in the same place. If an alien is destroyed while carrying a power core, it is dropped and begins to slowly float back to the housing. Dropped cores can be snatched up again if they don't reach the housing in time, so allowing one to be carried even part way along the exit route can be fatal, as aliens can end up "relaying" it out the door. Resources with which to build or upgrade towers are earned by destroying enemies but also earn a kind of "interest" as long as they are not spent, and there are cores in the housing, so it is your best interest not to overspend but to find a setup that requires the least number of towers. (The amount of cash earned also affects your final ranking on each stage, so even if you manage to see the aliens off without losing a core, that elusive gold medal may still be out of reach if you were too much of a spendthrift.) Defense Grid encourages experimentation, allowing you to hit a button to rewind to an earlier checkpoint at any time should things go south.
The aliens come in numerous varieties that require the player to carefully plan their tower choices. Swarms of grunts are best taken out with inferno towers that can spray flame across the whole group. Shielded enemies are resistant to heat-based weapons like lasers and infernos but weak against projectiles, so machine guns and the slow-firing but destructive cannons are your friends. Some are cloaked and can't be fired upon at long range. Others are "carriers" that drop a gaggle of smaller enemies when destroyed. And some levels also feature flying enemies that follow their own path and can only be targeted by a small subset of towers.
It's not a game that will tax your 4090ti but its ruined bases and futuristic industrial zones have aged quite well, and the friendly AI that guides you through the early stages and provides running commentary on your battles never becomes annoying. But it's the pitch perfect balance of enemies, towers and interesting level design that make it a classic of the genre, and one that I enjoy coming back to over a decade and a half later just to try and mop up those last few challenge stages. And there's nothing more satisfying than getting your setup just right, sitting back, and watching the mutant alien scum fall one-by-one before your cunningly designed defenses.
(All of the above also applies to Defense Grid 2, by the way, which is basically the same but more so.)
(1983, Ultimate, ZX Spectrum)
Some images you can hear
If you owned a ZX Spectrum in the 80s then you undoubtedly knew the name "Ultimate: Play The Game" and associated it with titles that were a cut above their peers. It's less well known that founders Tim and Chris Stamper worked on arcade machines before forming Ultimate (actually just the trading name of the less snappy-sounding "Ashby Computers and Graphics"), but it should come as no great surprise to anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at their debut title JetPac. The multicoloured laser that your character fires is a direct lift from Defender. That the gameplay takes place on a single screen dotted with floating platforms invokes another Williams' hit, Joust. And while I think claims of "it wouldn't look out of place in an arcade" are overselling it somewhat, it's as instantly accessible as the best of them. You could mosey up to it at any time and quickly grasp the gameplay loop: fly around the screen, avoid or shoot the baddies, pick up the rocket parts and fuel until the spaceship starts flashing, then jump in to blast off to the next level. Easy.
JetPac wasn't the first video game I ever played - that honor belongs to a generic Pong console, probably made by Binatone or Grandstand - but it might well be the first I played on a ZX Spectrum. When my dad brought that machine into the house I quickly became obsessed, and it set me down a path of computer geekery that shaped the rest of my life. But I don't think it's just nostalgia that keeps me coming back to JetPac. There are lots of games from that period that I remember fondly but which don't hold up when revisited. But when I set up a Spectrum emulator on a new device - most recently the Anbernic 405m I purchased a few months ago - it's usually the first game I try, more than 40 years after its release in May 1983.
Pew pew, etc...
It's a simple game, and you can probably come up with a dozen things you'd add to it off the top of your head right now. Changing the platform layout across different levels is maybe the most obvious, given that the planets that Jetman visits differ only in the type of enemies that reside there. Maybe you'd throw in some power-ups or a two-player competitive mode. But when you realize that this is one of the few games compatible with the short-lived, lower-cost 16k Spectrum, it's impressive that they managed to squeeze so many enemy types and spaceships to build into a memory footprint smaller than most web pages. A tight scope was an inevitability when cramming a game into just 16k, and while there aren't many moving parts to JetPac, they mesh perfectly. The fuel tanks keep the player moving around the screen, the aliens provide danger, the platforms a degree of solace, the bonus items encourage risk-taking in return for higher scores, and the different spaceships grant a sense of progression to the skillful.
Ultimate were always good at working around the Speccy's limitations and playing to its strengths. Colour-clash (a symptom of its inability to display more than two colours within one 8x8 pixel square) is kept to a minimum by careful arrangement of the scenery. And while the original Spectrum wasn't known for its sonic capabilities I do actually like the sound effects, such as they are. Enemies explode not with a boom but with a kind of wet squelch which works with the puffy little cloud that they disappear into. Rose-tinted headphones on my part, perhaps, but effective.
JetPac's simplicity is its strength and why it's a game I keep returning to almost exactly 40 years later. Maybe the controls and many of the enemy patterns - the little fighter jets that hang out at the edge of the screen then dive bomb you are my favourites - are burned into my memory from having played it as a spongy-brained youth. But I can put it down for months... years... and playing it again is immediately enjoyable, like a visit from a childhood friend, without feeling like I have to relearn anything.
Lunar Jetman. Not as good.
A sequel, Lunar Jetman, followed later in 1983. Targeted at 48k Spectrums, it featured a scrolling landscape, a drivable "lunar rover", teleporters, and enemy missile bases that Jetman had to locate and destroy... and wasn't nearly as much fun.
The Stampers sold the Ultimate name in 1985, founded Rare, and abandoned the Spectrum for the more lucrative world of home consoles. I haven't spent enough time with 1990's NES-exclusive Solar Jetman to form an opinion on it, though it has more in common with games like Thrust or Oids than its predecessors.
Solar Jetman. On the NES, so obviously not as good.
JetPac may not have spawned a franchise to rival the Marios and Sonics of this world, but it has remained oddly tenacious, thanks to both its fanbase and the Stampers, who throughout the successes of the following decades never forgot their humble origins on that tiny 8-bit computer with the mushy rubber keyboard.
The titular Jetman got his own comic strip in Crash magazine for a while (recently reprinted by Fusion Retro Books.). Donkey Kong 64 (1999) had a Spectrum emulator and a copy of the game hidden in it. Various homebrewed remakes and homages have surfaced over the years, such as Super Jetpak (sic) DX for the GameBoy Color and Jetpac RX which adds to the original Spectrum version.
Finally, 2007 saw the release of Jetpac Refuelled. This Rare-developed reimagining didn't set the world alight, but was good fun, got respectable review scores, and it was rather lovely to see that old Ultimate logo pop up on a game for a modern system. It's just a shame it's still an XBox-exclusive after all these years. Backwards compatibility means that it's still playing on your XBox Series-whatevers even though the 360's online store is closing down, but it would still be nice to see a PC version one of these days. With Microsoft still in possession of Rare and all its IP though, I won't hold my breath.
If you want to play the original JetPac however, and you can't be arsed faffing about with a Spectrum emulator and finding a tape image, you can do so in your browser RIGHT NOW thanks to the Internet Archive!
(2023, Llamasoft / Atari Played on PC and Nintendo Switch)
An in-game screenshot of Akka Arrh
I can admit it: I'm a bit of a Llamasoft fanboy. They're one of the handful of developers whose games I will buy on release day sight unseen. I was dimly aware of Jeff Minter during the 8-bit days, as this weird hippy-looking guy who made wacky games for the Commodore 64 that involved sheep and goats and other ungulates, but ours was a Speccy household and it wasn't until I upgraded to an Atari ST that I encountered the amazing Llamatron and became a full-blown fan.
It hasn't always been easy, though. I never owned an Atari Jaguar and had to wait for emulation to become a thing before I could sample the much-lauded Tempest 2000. I still have never played its sequel, Tempest 3000, but very few have given that it only appeared on the short-lived Nuon platform. There was a string of games for the Palmpilot (though fortunately those did eventually get Windows releases) and then a bunch of iOS-only things that as an Android user I was locked out of. But it seems churlish to complain. How many others of the 8-bit bedroom-coding era are still making games four decades later, without burning-out, being absorbed into a huge studio, or just leaving the industry altogether? And even during those fallow years, keeping up with Llamasoft wasn't a chore. From his monthly column in ST Action magazine, through the years of personal blogs and message-boards, and into the modern social-media era, Minter has presented a gently approachable figure, regularly sharing updates on his games as well as life in Wales with his partner Giles and flock of spoiled and happy sheep.
Fortunately Llamasoft (having doubled its number of devs since the 2000s to a staggering two with the addition of Giles) has in recent years returned to the more egalitarian shores of PC-based gaming, with some of their games also getting multi-platform releases on modern consoles such as the Switch.
Now, I describe myself as a fanboy, but I can't honestly say I love all their games. (With something close to seventy published titles over the years, how could I?) The recent Moose Life was one that I didn't entirely click with, for example, but they're always interesting, visually and sonically intense and immediately recognizable. I can honestly say that I've never regretted spending money on a Llamasoft game.
Llamasoft's relationship with the-entity-that-calls-itself-Atari seems to have undergone almost as many ups-and-downs as that beleaguered trademark itself. Tempest 2000 was one of the only reasons to own a Jaguar. Minter's second game for the platform attempted to do for Defender what T2K had done for Dave Theurer's Tempest, but Defender 2000 was allegedly hamstrung by rushed deadlines and corporate interference and didn't make the same mark, and Minter soon left Atari along with several other employees to form Nuon Labs and create the aforementioned Tempest 3000. 2007's much-misunderstood Space Giraffe added its own spin (pun intended) on Tempest-like tube-shooter gameplay, but TxK for the PS Vita was considered too close to the bone, and Atari's lawyers brought the copyright hammer down on the one person who had kept the Tempest name alive all those years, getting it pulled from sale. Luckily for us non-Vita owners, someone at Atari knew a good game when they saw one, came to an agreement with Llamasoft, and the game resurfaced shortly afterwards, suitably tweaked and renamed Tempest 4000. Luckier still, if there's any animosity remaining between Llamasoft and whatever-Atari-is-this-week it didn't stop them from contracting Jeff and Giles to produce a remake of hyper-obscure canceled arcade game Akka Arrh, resulting in quite possibly my favourite game of Llamasoft's storied history.
Screenshot from the original arcade game. Taken from Atari 50.
Akka Arrh began life in 1982 as a coin-op that only made it to the prototype stage, and never saw a full manufacturing run after it failed to connect with arcade-goers in test locations.The ROMs were only dumped a few years ago, though if you want a nice, convenient and legal way of trying it out, it appeared last year's excellent Atari 50 compilation. (In fact, part of me wonders if the Llamasoft remake wasn't originally intended to be a part of that collection, given that it includes reimaginings of a couple of other early Atari games, but it turned out to be too good to be buried like that and got a solo release instead. Sidenote: Atari 50 is also one of the best ways to play Tempest 2000.)
In its original incarnation Akka Arrh puts the player in control of a turret in the center of the screen, which can rotate to face a free-moving cursor controlled by a trackball, but which cannot move. Surrounding the turret are a number of colourful geometric planes. Abstract swarms of enemies enter the level and attack the turret, but instead of shooting them directly, the player can fire one "bomb" at a time that annihilates all enemies that are above the plane that it hits. The strategy comes from watching for windows of opportunity when multiple enemies are above the same plane and firing a bomb to take them out all at once.
If enemies get too close to the turret the player is prompted to "Zoom In" by hitting a button on the cabinet. This switches to a "close-up" view of the turret as enemies attempt to breach its shields and destroy it. The shooting in these stages is more conventional with no surfaces or bombs to worry about, just streams of bullets fired towards the cursor, though they always stop when they reach it, so placing it slightly "beyond" the enemy you're aiming at can be helpful.
The coin-op isn't bad. It certainly doesn't look like anything else in the arcade at the time, with its large, symmetrical geometric patterns. It's easy to imagine an early-80s arcade-goer being drawn in by its looks then walking away confused having deposited their quarter expecting a simple shooter and finding something much less intuitive. On the other hand, with a bit of difficulty tuning it could have found its audience and become a cult favourite, but cult favourites don't make the big bucks.
Llamasoft's remake benefits from not having to extract coins from the pockets of 1980s teens and layers additional mechanics to make a far more interesting game. The basic structure is the same - the turret in the middle, the geometric planes, the "zoom-in" mode. But bombs no longer automatically destroy all enemies that happen to be above the given plane, but instead cause an expanding "explosion" that has a different shape, lifespan, speed and symmetry on every level. Enemies destroyed by these explosions trigger their own, allowing a single well-placed shot to trigger long explosion chains that supercharge your score multiplier, but every time you fire a bomb that multiplier is reset to zero. Regular bullets can also be fired and don't reset your multiplier but are in short supply, only replenished by destroying enemies with explosions, and count towards your end-of-level bonus. Calling Akka Arrh a shooter seems like a misnomer when it's a game that actively rewards you for not shooting if possible, and like the best score-attack games, getting large numbers of points isn't just about showing off your prowess with a prominent position on the high-score table. It's vital to renewing your lives (or "pods" in this game) and keeping your game going for longer.
Some enemies trigger their own explosions when shot and are worth picking off with bullets first rather than waste a multiplier-resetting bomb. Others cause sections of the planes to disappear temporarily, making your job a lot harder, and are worth just ignoring and letting them float past, assuming they aren't on a collision course with your turret. Some fire shots of their own that fly off the screen first, before turning around and heading towards you at speed - a mechanic that I found extra frustrating at first until I noticed the little "tinkle" noise that accompanied their reversal and learned to anticipate their return. (There are probably accessibility concerns there that I am not qualified to weigh in on, but I wouldn't want to play this one with the sound off.)
Even when things get hectic, there's very little call for mindless blasting. Akka Arrh's levels are more like puzzles to be solved than tests of reflexes, and if they get out of hand it's probably because you haven't cracked the formula to keeping the current one under control. Do you use bombs or bullets? Do you deal with an enemy wave now or wait until they are over a more advantageous section of the level? Blast the shots that are heading away from you or use those precious seconds elsewhere and deal with them when they return? If a game is a series of interesting choices then few in the broad genre of "shooters" offer as many.
Things get characteristically trippy
Of course, this reimagining is full of Minterian touches that make it immediately recognizable as a Llamasoft game. Enemies explode into clouds of colour-cycling particles. Wibbly strings of text float by, humorously mocking (or praising) your performance, or just making fun references to hooved beasties. While not as retina-scorching as other games in their catalogue, collectable smart bombs will still cause the screen to warp and shatter. Sound effects consist of samples seemingly accumulated at random from classic coin-ops, household objects, assorted voices and (once again), those beloved ungulates. The banging techno soundtrack that accompanies most of their games is missing, replaced instead by ambient tones and washes that are triggered by your actions, enhancing the genuinely contemplative and relaxing moments that occur when you have mastery over a level and are clearing it with ease and minimal use of your arsenal. (Minter's love of old-school rave aesthetics is still apparent when you have to zoom in, though. Called "going downstairs" in this version, its sound effects include 808 hand-claps, piano stabs and airhorns.) This is a game that understands that a difficulty curve needn't be a consistent climb to the top, but that keeping the player engaged requires throttling back sometimes and letting them use what they've learned so far to feel a sense of accomplishment that offsets the frustration.
It's difficult to do justice to Akka Arrh's mechanics in text without them sounding over complicated, but it gets the delicate balance of rewarding the player for their newly acquired skills then further complicating itself in order to demand more of them so perfect that it's an absolute joy to play.
