This week Oi ‘ave mostly been uploading work-in-progress videos to YouTube!
A picture shuffling game and the basics of a scrolling shoot ‘em up for the Atari 8-bit:
Previews of Edge Grinder (scrolling shoot ‘em up) and Blok Copy (puzzle game) with a prototype bitmap scrolling routine that uses a RAM expansion, all for the C64:
For the last week or thereabouts I’ve been playing a lot of a coin-op called Fire Hawk – it was released by Korean manufacturers ESD in 2001 and a little “research” on the internet reveals that it’s actually built on a hack of Psikyo’s code with the most popular guess as to where the “donation” came from being the Strikers series; the influence of those games is pretty obvious too, with the overall look being like an unrefined, low resolution version of Strikers 1945 III.
Each level has a cliche… erm, theme ranging from desert with armed pyramids to rainforest and passing through that mining town with a huge marshalling yard, a rusty industrial area and the semi-rural landscape that’d be quite nice if it wasn’t for the mega tanks and concealed guns along the way. It also has what I can best describe as a “twee village” that sticks out like a sore thumb since it’d belong in an entirely different game if there hadn’t been an absolutely massive jet “parked” by one of the buildings – the bizarre scale of the jet to it’s surroundings hints that whoever drew the backgrounds wasn’t told which scale was being used for everything else.
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why I got so hooked on the thing. It’s a relatively simple shooter and not exactly perfect either since there are some bugs in the mix and, whilst most of the issues are cosmetic things like bosses leaving large chunks of themselves behind after exploding, I reckon the variation in the amount of kicking a boss will take on the later levels is too erratic to be deliberate and the collisions seem to be a bit squiffy since I’ve seen medals floating under the body of my plane without a hit being registered.
But it could’ve been worse; there’s a hack of Fire Hawk (oh, the irony) by another Korean dev Yona Tech called Spectrum 2000 that manages to all but shatter things to the point where the difficulty was ramped up to “fecking quick” at the start, half a helicopter and two bits of tank track were still considered to be an active boss that was therefore still firing and, whilst credit feeding through it to see how badly damaged things actually were, it fell apart completely, leaving an invisible, non-firing and indestructible chunk of boss in play so the level wouldn’t end!
Actually, I suspect that I do know why Fire Hawk (and to a degree Spectrum 2000 although that was more a morbid fascination) managed to hook me, it’s the simplicity of the thing; after a little “complexity” whilst having to choose from five different planes with their own weapons and initial level order, it becomes a case of dodging like a madman, grabbing power-ups and medals as they go past and most important of all giving anything that gets in the way a serious kicking.
The A600HD getting a CF card has meant that I’ve spent a couple of days playing Amiga games… and there are loads of great shoot ‘em ups out there for the Amiga that I could be playing like Battle Squadron, Uridium 2 or Disposable Hero (and one or two like Xenon 2 that aren’t much cop as games but, bizarrely, still well-remembered amongst Amiga users) so, with a wide range of decent titles to play, finding myself hooked on an early blaster like Scorpio is a bit hard to explain…
Allow me to wallow in nostalgia for a bit (after all, it’s my blog and you’re not paying) because the first time I played Scorpio was probably around the end of 1988 when I got my first Amiga 500; it was second hand and came with some [ahem] less than legitimate floppies including Katakis and something that looked a bit like R-Type turned onto it’s side even to the point of replicating a few set pieces like the circle of guns.
I think the sheer cheekiness of Scorpio has some bearing on why I’ve played and enjoyed it over the years, it doesn’t avoid some of the larger “bear traps” of shoot ‘em up design since it drops the player back at the start of a very long stage when they buy the farm and the difficulty curve is, to paraphrase Richard Richard, “effing vertical” to the point where clearing the first level is reason to celebrate – but for such an early Amiga title (and one that doesn’t appear to just be Atari ST code shovelled over) it’s neatly executed and, as long as the player is a masochist, doesn’t get annoyed by the looped sample that passes for background music and likes memorising attack waves, is enjoyable to play as well – but it just has that whole “look at me, I’m a rip-off of R-Type but vertically scrolling so they can’t sue” attitude going on and it always raises a little smile, even when it’s repeatedly and mercilessly pummelling me into dust…
