Category Archives: Arcade Games

Arcade Games

Space Ace videodisc arcade review

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It was a wet summer holiday in 1984 and I was with my cousin in an arcade on Canvey Island in Essex. Frankie Goes to Hollywood was in the Top 10 with “Two Tribes”, and the famous fight scene between Reagan and Chernenko was blasting out of the video juke box. I looked up from the 2p falls at the voice emanating from a cabinet at the front of the arcade…

Space Ace – Defender of justice, truth and the planet Earth!

I walked over to the crowd forming around the machine, and that was me set for the rest of the summer.

In 1983 Cinematronics released the first Laserdisc based arcade game, Dragon’s Lair. This was a milestone in arcade game technology, effectively allowing a player to direct the actions of a character in a full colour disney style cartoon. The use of a Laserdisk player hidden within the cabinet allowed a film to be “played” on screen through the timing of joystick and key presses. Getting the timing or input wrong resulted in the film switching to a context sensitive death scene, effectively rendering the game to a test of memory.

Space Ace Laserdisc Arcade Game
Ace and Kimberley

Whilst the gameplay was so-so, it was the quality of the animation, which was by Disney veteran Don Bluth, which kept players coming back for more.

Hot on the heels of Dragon’s Lair was 1984’s Space Ace, which in contrast to the first game’s medievel theme, was much more futuristic, and I felt much more fitting with the technology.

You played hero Ace, who has to rescue his girlfriend Kimberley from the evil commander Borf. Borf has a secret weapon, the Infanto Ray, which he uses to zap Ace back to his childhood form, hampering his mission.

Cue much timed jumping between floating platforms, dodging laser blasts and flying spacecraft through obstacles on a journey to save Kimberley and the earth from the evil blue alien (which was also voiced by Don Bluth). Seeing the game through to the end rewarded the player with a feeling of real accomplishment, that they had mastered the machine and seen all the great animation had to offer.

Although badly replicated on a number of platforms as a graphics only based game with no video footage, it has been translated to DVD/CD-ROM and now Blu-Ray, allowing it to be played at home in an approximation of it’s former glory. For traditionalists it is also possible to emulate on a PC if you have a copy of the original laserdisc files and an emulator (see Daphne).

Many retro gamers will remember the Amiga and the Super Nintendo versions, neither of which managed to capture the spirit of the original.

Space Ace – Video Game Marmite?

This is not a game for everyone, and many will state it was a passing fad and rightly so – the format was not long lived. You could claim it’s not even a proper video game, as you are never really in control of your character, you are just learning a pre-defined path through a video. But for me this was a great arcade experience, a blockbuster summer movie that you could actually interact with, and whilst the technology now might seem clunky, and the gameplay limited, it was a experience that no-one who played it could forget.

Arcade Games

Gyruss arcade retro review

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I found this game on holiday in Spain, around the same time that I discovered another Konami classic, Track & Field. This was in the early 80’s, a time when games arcades were massively popular and new games were launched seemingly on a weekly basis.

Gyruss arcade flyer
Gyruss arcade game flyer
Gyruss was a memorable arcade shooter for 2 main reasons, the first being the Tempest-like 3D perspective, where your ship travelled in a circle around the screen, with aliens emerging from the centre and flying out towards you. The aliens also fired various missiles as you spun around the edge of the screen, which was slightly disorientating as you looped left to right and top to bottom. Clearing each section advanced you closer to the next “planet”, flying through the solar system.

The other memorable feature for me was the fantastic music, a version of Bachs Toccata and Fugue that perfectly matched the pace of the action on screen. I would play for the music alone, which seemed to blast out of the speakers on all the cabs I played this on.

Gyruss arcade game screenshot
Gyruss arcade game screenshot

Between stages there were bonus sections, which Galaga-style allowed you to rack up points for clearing all enemies on a specific flight path. If you managed to shoot the mother ship you would pick up a “double fire” bonus that helped you clear the bonus screen more easily. This was a great risk reward mechanism, as the mother ship was well armed and defended by wingmen, and you had to work for it.

Simple in format but a great score chaser, you could play this all day and not get bored.

Apparently this was released on the NES – And here is a great review by Nintendo Legend. Gyruss was also released on the Atari 2600, which could only be a disappointment after the brilliance of the arcade original. The game even made it onto XBOX Live arcade, remastered in HD.

Arcade Games

Amidar arcade game retro review

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Apart from Amidar, in what other arcade game can you play the part of a paint roller being chased my evil pigs? None other that’s what. Just Amidar.

In 1981 Stern/Konami launched this arcade game onto a public that was recovering from Pac-Man, launched in the previous year, and Amidar featured many similarities.

Amidar Arcade Game screenshot

In the first level of Amidar you play the a plucky Gorilla who must collect coconuts dotted around random shaped tiles, whilst avoiding the tribesmen patrolling the maze. Eat all of the coconuts around a tile and the tile is coloured in. Colour in the corner tiles and (pacman style) you become invulnerable for a while. As an added defence mechanism, if you are trapped by a tribesman you can use one of three “jumps” to make him bounce over you.

On the next levels it gets more weird, with you playing a paint roller who must evade murderous porkers whilst colouring in adjacent squares. Try to stray too far from your last coloured square and the paint runs out and you have to go back. This makes these even numbered levels a lot more tricky, with careful planning required to complete the stage.

If that is not weird enough for you, in between levels there is a bonus stage which requires you to send a pig down one of a number of pathways, a bit like those kids puzzles in pizza restaurants, in order to pick up the bonus bananas and 5000 points. Why bananas? Surely this would be a bonus for a Gorilla, not a pig?

On both levels the enemy behaviour is pretty predictable, with no “homing” in on the player, except for one character who will start to chase you after a certain time period has passed. On later levels the number of enemies increases, and the time taken for the enemy to home in on you reduces, as well as the grids becoming more complex to navigate.

As well as the classic arcade version, there were home ports for the Atari 2600, and various conversions under a variety of names for the home consoles, my favourite being Crazy Tracer for the BBC Micro – Acornsoft also did versions of Pac Man, Mr Do, Galaxians, and were quite good at this.

Amidar feels like a classic, it has everything an old school arcade game should have: black background, lives and scores at the top, credits at the bottom, catchy tune and simple but colourful graphics and addictive, score chasing gameplay. Not a game that everyone raves about but in my opionion they should.

Arcade Games

Gorf Arcade retro cabinet review

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Gorf arcade machine
Gorf arcade with bezel

“I’LL GET YOU SPACE CADET!”

My first introduction to this classic arcade shooter was on a school trip in 1981. As we piled out of the coach and into the service station on the M1, I could hear a robotic voice calling from the arcade….

The voice was the alien from the Gorf cabinet, mocking the player to put in another 10p and attempt to defeat the GORF empire.

Like Phoenix before it, GORF game was a shooter made up of 5 distinct levels, some “borrowed” from existing shooters such as Galaxians and Space Invader. In addition to the robotic voice, GORF had other novel features such as the ability to buy up to seven lives depending on how many coins were deposited at the start of the game. Another feature was the ability to cancel your current shot (you only got one at a time) by pressing fire again so you could make the most of the limited number of missiles.

final screen in gorf arcade
Final screen in Gorf

But the stand-out feature for me was the synthetic voice, which mocked the player depending on their rank, as well as a backlit panel beside the screen which showed your current level – more like a pinball machine than a shooter. Not helpful for reuse of the cabinet, which was a priority for early arcade owners, so not repeated elsewhere on other games as far as I am aware.

GORF itself was relatively easy to complete, but quite unfair with some very dodgy collision detection seeing bullets which missed you by a mile destroying your ship.  For this reason I suspect GORF was not as popular as it could have been, as it became a major frustration the more you played the game.

Home conversions were released on Atari and Colecovision consoles, but interestingly they omitted the Galaxians level, most likely for copyright reasons.  GORF was also released for VIC20 and C64.

 

Arcade Games

Pengo Arcade Game by Sega – Retro review

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Pengo was an arcade game released by Sega in 1982. Kind of a cross between Pac Man and Space Panic, Pengo was a maze game with a twist. Rather than being constrained by the maze, you could use the blocks of the maze walls to flatten the chasing monsters. Your hero Pengo was pitted against the evil Sno-Bees in this game, strange blobby characters that would wobble around the maze in a hunt for Penguins.

Pengo ArcadeThe maze was made of ice blocks which could be pushed by Pengo, squashing any of the chasing Sno-Bees in the process, before smashing against the next ice block. The blocks would slide and collide in a very satisfying way, as you reformed the path of the maze on the fly.  This allowed for a large amount of strategy, as not only could you crush your enemies you could carve new routes through the game maze to avoid being caught.  The Sno-Bees could also destroy blocks by punching them, so you had to move fast to avoid being caught.

Crushing your enemies with ice blocks wasn’t the only way to defeat them however, you could also stun the sno-bees by pushing the outside walls of the maze, which would cause the wall to shake, and run over them whilst stunned. Some ice blocks contained diamonds, and bonuses were earned by lining up all the diamond blocks in a row.

Another similarity with Pac Man was the “between screen” show, which involved dancing penguins instead of ghosts. Early machines featured the popular synth tune “Popcorn”, which really got stuck in your head, but this was removed from later machines due to conflicts with the composer.

Pengo Home Conversions

The game made it onto some 80’s home computers including the classic Pengi clone for the BBC Micro, which was a reasonably faithful conversion. More recently, well in 1992, I found a cabinet entitled 3 Wonders, a multi-game which included a title called “Don’t Pull”. This was an updated version of Pengo, but with cute bunnies, that played almost identically to the arcade original.

A great game with some very good character animation, I spent a lot of money on this in my teens trying to get through all 16 rounds of the game.

Arcade Games

Time Crisis retro arcade review

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In the same way that Operation Wolf blew away the arcade competition with it’s 2D light gun game in 1987, Time Crisis did the same but in full 3D in 1996. Released after Virtua Cop, the first real 3D light gun game, Time Crisis featured vastly superior graphics, an engaging storyline and a killer feature – the ability to duck behind objects using a foot-pedal attached to the machine.

time crisis arcade game
Time Crisis Arcade Game
This is the defining feature of Time Crisis: the game retained the joy of firing a gun rather than moving a joystick, but the play mechanic was moved on from the “shoot before you get shot” to “use duck and cover tactics to shoot at the right time and avoid getting hit”. The enemy AI forces you to take cover in order for them to come out of their hiding places, and as the view is obscured while you are hiding, you come out blind, blasting for all you are worth at the on screen baddies.

Of course the game, due to the control mechanism, was on rails, but this seemed less of an issue when you had some control over the player in each scene. To ratchet up the tension, the time limited nature of each level forced the player to take chances in order to progress, with bonuses awarded in the form of extra time for killing certain enemies. You were also forced to hide in order to reload, rather than shooting off screen as per the light gun game standard.

The storyline was a standard “storm the castle, kill the bad guys at each level, defeat the boss and rescue the girl”, but it was well implemented, with game engine animated cut-scenes to give you a break from the frenetic action. There were also 2 modes, a standard Story mode, and a time attack mode, where every enemy in a level had to be defeated in a strict time limit.

Lucky Playstation owners were treated to an excellent port of the game in 1997, and various arcade sequels followed, with Playstation conversions keeping track. A ground breaking game that can still hold its own if you can find a cabinet.