Tag Archives: Arcade

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.

Projects

MAME cabinet project resurrected

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In the late 90’s I got hooked on MAME, having found it to be a great way of playing old arcade titles that were no longer available in the flesh. Like many people who start out playing using a PC and keyboard, I soon longed for the feel of a real arcade cabinet. I wanted to play standing up, using a real arcade joystick and buttons to control the play.

So in 2003 my MAME cabinet project was born. After reading John St. Claire’s excellent guide, “Project Arcade”, I used the plans in the book to create my own MAME cabinet.

MAME Cabinet

After buying all of the components online and on ebay, I set about building a test rig to make see if I could get the joysticks and buttons communicating with the PC. Unfortunately the test rig was so much fun I ended up just using this to play MAME, which delayed construction of the cabinet! When I finally got around to building the cabinet, we had our second baby, and the project was put on hold.

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Fast forward to 2011 and 3 kids later, and I’m looking at dusting off the cabinet shell and resurrecting the build. Its in fairly good state, I have all of the components and even a donor PC. The original SONY TV that I had in mind for a monitor has been ditched for a spare LCD screen I have knocking about, which has the added bonus of being switchable from vertical format to horizontal format. This means I will not be restricted to playing one format of game, or playing in a postage stamp area of a larger screen.

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So I am hoping this is the first in a series of updates as I complete the MAME cabinet, and that after an 8 year hiatus I will finally get to playing my favourite arcade games on a real machine.

BBC Micro

Snapper retro game review for the BBC Micro

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Acornsoft’s Classic PacMan Clone

Snapper was one of the many quality arcade conversions that Acornsoft created for the BBC Micro, being a very faithful example of Pac Man. Anyone who remembers the early 80’s will have experience of Pac Man clones on every platform, many of them pitifully poor (yes Atari 2600 I’m talking about you).

Snapper BBC Micro
Snapper on the BBC Micro, or is it Pac Man?
Most consoles or home computers of the time did not have the graphical capability, and just couldn’t to replicate the complex maze structure. So the results were often a compromised mess that whilst playable, did not give you that “arcade at home” feel that gamers at the time craved.

Arcade Clones on the BBC Micro

This is where the BBC Micro shone due to its graphical capability being much closer to dedicated arcade boards of the time. Strange in that the BBC was an experiment in education, to teach IT in schools, and not designed as a games device. And yet the rendition of Pac Man was so faithful in Snapper that Namco took offence, and later versions of the game replaced Pac Man with a sort of grapefruit, and the ghosts with generic monsters.

Snapper's revised graphics in later versionsAll other aspects of the arcade game are retained in Snapper, including the power pills and bonus items (with the Acorn bonus item a nod to BBC owners), and even the ghosts eyes escaping back to the central area after being eaten.

Rather than the ghosts in the BBC version having set patterns, they patrol their own corners of the maze, before breaking out to home in on the Pac Man. As the game progresses the ghosts become more aggressive, breaking out of the pattern earlier to chase you.

Snapper was a great PacMan conversion due to the graphical capability of the Beeb and a world away from the famously rubbish attempt on the Atari 2600.

Snapper gameplay on the BBC Micro

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.