The Closeout Warrior

Laserdiscs were very important. They showed us that a disc the size of a vinyl 33 1/3 record was still a viable medium for entertainment. It also paved the way for video games to be built with the very same technology. Instead of cartoony graphics that didn’t look a very realistic, suddenly you could see the most realistic graphics of all, real life!

Unfortunately, this meant that games that were built using this technology were usually pretty light on content. For every scene that the player saw, the developer had to set up and film the scene for the end user. When done well, the game could be pretty fun, though a bit short. Fast Draw Showdown managed to turn these weaknesses into a pretty fun little game.

The premise of this game (if there is a premise) is that you’re a gunslinger in the Old West, and you’re going to go up against a series of opponents in fast draw competitions. You have a gun in a holster attached to the arcade unit. When the light on the screen turns green, you have to out draw your opponent and shoot him before he shoots you. Your opponents range in skill, from the fumbling drunk old man to the crackshot preacher with a gun hidden in his Bible, and are frequently some degree of silly. Like the man who walks out of the Telegraph office, “Heh heh heh! I just wired your family, you’re dead!”

Eventually, if you manage to best all of the opponents you go up against Wes Flowers, pitchman for the game and ridiculously fast quick draw. When the light goes green, you have less than a second to react, draw your gun, and fire. You’re dead. He’s completely possible to beat if you either have phenomenal reflexes or time it like I used to. (He fires almost exactly 3 seconds after he touches his gun the first time, no kidding!).

Hitting my local arcade showed me that this game has been recently rereleased for some reason. It still stands as one of my all time favorite arcade games, even if you can see a car driving along one of the back roads in the Old West.

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.