Washing-Up Software Projects
(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.
