If you have a game that’s as successful as Q*bert, what do you do to keep the cash flowing in? Barring some kind of catastrophic market crash you make a sequel, of course.
So you take the blocks from the original game, separate them and make them rotatable, add a new character or two, and you have a new game.
The goal in this game is still to hop on cubes, though now there is a slight twist. When Q*bert hops off a cube, it rotates in the direction he hopped. Getting the cube to match the orientation on the top-left of the screen makes the cube turn black. Get a tic-tac-toe (four in a row in any direction) and you win! Then you go to the next stage where things move faster, the enemies are more plentiful, and the blocks get more difficult to orient correctly.
I was never able to actually play this game until recently, due to never being able to find it in my area. But it turns out to be so similar to the original game, that vets should feel right at home. Over 20 years after it came out and I was finally able to play it, I did reasonably well, but I don’t feel any great desire to play it again.
Though Q*Bert has starred in exactly 2 games (three if you count the unreleased prototype of his third game), he’s still very recognizable. Maybe it’s because he has a very memorable appearance: Orange ball with legs, eyes, and a big hose-like nose. Maybe it’s because his game came out at a time when video games were in their peak level of popularity in the early 1980’s. Or maybe his game was simple to learn and difficult to master, which made it accessible to nearly everyone.
Q*Bert lives in a world consisting of a series pyramids floating in empty space. His goals are: hop on the tops of the blocks of the pyramids, changing their color, collecting things that are green and, avoiding everything else.
Changing the color of the tops of the blocks starts out simple enough, a single hop changes them to the right color, but eventually it will require more hops to get to the right color, with the colors changing back if you hop on it after it has the correct color on it, forcing you to use your noodle a bit.
This video’s a little small, but was the best one I could find that had the voices
There are some enemies in this game, red balls that meander down the pyramid, purple balls that meander down the pyramid, but turn into a coily snakes that persue Q*Bert when they reach the bottom, purple pigs and gremlins (Ugg and Wrong-Way), and little green guys (Slick and Sam) that hop on the blocks and change them back to their original colors. All of the enemies are deadly to touch except for Slick and Sam. They’re green, so you can collect them. There’s also a green ball that you can collect to temporarily stop the action, it’s the only actual powerup you get.
One of my favorite things about the arcade version of this game is that it uses a rudimentary speech chip to produce voices. The voices sound really weird, and almost sound like reversed speech, but not quite. Q*Bert’s speech when he runs into an enemy character is expressed in a word balloon as, “@!#?@!”. Could the word be a veiled nod to a curse word that some players may express when they play the game, or is it just onomatopoeia for the weird alien-like language he speaks? My other favorite thing about the arcade version is that the machine was fitted with the knocker that’s in pinball machines, the one that typically goes off when you win a free game. This knocker would go off when you would fall off the pyramid, simulating the sound of Q*Bert smashing unceremoniously into the bottom of the cabinet. Cheesy, but a nice touch.
Q*Bert is one of those games that I forget about for a few years, and then go back to test my skill (which was never particularly great, unfortunately). I’m pleased to say that it holds up after over 20 years.
You see games with titles like Super Buster Bros. and you may think to yourself, “Was there ever a game called Buster Bros.? The answer in this case is ‘yes‘, but I haven’t actually played that one. It’s just as well, the two games are almost identical.
Buster Bros.
Super Buster Bros is pretty simple, you travel around the world, busting bubbles with your harpoon gun as you go along. Big bubbles burst into two smaller bubbles, and those bubbles burst into two smaller bubbles, and so on until they become small enough to burst completely. If the bubbles touch you, it’s game over, and it’s much easier to dodge a few big bubbles bouncing around than a bunch of smaller ones. Of course, popping the big bubbles also yields powerups, so you have to decide if you want to try and avoid the smaller bubbles in exchange for the ability to shoot them faster.
I’ve never been able to play this game to the end, I usually run out of steam or money at about the halfway point. Perhaps one day I’ll see the game to the end. It just won’t be today.
Breakout is boring. Even when I all I had was a second-hand Atari and no other games that the dog hadn’t eaten, Breakout bored me to tears. I’ve never quite understood that fascination with this game, or why it seems to spawn so many clones. In fact, this shaky, cockeyed video of the arcade version is the best one I could find.
See, in Breakout you control a paddle at the bottom of the screen. Your goal is to bounce a ball against the wall of bricks at the top of the screen. Hitting a brick will make it disappear, make them all disappear and you win. Your only method of control is sliding a paddle across the bottom of the screen, bouncing the ball back into play. Allow the ball to fall off the bottom of the screen 3 times, and you lose. Then you get to go play a better game.
If you take a Warrior, a Valkyrie, a Wizard, and an Elf, throw them into a series of dungeons packed to the rim with monsters, and throw in a heckling dungeon master, you’ll have Gauntlet.
Each of the four characters has a projectile attack, the Elf fires arrows, the Valkyrie throws axes, etc. Your goal is to get to the exit, to make it as far into the dungeon as you can. This is made slightly difficult because each room in the dungeon is packed tight with abominations, each one hungry for your delicious Hit Points. It would make sense, then, to stand in a corner and pick them off one by one until the way was clear and then rush feverishly to the exit, but there are two problems: the monsters constantly are spawned by ‘monster generators’ replenishing their supply almost as fast as you can mow them down, and your health constantly deteriorates. You can mitigate these problems by moving quickly and collecting food that’s scattered through the level. However, some of the food is destructible. Move too fast and you will inevitably destroy the hit points you were working your way toward (“Someone shot the food!“).
The game is a bit deeper than I’ve gone into here. You have to collect keys to open doors and chests, you can collect magic bomb-things to annihilate screen-fulls of creatures, and you have to deal with Death on more than one occasion. The only flaw with this game? It goes on forever. I would like to have seen some kind of ending to this game, but I would have to wait until Gauntlet 2 or the NES port of this game to get one.
I’m reasonably certain you’ve heard of Pac-Man, one of the most successful games of all time. What do you do when you see something that’s really popular (i.e. making buckets of money)? Easy, create a clone! A direct clone, of course, would be way too obvious, so you might consider doing the next best thing, make a game that is similar, yet legally distinct from, the original game. Paint Roller is one of that kind of game.
Okay, so Paint Roller is only tangentially similar to Pac-Man. They both take place in mazes and both have monsters. The difference is that in Pac-Man you cleared the screen of dots while in Paint Roller you take your paint roller and paint the floor of the maze. Of course just painting the floor is incredibly boring, so the monsters are there to ’spice things up’. Occasionally, one of them will escape the cage that it’s in and run around your freshly-painted floors, leaving footprints. You have to re-paint the printed-up areas before the stage is complete and you move on to the next one.
I’ll be honest. I had an old book about arcade games that I wore ragged while growing up. This was one of the games that the preview in the book made sound fantastic, I couldn’t wait to play it, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Many years later I was finally able to play it. Turns out that it’s slightly below average, and only worth playing once, if that.
Dateline Peoria – Three giant monsters are destroying the city. What will you do?
If you answered ‘Try and stop them’ then you’re very wrong. Rampage lets you take on the fantasy of just about every preteen (and some post-teen) person on the planet and assume the role of the monster and destroy the cities. You can choose between 3 giant monsters, George (a giant gorilla), Ralph (a giant werewolf), and Lizzie (a giant lizard [and the only girl]).
Each city is represented by a set of buildings that you must destroy to reach the next. You destroy buildings by punching them and jumping on them (standard giant monster moves). Do enough damage and the building falls to the ground in a rubble heap. Inside the building are power ups and power downs. You, for example, want to eat the roast chicken, but not so much the fire extinguisher. Keeping your health up is vital, as there are bullets coming from every direction all at once in an effort to stop the carnage. Bullets coming from helicopters (which you can punch) and soldiers (which you can eat).
This game is actually pretty fun, if you have the quarters and the patience to play all the way through it. You eventually smash your way through the entire USA. What do you do after you finish the USA? Why you go to other countries and eventually other worlds, but those are different entries for different days.
In some kind of nuclear bombed-out New York City, monsters and mutants armed with ‘high tech weaponry’ have taken over the decaying ruins, stifling all attempts at restoration. What’s the government to do? Why, find two ludicrously-muscled brawlers and pay them some fantastic fee to enter the city and clean it up.
Duh.
Crude and Buster, the two heroes, are so muscular that they can’t find shirts that fit. They constantly walk to the right and savagely beat anything that gets in their way. The hook is that they are able to pick up an unusually large amount of scenery to use as weaponry. Weaponry like building rubble, street signs, burned out cars (I told you they were quite muscled).
Each stage has a mid-boss halfway through it and a full boss at the end. These guys aren’t quite the fodder that you deal with through the stage, they have ridiculous reach, unusual stamina, and will kill you. Since your guys are so muscular, they aren’t very maneuverable. Since the mutants are so… mutated, they’re very maneuverable and very able to kill you.
Controls in this game were so bad that I couldn’t make it very far. After about 15 minutes and the equivalent of $5.00 in quarters, I was partway through stage 3. I decided that it was best to fight again another day… with another game.
Karnov is an icon of video game of the 1980s. He’s an unlikely hero in a world that doesn’t make any sense, out to save the day. You see, Karnov the guy is a chubby, bald-headed fellow that breathes fireballs, fireballs that sound like radio static. Hit him once, he turns blue, hit him twice he turns dead.
He has to travel a landscape that looks like some kind of burned out villa, fighting gargoyles, birds, suits of armor, and stone heads that look suspiciously like Abraham Lincoln. If Karnov merely had the fireballs, he’d be a force to be reckoned with. But, as it happens, he has a host of items available to help out. Things like bombs, gas masks, and ladders. A quirk about this game is the usage of these items. Your items that you’ve collected are at the bottom of the screen, and you press the ‘Select’ button to use the highlighted item. But you choose the item you’re going to use by pressing the left and right buttons on the d-pad. You can imagine that placing things like a ladder are exponentially more difficult when you’re moving around every time you try to choose the ladder to deploy.
I never was able to make it very far into this game, I just wasn’t willing to put in the required hours. But I do know that the game gets weirder. Thanks to a video that I have detailing secrets of many games, I know that there is a stage underwater where Karnov is wearing flippers and goggles, and a stage in the sky where he’s sporting wings. Karnov would go on to make ameos in other games, but those games will have to wait until another day.
I mentioned the other day that Chopper Command was a lot like Defender. How can this be? One is set on Earth and has you piloting a helicopter, and the other is set on an Earth-like planet and you are piloting a spaceship.
The main difference between the games is that instead of the enemy forces simply trying to destroy a convoy, these aliens are attempting to kidnap the people on the planet’s surface to turn them into ‘mutants’. Ideally, you’d want to destroy the ships before they have a chance to kidnap the folks on the surface. Failing that (and you will fail) the poor schmucks will get snapped up and transported to the top of the screen. If they make it, they’ll be lost, transformed into ‘mutants’ that you have to kill. It’s not all over if your guys get picked up. They’ll let out a noise when they get nabbed, and the ships fly pretty slowly toward the top of the screen, giving you a few seconds to rescue them. Of course, after you blow up the ship that’s got your buddies, you have to catch them and deposit them back on the surface, lest they splatter on the ground.
Kill all the aliens and a new wave appears, faster and more aggressive than before.
I found the game to be kind of dull, so I would let all of the people get kidnapped right away. Doing that would make all of the enemies you fight the ‘mutants’ and makes all of the buildings disappear (civilization falls, it seems). Though even that couldn’t hold my interest for long.
