It's no contest. (Also, Eye Brawls development journal)

For me, I mean. My latest game, Eye Brawls, was barred from the 2026 SMS Power contest, because it was submitted to SMS Power a day before it started. Or some horseshit. Funny how I'm always slightly too early to join these contests, as if the rules were enforced to specifically bar me from participation. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. 

"But feel free to join the contest next year!" Feel free to pick off the little granules of turd clinging to my butthole hair with your teeth. Putz.

...but anyway. Eye Brawls is out, it's available on Itch.IO, and it sure would be grand if someone gave the goddamned thing some love, because I sure poured a lot into it.

Digitrex Techstar's logo, which looks more
painful to step on than most video game logos.

"And what IS Eye Brawls?," you ask. Well, imaginary reader, it's like this. There was a video game way back in the 1980s, from a little-known Miami game developer called Digitrex Techstar. Its founder, and the man who made all its games, was Luis Sanchez, which gives you a pretty good idea of how small his operation really was. Games from Digitrex Techstar include Gorkans, Lizard Wizard, and the company's headliner, Eyes.

Eyes is best described as Pac-Man, with shooting. That's it, that's the game. As a tiny, confusingly drawn eyeball (I went for years thinking that flattened hat was a cluster of muscle around the eye, as if it had been ripped from someone's socket), you've got to blast a bunch of spastically pulsing objects while keeping one step ahead of the game's unnamed enemies. Some move faster than others, but they're all singularly focused on finding you, then zapping you with an optic blast. Similarly, the twisty maze of Pac-Man has been flattened out to a series of horizontal and vertical bars, resulting in a lot of long corridors and tense shoot outs with the roaming eyes. 

Get an eye-full of this! Heh, that's
the best I can do for a joke at the
moment. 

It's a dumber game than Pac-Man for sure. Enemy behavior never gets more complicated than "AFTER HIM!!!" in Eyes, while in Pac-Man, the monsters were sneaky, cornering you in the warp tunnel and making rare, unexpected 180 degree turns (not constant backtracking, like in Baby Pac-Man. A-hem, Dave Nutting and Associates) to play with your head. However, it's also a more intense and immediate game, with death literally coming at you from all sides. 

A classic? Maybe not, but a sleeper hit for sure. It's better than many Pac-Man clones, including Midway's own Exasperating Exciting New Pac-Man Plus, and it made big waves in Michigan, where Roogie Elliot achieved some small measure of fame by getting over 23 million points in one game. I met him briefly in Lake Odessa, or more accurately, stood next to him as he tried to bring back his magic touch. (Years of being behind the wheel of a long-haul truck left him a little rusty.)

Fast-forward to two years ago. Oscar Toledo Gutierrez, a Mexican IT expert better known to the world as Nanochess, released a BASIC compiler for the ColecoVision, and after getting familiar with the software, I went right to work on Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons, along with a ColecoVision port of Eyes. WESEB got finished, but the newly minted Eye Brawls got put on the shelf for a while.

The Eye Brawls cast, featuring one-eyed puns
for the four wandering eyes. Pops and Pete
are sluggish and have lousy reflexes, but Sandy
and especially Samson are more dangerous.

Fast-forward again to just about now. After frustration with the enemy logic in Pyrebirds, I stepped back from that cliff and attempted something less demanding. I went back to Eye Brawls, adding collision detection, sound, and an improved engine for the onscreen whatzits, now called whirligigs. There's a lot of optical puns, as you can see... the previously unnamed hero is now 20/20, and the four evil eyes are now named after Cyclopean celebrities like Peter Falk, Sandy Duncan, and Sammy Davis Jr. It's silly, bordering on crass, but it felt like it fit.

It took about two weeks of work to convert the Eye Brawls alpha into a full-fledged game, thanks to the power of CVBasic and me having no social life. There were frustrations, to be sure! Enemies absolutely insisted on cutting through the horizontal bars near the center of the screen, and it threatened my already thinning hairline and fractured sanity, held together with duct tape and hope. The solution was to force the eyes to move away from them with a command that superceded all the other ones. That was easily, without a shadow of a doubt, the toughest part of this project.

A tear swings from 20/20's eye-self when he's
hit with an optic blast, one of the additions
Eye Brawls makes to the arcade game. The
other ones you'll have to find for yourself!

In the end, I'd say the Eye Brawls project was a success, and a fitting tribute to a game that didn't get the kudos it deserved. (Boy, can I relate.) Because it's so easy to port a game to other formats with CVBasic, Eye Brawls is available for not only the ColecoVision, but the MSX and the SG-1000 as well. The SG-1000 port I'm regretting in light of recent events, but hey, I'll know better next time.