The Closeout Warrior

Crime Fighters is nothing more than a street fight. A several levels long street fight, but a street fight nonetheless. You and your team of identical brothers (save for differing pants color) must go along and beat up a bunch of generic thugs until they’re dead.

It’s a touch violent.

You have at your disposal the ability to punch and kick your enemies until they fall down and then kick them some more. Occasionally your character will be kicked in a very tender area, with the appropriate ringing sound, or smacked around by one of the weapons that the thugs decide to bring to the party: lead pipes, switchblades, and pistols. You can punch the Bad Guys and they’ll drop the toys for you to use, although when you get punched and drop whatever you’ve picked up it disappears as soon as it hits the ground.

Each stage ends with an disproportionately deadly boss character who will bash you repeatedly, often resulting in the death of several of your quarters. You then go to the next stage for some more carnage.

The game is pretty fun, hardcore cartoony violence aside, until the very end. At the end of the game you get to fight all the boss characters from all the stages again, all at the same time. That stage hurts. A lot. If you plan on playing the game, I’d suggest bringing lots of quarters. That or a posse.

When I think back to the dawn of mainstream video games, I can’t help but think that they were largely terrible, and then I’m amazed that the industry wasn’t killed off before it was really born. I’m especially dumbfounded at some of the games that achieve ‘classic’ status merely by being old.

Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh. I could be looking back at some of these games with my Curmudgeon Goggles, since I didn’t really like some of these games when they were new. A perfect example is Space Invaders.

Space Invaders features you in a ship protecting the planet (presumably Earth) from throngs of invaders, ostensibly from Space. The invaders are in tight formation and will move slowly in one direction until one of the ships on the edge hits the side of the screen, then the entire formation will drop down slightly and go the other way. This continues until: all the alien ships are destroyed, the alien ships touch down, or you run out of ships. If you destroy all of their ships, they reappear faster and deadlier. If they manage to touch down, they kill us all. If you run out of spare ships, the aliens will touch down and kill us all.

There are four weird little shield-things that will soak up some shots from either you or the aliens, and UFOs occasionally scoot by that you can try to shoot for bonus points, but I just couldn’t get into it. Even when it was relatively new, I couldn’t get into it, and I typically skip right over it when it’s included in some classic game compilation or other.

Dig Dug has a problem, he has to clear the monsters out of the ground by any means necessary. The means that he has available to him are: smashing them with boulders, and using his air pump to inflate them until they explode, sounds pretty gory.

Dig Dug can dig (and, by extension, dug) through the ground either up, down, left, or right and needs to make his way toward the pockets of monsters, and to carve out traps to make use of the strategically-placed boulders. The only weapon he has, other than his fantastic cunning and smart white jumpsuit, is an air pump. He can send out a line, lodge it into a monster, start pumping away, and the monster will inflate and burst.

The monsters start out pretty stupid, but they quickly remember that they have the ability to travel through the dirt, where there are no paths, straight to Dig Dug, who is likely going to be immobilized because he’s busy inflating something or other. Then he dies.

I may be being a tad harsh on the game, it’s actually fun for a few levels, before the ridiculous amounts of enemies surround you before you can form a plan. But that may be just me.

Centipede is one of the old classic games that people hold in abject reverence. Everyone and their grandma has heard of Centipede, and they will likely tell you that it’s one of the best games of the 1980’s. I played it, and I didn’t really like it.

Centipede is a game about destroying centipedes in a garden of mushrooms. You play the part of some kind of thingus that can move around on the bottom portion of the screen and shoot toward the top. At the top of the screen are centipedes of various lengths and colors that work their way down the screen. They descend slightly when they either hit the edge of the screen or hit one of the mushrooms. Your goal is to shoot all the segments of the centipede and proceed to the next level. You have two problems: you shoot the head segment and it turns into a mushroom, making the centipede descend a level, and if you shoot the middle, the middle part turns into a mushroom, the centipede splits into two where you shot it, and both parts come down independent of each other.

Compounding this problem are the spiders that flit around on the bottom part of the screen at irregular intervals. They touch you, you = dead. Of course, you get more points the closer the spiders are to you when you shoot them, but their erratic movements make them particularly dangerous.

Later on, there are fleas that drop from the top of the screen, littering it with more mushrooms, which makes the centipede descend faster. And scorpions that poison mushrooms. A centipede that touches a poison mushroom will immediately head directly toward the bottom of the screen. What fun!

The game was designed to use a trackball, and is really the only way to play it, joysticks don’t really do the game justice. That’s assuming, of course, that you can actually want to play this game.