The Tower of Retro-Babble: Williams

"Who's the baddest mofo on the arcade floor?"
"Who makes the games that are (almost) never a bore?" 
"Williams!"
"You're daaaamn right."

Originally known for its pinball, Williams made a smooth slide into the video game industry with its 1980 debut, Defender. Defender is the kind of arcade game that immediately comes to mind when you think "arcade games"... obnoxiously loud and colorful, with big explosions, ruthless enemies, and a control panel that's maybe a little too complicated for the player's own good. 

Eugene Jarvis makes a sneaky
cameo appearance as a delivery 
guy in an episode of NewsRadio,
where Dave Foley's character
is addicted to "Stargate
Defender." Who calls it
Stargate Defender?

Games by the Vid Kidz team (consisting of Larry DeMar and Eugene Jarvis) made up the bulk of the Williams arcade library, and would make frequent appearances in classic game collections by Digital Eclipse, starting with the 16-bit era of home consoles and continuing up to 2011's Midway Arcade Origins. Williams' Arcade's Greatest Hits was a godsend for Saturn-owning arcade nuts who were deprived of Namco's library and didn't yet have easy access to emulation on PCs.

There's a reason these games keep showing up in collections... they're really good! Robotron: 2084 would pioneer the dual stick shooter still popular today, Joust is a grand time for two players, with a sweet science-fiction fantasy aesthetic, and nothing builds tension like the construction of the all-consuming Sinistar. 

There are a few "what were they thinking?" moments in the early Williams library, like the good clean not-so-fun of Bubbles and the bold misfire that was Robotron's first-person sequel, Blaster. However, for the most part, Williams arcade games are among the greatest ever made. If there is an arcade on Mount Olympus to amuse the gods, you bet your sweet ambrosia Robotron: 2084, Defender, and Sinistar would be in there.

If Nichibutsu's games about
transforming robots were
morphin-omenal, Jaleco's
Aeroroboto is closer to
morphine-omenal.

 

Williams also dabbled in the localization of Japanese titles, with games like Toaplan's Truxton and Jaleco's Aeroboto. The last arcade game by Williams as an independent brand was NARC. It wasn't a fantastic game, feeling nearly as over-encumbered as Xenophobe, but the digitized graphics and copious violence found its share of fans, and would lead to bigger, better, and bloodier things under the Midway banner.

Blaster
Seen in: A Grand Rapids mall arcade
(I don't know if I actually played this, or ran out of quarters and just stared at the attract mode for five minutes)

Weird swerve, Williams. Robotron: 2084 is a dual stick shooter seen from an overhead view, but its canonical sequel Blaster takes things into the third dimension for what feels like a caveman ancestor to After Burner. As you flee Earth in an escape ship with the last surviving human family, you're accosted by bigger and even blockier GRUNTS from the previous game. Manage to escape orbit and you'll then have to fight through meteors, swarms of flying cats, vampire ships (yes, space ships can apparently be vampires), and anything else the design team could pull out of their (ahem) hats at the last minute. There's no unified artistic vision here; just "let's put a lot of crap on the screen for the player to shoot."

Blaster is a boldly experimental game, you've gotta give it that. Arcade games didn't often attempt a first-person viewpoint in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, playing Blaster makes you realize why such games did not flourish in pre-Mode 7, pre-Super Scaler 1983. It looks rough; generally a whole lot of flashing squares and somewhat convincingly animated sprites, with the occasional starfield to suggest depth. It's harsh, but psychedelic, like a drug trip David Bowie once had while watching the Disney movie Tron.

Blaster looks rough, attempting a
first-person viewpoint but mostly
just throwing a lot of squares and
rectangles at the player. There was
a planned Atari computer version
which pares down the graphics, but
not by that much!

Blaster is an adequate shooter that gets a lot of brownie points for its innovative first person gameplay. Sadly, it never feels like it finds an identity beyond its 3D graphics, and there's no year beyond 1983 where graphics like these were anywhere close to acceptable in an arcade game. If you squint, you can see the DNA of Space Harrier in Blaster, but the game is attempting tomorrow's ideas on yesterday's technology, and the two rarely pair well.

Bubbles
Played: A Chuck E. Cheese in Grand Rapids

It would be easy to take one glance at Bubbles and conclude that it's based on Scrubbing Bubbles, a bathroom cleaner from the 1980s with a memorable animated ad campaign. Bubbles with brushes for feet skate across sinks and tubs to clean stubborn stains, leaving them as clean as they were the day you bought your house.

A scrubbing bubble, or
"scrubble," if you prefer.

Bubbles is not officially associated with the bathroom cleaner by S.C. Johnson (a family company!), but you'd have a hard time telling while playing this. Bubbles is basically the Scrubbing Bubbles commercial, in video game form. As a slippery, soapy sphere, you'll need to clear a sink of clutter, while dodging razor blades and the dreaded cockroach. Steal a broom from a tiny cleaning lady (maybe she's the Tydee Bowl man's wife?) and you can use it to slay a single roach for extra points. 

This might pair well with Rug Rats
if you're the Felix Unger type.

The more filth your bubble scrubs away, the larger it becomes. Once it's big enough to have freckles and a derpy grin (what, me worry?), it can hit the drain to escape the stage. Be warned! There's a time limit, and eventually your bubble will be flushed down the drain whether it's large enough to survive the trip or not. 

It's a functional game design, but you won't last long in Bubbles' later stages, where there's just barely enough crumbs, ants, and grime to bring your bubble to adulthood. Most likely, you'll have to build your bubble up to drain-proof size over the span of two lives, making Bubbles a battle of attrition you're destined to lose. It's amusing, briefly, but at the same time you don't wonder why Bubbles was trimmed from the Super NES and Genesis versions of Arcade's Greatest Hits. Really, you 16-bit holdouts aren't missing a thing.

Defender
Played at: A bowling alley near Portland

Defender was the toughest game you could find in a 1980 arcade, the Dark Souls of its era. Players were given a joystick, along with an unholy number of buttons for control. Instead of pressing left and right to move in those directions as one would expect, the player had to maneuver their ship with taps of thrust and reverse. It takes a lot of practice just to learn to play Defender because of the complicated controls, and mastering the game is an almost Herculean feat. Git gud? You'll have to git exceptional to roll the score on this one.

Swarmers! Always with the accursed
swarmers!

Defender has you darting across the surface of a distant planet, which is so massive you'll need a second radar screen to see it all at once. Humanoids dot the surface of the planet, and green Landers hope to kidnap them. Any Lander that succeeds in taking a humanoid off-screen merges with it to become a more hostile Mutant. If all your humanoids die, the game doesn't end, but it might as well be game over for you! The planet explodes, and all Landers become Mutants, leaving you hopelessly overwhelmed. 

In case I haven't belabored the point enough, Defender is tough. It's tough to get a handle on the senselessly complicated controls. It's tough to first blast an escaping Lander, then catch the humanoid it was carrying without turning them both into pixel soup. It's tough to resist the temptation to hit the smart bomb when you're faced with a flock of swarmers, and it's extremely tough to survive when the planet has been annihilated and you're surrounded by a dozen of the game's worst enemies.

Despite all that hardship, it's also tough to stop playing. Defender has the raw look of a VidKidz game, with pulsing colors and massive, messy explosions, and your ship's laser blasts look terrific, stretching across the screen as long neon trails. You'll stumble over the controls, and you'll swear when a humanoid slips through your grasp and plummets to its death, but you'll keep coming back. I can do better next time, really! I've almost got the hang of it!

Joust
Played: Among other places, a convenience store just outside of town

Arcade games are good. Arcade games that let two players play together are even better, and Joust is the best of them all. It was the king of two player gaming in the 1980s, until Street Fighter II came along a decade later to knock it off its throne.

And what will two players do when they play Joust? As the name suggests, they joust with their enemies... in space, on a flying ostrich. Hey, it's a video game! It doesn't have to make any sense! Players mash the flap button to fly, then collide with evil knights astride green buzzards. The highest knight in a collision wins, with the other either dying outright or turning into a harmless egg. Defeat all the rival knights (and clean up any of their eggs, because they will hatch) and you're whisked off to a new, more dangerous stage.

The lava troll exacts a heavy toll
on anyone who approaches his
domain. Mm, buzzard barbecue!

Joust is fun and frantic. Keeping an ostrich airborne is exactly as hard as it sounds, with the player hammering flap to maintain altitude, and the gameplay subtly changes from stage to stage, with survival waves challenging you to stay alive for a hefty point bonus, and egg waves that force the player to grab a dozen eggs scattered across the playfield before they hatch into new opponents. You can unite with the second player to defeat the buzzard army, or challenge them to impromptu jousting matches... entertaining, if counterproductive.

Past all that, Joust is a brilliant work of art. The warbirds are all smoothly animated and meticulously detailed, with artist John Newcomer using the book Animals in Motion to make the player's ostrich especially lifelike. (The second player rides a stork, and you can tell the difference between the two birds at a glance, a testament to the game's incredible graphics.) Lava pits on either side of the stage bubble ominously, with the hand of a lava troll bursting out of the magma to drag any nearby warbirds to a fiery doom. Take too long to complete a stage and a shrieking pterodactyl arrives to punish you for loitering. Lose a life and your next one rises out of a spawn pad, flashing a rainbow of colors as it waits for you to take command.

Joust is just cool, in a way only video games can be cool. It's cool the way Strider Hiryu, a high-tech ninja armed a light saber/police baton and a robot sabertooth tiger, is cool... confident, creative, and way over the top in its presentation. Fans of Balloon Fight will argue all day long that their game plays better, but Balloon Fight feels like Joust with all the edges filed off. In that grand Nintendo tradition, it's harmless, friendly, neutral... and neu-tered, compared to Joust.

Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest
Played: In a Lansing movie theater

This is not the greatest two-player game in the world, and it's a lousy tribute. Joust 2 steps up the quality of the original's already fantastic graphics, but the gameplay is buried under an avalanche of discordant ideas, like so many toppings dumped onto a scoop of Cold Stone ice cream. Really, can I have some ice cream to go with my mountain of gummi bears and Oreo crumbles? No wonder Cold Stone hasn't been a "thing" for at least a decade now.

You'll often feel them when playing
this game. The low-down, no-damn-
place-to-go, smashed-into-a-tin-can
blues.

And that's the problem with Joust 2... too much noise, not enough signal. There are new play mechanics galore, even when they don't add to the experience and don't even make sense. Players can swap their steed from an ostrich to a pegasus and back, but the winged horse weighs a half ton, and pega-sucks at anything other than being a bulky target for buzzards. Hatched eggs now become knights with a fatal lance, and red buzzards apparently made out of a cereal box deposit crystals which hatch into pesky bats. Oh, oh! And if any enemy eggs fall into lava, they re-emerge as mutants, larger and deadlier than the already aggressive garden variety buzzard. Gee, another nuisance designed to chew through my credits! Thanks, you shouldn't have.

And on and on it goes with the new ideas, with the design team blissfully unaware that the new vertically oriented monitor doesn't have the space to contain half of them. It makes Joust 2 a claustrophobic, quarter-sucking experience, doubly so with a second player. You may recall that two player gameplay was a vital component in the first Joust... in its sequel, player two is just another hazard in a congested screen. Even if you did convince a friend to join you, they'd just share your disappointment.

Joust 2 was never ported to any home game consoles, at least not before emulation. Perhaps there wasn't much interest in the license. Perhaps Williams just preferred to pretend it never existed. 

NARC
Played: A Lansing arcade

Williams' last game before it merged with Midway, NARC is a blood-smeared sneak preview of Midway's approach to game design throughout the 1990s. As one of two police officers decked out in riot gear, it's your job to clean the slums of drugs, while painting the streets with the blood of dealers. While you can follow police procedure and just arrest them, it's a lot more reliable (and satisfying!) to gun 'em down with your firearm, or launch a rocket into a crowd of addicts and fill the screen with a shower of severed limbs. Say "hi" to William S. Sessions for me when you meet him in HELL! Haw haw haw HAW!!!

NARC's Judge Dredd approach to winning the drug war felt out of step with the games Williams had released in the early 1980s... yet would be right at home among the games it released under the Midway banner. NARC uses the same style of digitized graphics (and even some of the same actors!) as Midway's smash hit Mortal Kombat, and it's every bit as gratuitously violent as either that game or Smash TV. 

I'm pretty sure this guy was also Kano
and Crun-Chi from Mortal Kombat.

Granted, NARC isn't as good as either of those games, or most of Williams' older ones. The thick crowds of exploding drug dealers leave the game feeling cheap and messy, and when you peel away the controversial content, you won't find much actual game underneath. Walk from left to right, pick up baggies of coke, blast a thousand suspects into dog chow because arresting them almost never works, wonder why the hell you need a duck button, get stabbed with a bunch of syringes you couldn't reasonably avoid or even see, and dump in a couple more coins to keep the blood flowing. Also, there's occasionally a sports car you can ride around in, squishing addicts until it gets blown up. That's it. That's the whole game. Where depth is concerned, it makes Rampage look like Nobunaga's Ambition.

He didn't say "no."

Acclaim had high hopes for NARC as a franchise, hiring Rare to make an NES version (with everything that made NARC entertaining stripped away...) and even including Max Force and Mr. Big in the cast of the Power Team, a segment of the Video Power television series. The Power Team was a low-rent Captain N, with the insufferable Johnny Arcade and a bunch of Acclaim-licensed characters riding around in Bigfoot, the monster truck. They had Quirk the Chilled Tomato as a sidekick. He rapped once, with all the funky flow of Ben Stein at his most boring.

From left to right: Tyrone from Arch-
Rivals, Max Force from NARC, Fabio
from Wizards and Warriors, and
Quirk the Obnoxious Orange Chilled
Tomato.

As you might expect, Max Force was less violent in the Power Team cartoon. (Now he has a grappling gun, wink wink!) After meeting Quirk, I imagine he'd consider going back home for his rocket launcher, broadcast standards and practices be damned. Tomato bisque, anyone? 

Robotron: 2084
Played: A bowling alley not far from Portland. The Michigan one, not the important one

Legend has it that Robotron: 2084 was created by Eugene Jarvis after he broke his hand in a car accident. He couldn't manage a handful of fire buttons, but he could play test a game using two joysticks. Little did Jarvis realize, he stumbled into one of the most intuitive and enduring control schemes in the history of video games.

Dual sticks have become standard equipment for video games in the 21st century, letting the player move with one stick while adjusting their view of the environment with the right. With Robotron and other twin stick shooters, one stick moves your character, while the other aims and fires. It's a brilliant design, because no matter where you're going, you can always defend yourself from any angle, at any moment.

Things start getting hairy when the
Brain Robotrons come out to play.

Shooting that versatile could make the average game easy, but Robotron: 2084 isn't easy. The screen is absolutely choked with robots at the start of each wave... mostly mindless GRUNT soldiers, but also Indestructible Hulk robots (in green, heh heh), cunning brain robots, and Spheroids that cower in the corners while pumping out an endless supply of bullet-spitting Enforcers. Hidden in the chaos are the members of the last surviving human family... catch them before the robots do and you'll get up to 5000 points for each rescue.

Robotron is a very flashy game, with tons of onscreen activity and a kaleidoscope of strobing colors. It's also a very mechanically sound game... its various enemy types and their behaviors make it feel like you're playing chess in real time. With lasers. And robots. And a damn good attract mode, explaining the gameplay while throwing in enough exciting science-fiction buzzwords to tickle the neurons of young nerds like myself. You tend to notice references to genetic engineering when you watched The Secret of NIMH the week before.

Sinistar
Played: In a bus stop (train stop?) right next to Elevator Action

Here's Williams' answer to the free-roaming space shooter, just in time to nick some quarters from Namco's Bosconian and distract players from Konami's forthcoming Time Pilot. And it's a nice effort... not quite up to the standards of Williams hall of famers Robotron, Defender, and Joust, but unforgettable all the same.

Your mission is to use a laser to strip minerals from stray chunks of space rock, then process the ore into Sinibombs. Don't worry about collisions... just bury your ship's nose deep into a meteor, and fire away until it's dust! While you're mining for Sinibombs, worker drones will be using the same ore to build their master, the ferocious Sinistar! Once he's complete, this metallic monster will chase you to the ends of the galaxy, sucking you into his fang-filled mouth if you get too close. Give him a taste of Sinibombs instead... that'll curb his appetite! Nail Sinistar with thirteen Sinibombs and he's finished... at least until the worker drones build another one.

They put this guy front and center
in the advertising, and for good
reason. He looks like Hordak from
She-Ra tried to turn into a UFO
and got stuck that way. 
(image from Strategy Wiki)

Sinistar is a pretty good game with one of history's all-time best video game villains. When he awakens, Sinistar will let you know with growling voice synthesis. (At minimum, you will be startled by the news... at worst, you'll need new underpants.) If you're not already headed in the opposite direction when Sinistar is brought to life, he'll quickly swoop in to turn you into a Sini-snack. The deck is perhaps stacked too high in Sinistar's favor, but the sense of doom that washes over you when you realize you're a couple bombs short of victory and he just woke up is one hell of an experience, and one you won't find anywhere else.

Stargate 
Played at: An arcade tent at the Potato Festival in central MI
(yes, I said "potato festival." I don't know, they just think they're neat.)

Making a follow-up to an arcade hit is risky business. Maybe you'll get a classic like Ms. Pac-Man, or maybe it'll miss what made the original so compelling and wind up like Donkey Kong Jr., or maybe it'll be a cynical rehash that mistakes annoyance for challenge. (Looking at you, Exciting New Pac-Man Plus.)

Even more things to blast!
And be blasted BY!

Stargate takes the Millipede approach, with the same core gameplay but a whole lot of new elements sprinkled into the mix. Ship-cloaking "inviso" has been added to your auxiliary weapons, alongside the smart bombs and hyperspace from the first game. A stargate in the center of the map takes you directly to the humanoid most in need of your help. Classic enemies like the Lander, Swarmer, and Baiter have been joined by Fireballs, Phred and the Munchies, and Yllabian Space Guppies, thin ships that are infuriatingly good at slipping between your laser blasts. 

If you couldn't learn to play Defender, forget about Stargate... it will crush you flat. However, fans of the original might enjoy the added nuance this sort-of sequel provides. One highlight is the ability to hold multiple humanoids, which not only awards more points but lets the player jump ahead several waves... you just need to know the trick. Players love hidden Easter Eggs like this, and Stargate was one of the first arcade games to offer them.

The Tower of Retro-Babble: Midway

(image from Arcade Shop)

 
Hey, it's Bally-Midway! You know, the creators of Pac-Man.

(angry whispering) 

They're... not the creators of Pac-Man? Who is?

(more whispering)

Namco? Where does it say that on the machine?

...Er, anyway. Bally-Midway took all the credit for Namco's work in the United States, to the point where it made its own unauthorized sequels to Pac-Man and wove elements of Galaxian into its own Whitman's Sampler of a shooter, GORF. Eventually, Namco lost its patience with Midway's chronic misappropriation of their characters, and paired up with Atari to distribute its arcade games in the latter half of the 1980s.

The credits for Top Secret illustrates
just how possessive Midway was
of a game that wasn't even theirs.
(Like how Paramount made it nearly
impossible to get this screen cap.)

 

In all fairness, Midway is more than just the games they tried to filch from Namco! It's also the home of artist Brian Colin, who brought the feel of Sunday comics and MAD magazine to the digital world with games like Rampage and Xenophobe. It's also the early stomping grounds of Dave Nutting and his esteemed associates, Jamie Fenton, Bob Ogden, and Alan McNeil.

By the end of the 1980s, Bally would divest itself of Midway, and the company would eventually merge with rivals Williams and Atari Games to become... Midway again. Then it would go bankrupt, with Warner Bros sweeping up the pieces to form Warner Games.

Enough with the history lesson... onto the games! The output of Bally was familiar but competent in the early 1980s, with GORF, Wizard of Wor, and Tron being highlights. However, Midway got an in-house artist, and got a lot more creative and experimental with their game designs in the latter half of the decade. Not all of these daring new ideas stuck the landing- for all its innovation, Xenophobe is an uncomfortable game to actually play- but the occasional smash hit like Rampage proved that experimentation was the right direction for Midway.

Note that these aren't all the games released by Midway. A complete list would probably take a while to review!

Blueprint
Played: in MAME, but saw in a convenience store near Lansing

So about this game! A long, long time ago, I did a video review comparing Blueprint's various home conversions, but I erroneously stated that the game was born in Japan, by Jaleco. Not so! Jaleco distributed it in Japan, but the reality is that the game was designed by Ashby Computers, a little software business in England that would grow up to become... wait for it... Rare.

There's no better way to kill a rogue raisin than
a Rube Goldberg device that shoots basketballs
with all the precision of Shaq at the throw line.
Don't look for sense in this game, you won't
find it.

I was right about it being a weird game, though. As JJ, a man better dressed for Vaudeville than a video game, it's up to you to save your girlfriend from Ollie Ogre, drawn as a cartoon thug on the marquee but looking a lot more like a rampaging prune in the game. JJ can't go toe to toe with the ogre... raisin... thug... creature, so he does the next best thing, stealing parts from various houses to build the world's least efficient mech. This unwieldy contraption fires basketballs from the top of its funnel-shaped arm... nail Ollie with a ball and you're off to a new, rougher neighborhood.

Rare was going somewhere with this design, but it's a little too process-oriented and memorization-dependent for Blueprint to be an arcade classic. Bug-eyed monsters (this is a Rare game, after all) pop out from a hole, hoping to unravel your work, and potted plants rain down from the top of the screen, honing in on you with infuriating accuracy. Return to a house you've already visited and you'll find a bomb inside... quickly chuck it in the monster hole or you'll be blown to bits, with a taunting message from the designers to throw salt in the wound.

There's a lot of balls to juggle in Blueprint, and it's easy to lose track of which houses you've robbed in the chaos, resulting in wasted time and lost lives. It's surprisingly complicated and user-hostile for an arcade game, making it a hard sell next to more intuitive mazers like Pac-Man. Maybe Blueprint was more popular in its native Great Britain, where punishing, over-encumbered titles like this grew like weeds on the ZX Spectrum.

GORF
Played at: Cedar Park in Sandusky, Ohio. Booyah!

I quite distinctly remember playing this at Cedar Park. I also remember playing Space Panic, and not understanding or enjoying it. I was seven, cut me some slack!

Where was I? Oh yes, GORF. This game is a sampler plate of shooters you've already played before, or are a lot like games you've already played before. It's derivative to the point where you wonder why Namco or Taito didn't sue, but it's got something neither Galaxian nor Space Invaders had... menace. The Gorfian consciousness addresses you with rough synthesized voice, and he's rarely complimentary. Your shield crackles with volatile energy, and scorching explosions singe your ears as you pick off each Space Invader, or its almost legally distinct Gorfian counterpart. Playing this game feels like licking a 9-Volt battery... it's a prickly yet energizing electricity.

The arcade game had a lit panel on the
cabinet, with your rank highlighted.
It's not strictly necessary, but it's
a nice touch.

The five mini-games on offer are better than the average shooter of the time, with the flagship offering a memorable end to each loop. Dodge its fireballs, crack a hole through its shield, and sink a bullet into its nuclear heart to witness the best explosion you were likely to see in a 1981 video game. The gameplay is fine, but it's the raw, electric atmosphere of GORF that takes the experience over the top. When you clutch that flight stick tightly, as if it's the only thing between you and the vacuum of space, you'll get it. 

Journey
Played at: A bowling alley in Lake Odessa. Check out those swans!

Before Spice Girls... before Revolution X with Aerosmith... before Moonwalker with Michael Jackson... there was Journey. Here's an early example of a game whose sole reason for existence was to bank on the popularity of a trendy music act. This time, it's the 1982 line-up of the pop rock band Journey. And you can tell it's really them, because their digitized faces have been stapled onto cartoon bodies!

You can kind of tell it's them. Steve Smith looks more like Cheech Marin than anything, but it's early video game digitization. There's not even any color in these low-res photos... everyone looks like a grey smudge with five 'o clock shadows.

Go get 'em, Cheech!
I mean, Steve!

Where was I? The contrived plot has our five musicians trying to regain their instruments from crazed alien group-oids. (The designers didn't take this seriously. Who could?) Simple platforming challenges, like squeezing through rows of neon gates and bouncing on giant drums, stand between each member of Journey and his instrument of choice. Once the band member grabs it, he can fire bullets with the power of radio-friendly soft rock... which is handy, because everything on screen is now eager to kill him. Quick, back to the Scarab!

Journey looks a lot like Tron, with the glowing circuitry replaced with a science-fiction theme loosely based on the band's album covers. It's not as good as Tron, feeling like a clumsy re-badge of a better idea, and that's pretty much what it was. Ralph Baer, the inventor of video games, also pioneered video game digitization, which Midway would use a decade later in Mortal Kombat. The original plan was to let players take snapshots of themselves (any part of themselves...) in place of initials for the high score screen. Since people were already using "ASS" for their initials, you can understand why Baer ultimately went with Journey as his Plan B. (Maybe it should have been his Plan Z! Maybe it was!)

Omega Race
Played: on the VIC-20, primarily

This was Midway's one and only vector based arcade game, designed to shake quarters out of Asteroids fans with a game that feels a little sleeker and a lot more threatening. You're not fighting mindless rocks in this combat simulation, but a caravan of circular droids. One droid takes a leadership role, while the rest follow behind it. Eventually, another member of the flock gains sentience (and rage), becoming increasingly aggressive and trigger-happy. Soon after that, it evolves to its deadliest form... a triangular paddleboat. (Look, they're vector graphics... don't expect ornate detail here.) This Delta Queen is merciless and mean, spraying gunfire everywhere while making a beeline for your ship. A death ship will be spawned at least once in every stage, and it's always a Maalox moment for the player. 

This isn't one of those floaty, "leave one end of the screen, come out the other end" kinds of space shooters like the relatively placid Asteroids. Omega Race exists on a rectangular track with the score and lives in the middle. Try to move outside the borders of the screen and you'll be bounced back by elastic lines. The ship in Omega Race also handles differently than the one in Asteroids... it's lighter, faster, wispier. A good tap of thrust fires your ship outward like an arrow, so you'll have to practice thrusting to take advantage of your ship's speed, while not careening into the droids or any of their droppings. What are these, vec-turds?

Always clean up after your combat droids!

Omega Race was given an exceptional conversion on the VIC-20 home computer, which captured the vector look of the arcade game perfectly along with the Omega Race logo and the storyline, explained in text during the attract mode. The less satisfactory ColecoVision port contains... none of these things, and it badly whiffs the Omega Race physics that the VIC-20 game nailed. Calling this Omega Race feels like calling store brand toaster pastries Pop-Tarts, but you can play it if you want. (I wouldn't. Just sayin'.)

Rabbit Punch
Played: In a Lansing dollar store 

Rabbit Punch was the debut of Japan's Video System, and an odd choice for localization from Nolan Bushnell's Bally-Sente. It feels out of place next to the likes of Snake Pit and Trivial Pursuit and Hat Trick, but bless Nolan and crew for taking a chance on it anyway.

Rabbit Punch is a horizontal shooter that's unmistakably Japanese, but feels very unique from similar games by Capcom, Konami, and Data East. There's a distinct vibe to Rabbit Punch... the visual style is at once metallic, cartoony, and grotesque. One minute you're gathering power-ups from cans of carrots, the next you're flying past Peter Weller in the middle of brain surgery, and the minute after that, you're battling a pride of robot cheetahs. This game goes places. Strange, slightly worrying places that makes you almost afraid to go down this rabbit hole, but you'll want to keep digging just to see what freaky Twilight Zone-meets-Ghibli imagery Video System will throw at you next.

This game is all over the place stylistically.
It's like that cartoon, Gumball.

The gameplay in Rabbit Punch ain't too shabby, either. Kind of punishing despite the cute rabbit heroes and the use of a hit point system, and feeling uncomfortably cramped at points, but not bad. The headlining feature is the titular rabbit punch... get close enough to an enemy and you'll smack it with an oversized fist, doing incredible damage and knocking it backward if it's not already been turned to space dust. Packs of homing missiles can be collected from carrot cans, which spread out to reach those pesky cannons tucked behind walls. 

Rabbit Punch holds together pretty well for Video System's first release, and suggests that the company has a bright future ahead of it as a designer of competent shoot 'em ups. (And that one really bad volleyball game, but the less said about that, the better.)

Rampage
Played at: A bowling alley near Stanton (no swans here! Or bowling alley, now!)

Okay, I'm told the bowling alley near Stanton is now an empty field. Nothin' but flowers. I miss the Dairy Queens and 7-11s. (Never really cared for the Honkey-Tonks, though.)

So I guess this will double as a memorial for the Double 6, or whatever it was called before it got bulldozed. The Double 6 was a bowling alley not far from our house, that was in better condition than many. They must have renovated it for the 1980s, because it's where our family would spend some quality time when we didn't want to drive all the way to Grand Ledge-sing for mini-golf, and neither the NES nor the Disney Afternoon were cutting it for fun.

It was the first bowling alley I went to with computers taking the place of manual scoring, and monitors that played those cheesy cut scenes from the stone age of CGI whenever you got a strike. It was also a fantastic source of arcade games, with a regularly refreshed variety of cabinets. One year, you might find Data East's Shoot-Out (with a "not for play outside Japan" warning before the title screen), and the next, it could be Shinobi.

Don't eat that toilet bowl!
Or do... you're going to have
to throw another quarter into
the machine soon enough anyway.

 

One year, it was Rampage. And Rampage was glorious, a three player celebration of cheesy monster movies from the 1950s. The game was in high resolution, with every pixel of that densely-packed screen used to its fullest by Brian Colin, Midway's in-house artist. At points, the game looks like a MAD magazine page come to life, with your movie monster sneering in disgust after swallowing a toilet, losing his balance atop a skyscraper, or being shrunk down to a normal (and very naked) human after you've run out of health.

As for the gameplay, you break things. You break everything. You demolish buildings by punching through every window, you punch manhole covers, throwing them high into the air, you punch trolley cars that let out a disapproving "ding!" with every hit, you punch neon signs that electrocute you. You'll even punch your friends because damn it, Matt, I wanted that turkey! Come on, you've got a lot more health than I do!

Few games are as jam-packed with personality as Rampage, and it's an absolutely terrific game for three players. However, after punching a dozen cities into rubble, you've seen as much of this game as you need to see. You definitely don't need to see all 255 stages in the heavily watered-down NES conversion. Don't make the same mistake I did!

Satan's Hollow
Played at: A laundromat in Coldwater

Years before Mortal Kombat, Midway got the nipples of parents groups in a twist with Satan's Hollow. Past the use of Lucifer and his minions as enemies, and some slightly foreboding backgrounds (on a scale of 0 to Heironymus Bosch, they rank a generous 3), there's nothing scandalous about this fixed-screen shooter. Take Galaxian and Phoenix, smoosh 'em together, then give the player some extra busywork by letting him build a bridge to a second screen, and that's your game. Also, as expected from the title, there's Satan himself. He belches streams of fire down upon the player... better be quick with that shield button!

Satan's fire vomit is deadly.
(Sounds like a hot sauce
I had once.)

Satan's Hollow doesn't compare to the timeless cosmic ballet that is Galaga (anyone wanna switch seats?), but it's a workable shooter when taken on its own terms. A generous shield protects you from the thick swarms of gargoyles and their hail of brimstone, and cannons can be added to your ship by killing a lesser demon lurking on the second screen, but there's not much else going on in the gameplay department. Well, there is that occasional aggravating demon who will try to swipe a life from your stock... it feels cheap, and if you get it back, there's no benefit to your current ship, like in Galaga. You just prevent the flocks of demons from destroying your ship before you even get a chance to use it. Dirty pool, Midway. Annoy the parents groups all you want, but now you're getting on my nerves, and I'm the one playing this!

Apropos of nothing in particular, there's a recent port of Satan's Hollow for the ColecoVision, that performs remarkably well in spite of the significant hardware gap between Coleco's console and the MCR-II that powers the coin-op. Here's a link to the game in action, courtesy of the always jubilant Willie from ArcadeUSA.

Space Zap 
Played at: A bowling alley in Vestaburg

It's more of a reflex test than a video game, but Space Zap will keep you busy for the five minutes you'll want to play it. You control the defense cannon of a station set deep in space. Enemies arrive to rain fireballs down upon the station, and they're easy enough to dispatch at first... just point the cannon in one of four directions and blast away. However, just as you're lulled into a false sense of security, the attack intensifies, with ships appearing, firing, and vanishing in the blink of an eye. Then a satellite joins the fray, madly swirling around the station until you catch it with a laser blast... or it crashes into the station, causing a messy pixelated explosion. Sure, it looks like someone made it with the spray tool in Microsoft Paint, but cut the designers a little slack! This is a game from 1980, after all!

Space Zap isn't much for looks. There's not much of anything here, really, but it's an example of how to make an effective game with as little game as possible. It's a short thrill, but a thrill's a thrill.

Tapper
Played at: Uh...?

At the peak of early video game mania, even bars and taverns wanted a piece of the action, asking Midway to make an arcade game about serving beer so they could put it in an establishment serving beer, to encourage people to drink more beer. Maybe even BUDWEISER beer!

So Midway gave us Tapper, starring a bartender who serves mugs of beer the only way a video game character could... rapid-fire, to a thick crowd of rowdy customers. If a customer reaches you before they get their beer, you lose a life. If you serve a beer and there's no customer to catch it, the mug shatters, and you lose a life. If you're lucky, a customer may leave a tip, which you can grab from the counter... if you have a spare moment, and you rarely will. Such is the life of a video game bartender... you're five times faster than a real bartender, but also under five times the stress.

So, a cowboy, a punk rocker, and a football fan
walk into a bar...

Tapper isn't a deep game. You're racing up and down, slinging suds across four counters to wet the whistles of your throng of customers. Tips trigger a sideshow that catches the attention of your beer-swilling clientele, giving you a chance to catch your breath. However, it's more efficient to leave the tips on the table and just get your customers out the door. A distracted customer can't catch any mugs you send their way, and it's all too easy to throw them one by mistake.

Every two stages, you're given a shell game played with shaken up cans of beer, and a new set of customers, ranging from sports fans to aliens. (All life forms are united in their love of alcohol, apparently.) Tapper is presented in a high resolution with detailed cartoon graphics, and it's a big part of the game's charm. Things just feel more lively when your character cowers in fear of an unseen boss after a beer mug shatters, or when he's dragged over a table and thrown out the front door by an unsatisfied customer.

A later iPhone remake leaned hard on those cartoon hijinx, with artwork supplied by animation legend Don Bluth. Tapper also got a sequel of sorts in Timber, with two players chopping down trees as lumberjacks. It doesn't get the acclaim that Tapper does, due in part to the video game crash but also because deforestation doesn't have the same addictive quality as serving (or drinking!) beer. You could tip trees on your brother to irritate him... there's that. That's always a plus.

Trog
Played: MAME, but seen in a Battle Creek Meijer

Midway had a good thing going with Pac-Man, but after one too many creative liberties with the license, Namco took its munchy yellow ball and stormed home. Suddenly, Midway was without its star player, and found itself in dire need of a replacement. What to do, what to do?

Midway's solution was to take the core gameplay of Pac-Man and infuse it with stop-motion graphics and the hip, playful attitude of the early 1990s. The end result is Trog. While it's not the classic Pac-Man was (and feels out of step with the gaming trends of 1991), it's a fairly diverting mazer with more than its share of goofy Western charm. If you've ever done the Bartman, you'll want to play Trog.

I bet this guy would get along really
well with Toejam and/or Earl.

Trog casts you as one of four dinosaur buddies- or all four buddies at once if you've got three friends!- gobbling eggs while avoiding the game's pot-bellied Cyclopean cavemen. Trogs can be batted away with punches, but your tiny dinosaur arms demand exact precision, and if two Trogs corner you, you're dead meat no matter how ferociously you fight back.

Occasionally, power-ups will randomly appear in the island maze, with a lucky horseshoe granting you temporary invulnerability and an ice cube that freezes the cavemen in place. The grand prize is the pineapple, which bulks out your mild-mannered dino, letting you chomp all the nearby Trogs as a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Munching blue ghosts in Pac-Man was satisfying, but it's doubly so in Trog, with your T-Rex taking big, bass-filled bites that shake the screen. Yeah! Who's on the top of the food chain NOW?

The pineapple is your golden ticket
to T-Rex-ville. Population: All you
can eat!

It's a little sluggish and random compared to Pac-Man, but Trog's laid back pace is more accommodating to casual players, and the double-helping of animation makes it worth the quarter for arcade veterans. When Trogs eat you, they literally eat you, pulling out a fork and chewing thoughtfully as they strip the meat from your Claymation bones. Step in a tar pit and your dino struggles briefly, only to wave "bye-bye" as he gets pulled into the muck. Finish a stage and a super-sized version of your dinosaur buddy pumps his fists in triumph. It's fun enough to play, but Trog is a delight to watch. 

Tron
Played at: Among other places, a Tucson laundromat

Like GORF and Journey, Tron is a variety pack of games, this time loosely based on scenes from the Disney film that sparked the imaginations of millions of budding nerds. Defend yourself against patrolling tanks! Fight through swarms of bugs guarding the stage exit! Infiltrate the Master Control Program by chipping through its firewalls with your trusty data frisbee! Trap your opponents in walls of light, set in the wake of the Syd Mead-iest motorcycle in virtual existence!

Plick through the rainbow
walls of the Master
Control Program, one
of four mini-games in
Tron.

As games go, Tron is better than average... a little awkward thanks to its use of a flight stick for movement and a dial for aiming, but perfectly playable. However, as merchandise for the film, it's spectacular. Few film-licensed video games capture the spirit of the movie as well as the Tron arcade game. Onscreen objects pulse with energy, Wendy Carlos' electronica soundtrack is paired with angry hums, unnerving thumps, and violent digital outbursts, and the tension is kept high with tough opponents and tight time limits. When you play Tron, you too will feel like you're trapped in a computer, and you too will feel like death is always three steps behind you. The Dude does not envy you. He was trapped in a computer once, and it was a pretty bad scene.

Here's a game that
knows its audience!

Tron was followed up with Discs of Tron, which captured the feel of the disc duels near the start of the film. Perspective is used to brilliant effect, to both distance the two players and strengthen the feel of being trapped in a digital world... stark, barren, and most of all, dangerous. Watch your step on those silvery platforms... it's a long way down into oblivion!

Wizard of Wor 
Played at: A roller rink in Crystal

Even in the early days, there was a vibe to Midway's arcade games. They were meaner, colder, and more threatening than the kind of game you'd get from a Japanese company, like Namco or Nintendo. 

That may have something to do with the Astrocade-based hardware Midway used in the early 1980s, with its harsh blues, reds, yellows, and statics (yes, static is a color now. Ask the Astrocade!) set against a black void. More likely, that sense of desperation came from the creatives at Midway, who wanted to impart that hopeless mood into their software. There's no question you're going to die when you play an early Midway game. The question is, how long can you stay alive under the mounting pressure?

And that's Wizard of Wor. You're trapped in the Wizard's dungeon, crawling with all kinds of hideous monsters. Bipedal wolf-kangaroos! Six-legged hogs with antennae! Something that looks like a scrunched-up T-rex! And a humanoid wasp, who flits through the maze looking for Worriors to sting. You can fight back with a laser rifle, but something, somewhere is going to kill you. The worst part is, because monsters disappear if they're not in your field of view, you may not even see it coming.

In Wizard of Wor, you're hunter and hunted all
at once. Check the radar... the monsters
like to hide in the corners!

That fear of the unknown causes tension. Tension that forces you to frequently check the radar for monsters you can't see in the maze. Tension that only grows when the monsters get faster, and the other player decides you're an easy 2000 points, and the robotic voice of the Wizard taunts you, and holy shit he's in the maze right now get him get him get him annnnnd he just got away. Finally nailing the Wizard is pure satisfaction... even the game can't seem to believe you did it, strobing colors and letting out quivering digital moans as if it was on the verge of a meltdown.

Wizard of Wor is an awesome game with awesome concepts, that unfortunately doesn't remain awesome when the Burwors, Garwors, Starwors, and Worwors get too fast to manage. You will definitely die. But you'll have fun fighting for survival, in those early stages where survival was possible.

The Tower of Retro-Babble: Nichibutsu

Soar, Mighty Orbots! And take off in
an extremely exciting action sequence!

Back in 1985, giant robots were all the rage. Voltron! Robotech! Transformers! Mighty Orbots! As an eleven year old boy who fixated on pop culture with the intensity of a laser beam, I loved 'em all... and even tolerated Go-Bots, if nothing else was on.

You could find giant robots (and even better, giant robots that combine into even giant-er robots!) everywhere on television, but when it came to video games, especially just after the crash, there was just one place to get your fix...

Nichibutsu! Also known as Nihon Bussan,
and currently festering inside the stomach
of Hamster. Funny... in nature, it's typically
the other way around...

Nihon Bussan had two early arcade hits with Crazy Climber and Moon Cresta, but took a hard swerve into contemporary Japanese pop culture under the creative leadership of Shigeki Fujiwara. Nichibutsu games were often inspired by Japanese action shows, in the same way a high schooler's cheesy fan art was "inspired" by Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon. 

"Space Sheriff Sharivan? No, our game is called Cosmo Police GALivan! UFO Robo Grendizer? No no, our game is UFO Robo Dangar! It's an easy mistake we hope players will make, so we can make money from those hot television shows without actually paying for their licenses."

Eleven year old me didn't give a damn about Nichibutsu's dangerous dance with Japanese copyright laws. He just wanted cool-looking ships that combine into bigger, more powerful ships, and Nichibutsu was the first company to consistently bring that experience into the arcade space. The only thing better than giant robots that combine is combining giant robots with video games.

Formation Armed F
Played: in MAME

Every classic shoot 'em up has a black sheep in its family. For Gradius, it's Xexex; for R-Type, it's R-Type Leo; and for Terra Cresta, it's Formation Armed F. Designed by artist and future Ghibli employee Takanori Tanaka, Formation Armed F makes visuals its highest priority. Admittedly, the artwork is better than what you'll find in the average Nichibutsu game... each stage is memorably themed, from the creepy, crawly Insect Stage littered with brightly colored exoskeletons, to the giant carcasses of the Bone Stage, with moldy lumps of flesh still clinging to the remains. It doesn't have the impact of R-Type's chrome-plated Gigerian nightmares, but the backgrounds are impressively detailed for 1988.

Armed and middling.

Does it play as well as a true Terra Cresta game, though? Not really. The vertical aspect ratio doesn't pair well with those pretty foreground objects, leaving the action feeling congested. And while there's a formation button (it is in the name after all... twice if you count the F!), there's no fleet of ships to re-arrange... instead, it shifts the position of your two escort ships, the "armers." Armers can block shots, and when extended, can actually poke through the foreground, letting you blast enemies behind it. Power-ups change the size and angle of your shots, but that's as deep and strategic as Formation Armed F gets.

Crazy Climber 2
Played: in MAME

Crazy Climber gets a 16-bit glow up in this Japanese sequel, one of many Crazy Climber sequels that never reached these shores. (There's at least two on the Playstation alone, not including Nichibutsu Arcade Classics.) Looking at this particular game with its subdued earth tones and parallax scrolling makes you think this is how Crazy Climber might have looked on the Sega Genesis.

"Playfully sleazy" is the prevailing mood
throughout Crazy Climber 2.

Whether you're down with the new look or not, it's a massive improvement over the 1980 original. Nichibutsu has dedicated sprite artists now! GOOD artists! And hardware that can do that artwork justice! While it's a much prettier game than the original, the gameplay is roughly the same, with the player rhythmically shifting two joysticks to mimic climbing with two hands. Some of the stage gimmicks are the same, like the giant gorilla and escape helicopter, while others are new, like the racy billboard that kicks you off the building if you're careless. However, they all have a naughty urban edge that fits the New York setting and the attitude of the late 1980s.

In short, Crazy Climber 2 is a fitting if not exceptional follow-up to an arcade classic. It may not be the best version of Crazy Climber, but you could chalk that up to sheer volume. 

Dangar UFO Robo
Played: In some woodsy convenience store, somewhere in Michigan

Dang is right! A year after Terra Cresta, Nichibutsu took the next logical step with its follow-up. Now, instead of five ships that turn into a phoenix, you're playing as three ships that transform into a robot! A robot that shoots its own fists at the bad guys! And the robot can turn into a flying saucer! Okay, that is ten thousand percent awesome. Where can I buy the toy?

Second verse, same as the first!

As for the game, well, it's more Terra Cresta. There are differences, mostly in the trajectory of your shots... Dangar concentrates his firepower directly ahead of him, while Terra Cresta's Wing Galibur spreads its bullets across the screen in its most powerful forms. There are also gateways to pocket dimensions, leading to some creepy background scenery and a boss that makes Mandora from Terra Cresta look like a six-armed wuss.

The biggest problem with Dangar UFO Robo is that it's too much like Terra Cresta, without the novelty that game enjoyed in 1985. It's still good in all the ways Terra Cresta was good, but the experience is no longer fresh. It's Terra Cresta leftovers.

Moon Cresta
Played: in MAME

"You can get a lot of fun and thrill" from Moon Cresta, alleges Nichibutsu. Funny, I just noticed a lot of frustration and annoyance. This is your boilerplate fixed screen shooter, with several features that seem like they could add to the experience, but only add to the player's mounting aggravation. Take the lives system (please). You're given three separate ships, which can be stacked on top of each other for a boost of firepower. However, when a ship is destroyed, you're not getting it back... and the wider two ships have the combined annoyance of a larger hit box and gaps between the lasers you could drive a Space Winnebago through.

Hard to believe this fathered
the exceptional Terra Cresta.
I demand a paternity test!

By the time you're down to your third, absolutely enormous ship, you'll be easy pickins for the Cold Eyes and "atomic piles" that effortlessly dodge your shots, then swerve into your space barge with their constant infernal looping. Yeah, something's an atomic pile here, and it ain't those missiles near the end of the game. Moon Cresta was followed up with Moon Quasar, as minimal an upgrade to the original as one could make without simply writing the new title over the marquee with a Sharpie. Your first ship fires faster (making the other two ships even more useless by comparison) and you can refuel with a mothership which looks like it has a goiter problem. This doesn't add a thing to the game, and is certainly not an improvement I would have suggested.

Moon Shuttle
Played: in MAME

Turn Moon Cresta sideways, then add some asteroid belts, and you've got Moon Shuttle, one of Nichibutsu's earliest (and if we can be honest here, most creatively barren) releases. The first half of the game has you blasting a field of lazily drifting meteors, squeezing through the gaps you've made with your laser, and the second half is spent blasting enemies with swirling patterns that should be familiar to anyone who's already played Moon Cresta.

Laser erosion is a slow and steady process...

There's nothing overly offensive about the gameplay of Moon Shuttle... it just feels like a "been there, done that" kind of shooter, at a time when players had access to the superlative Galaga, and Sega's own strong entry into the fixed shooter genre, Astro Blaster. Who needs Moon Shuttle when those games are just a few cabinets away? Hell, who needs Moon Cresta when you've got Galaga or Astro Blaster nearby?

Ninja Emaki 
Played: on that Namco Museum cabinet

Ninja Emaki takes the top-down, Japanese-flavored run 'n gun action of Sega's Ninja Princess, and cranks it up about a hundred decibels. Your hero lays down intense crossbow fire from the moment the action begins... just hold down the fire button and you'll unleash a stream of bolts in whatever direction you're facing. However, pick up a scroll and you'll gain access to eight new weapons, from tornadoes to spinning shuriken to waves of water. These super weapons don't last long, so charge deep into enemy territory while you've got them... and grab that new scroll the moment it appears!

A Dragonball cloud! It's
the only way to fly in
ancient Japan!

This is one of those games that takes you by surprise while you're poking through MAME for random entertainment. It's not just that Ninja Emaki is obscure... it's also pretty darned good. How did this miss the NES? How did this miss me the last time I was in an arcade? The gameplay's both intense and varied, with your ninja fighting on land, air, and sea, the graphics shine with iridescent colors, and the music captures that feudal Japanese feel while adding an appealing digital edge. Honestly, I don't care what Ninja Emaki is or where it came from... just give me more of it! (Change the DIP switch settings from five continues to ninety-nine, and you can have as much Ninja Emaki as you want. Look Nichibutsu, I'll tell YOU when I'm done playing this.)

Terra Cresta
Played at: The Malt Shop in Mount Pleasant

Xevious was a huge hit in Japan, and one of the first vertical shooters. Given its pedigree and the fact that it was designed by Namco at the peak of its game-making powers, you'd think I'd like the game more than I do. It's fine, but I just don't get all that excited about shattering flocks of dinner plates and dropping bombs on chrome-plated pyramids.

Double your pleasure! And
QUINTUPLE your pleasure,
if you last long enough to
get all the ships.

Now Terra Cresta, on the other hand, that speaks to me. At first blush, it's very similar to Xevious, but the differences become clear when your teeny little space ship docks with a slightly larger one, boosting its firepower. Wait, my ship is a Transformer?! And there are more ships to find? How many space ships can I tack onto my Winger? Four? And I can split them apart with a touch of a button? And if I can get all four ships at once, they briefly transform into a flaming phoenix that destroys everything it touches? And you can blow up dinosaurs? 

Look... it's 1985, I'm eleven, and I never miss an episode of Voltron, even the crappy ones with the vehicles. I was already onboard with Terra Cresta the moment you told me there were playable Transformers. Blowing up dinosaurs is just gravy. (I'm also cool with bubble-blowing dinosaurs, because I'm flexible like that.)

Terra Cresta is a fine game on a fundamental level... it doesn't do anything worse than Xevious, although the enemies who delight in reversing course and flying straight up your butthole get annoying in a hurry. (Oh, there's that Moon Cresta DNA.) However, it's the combining ships play mechanic that puts this game way over the top. Terra Cresta has a more rewarding and versatile weapon system than most other mid-80s shooters... a fully assembled Wing Galibur is death on two wings, in contrast to the piddling firepower in Tecmo's Star Force.

And! And! Terra Cresta lets you play as a Transformer. In case you've forgotten.

Rug Rats
Played at: The Castle Pizzaria in Lakeview

Not to be confused with the brats from the Nickelodeon cartoon, Rug Rats is a cartoon carpet caper starring you as a vacuum cleaner, and animated dust bunnies as the villains. It's a lot like Dig Dug, with the dirt replaced by a dirty kitchen floor. There are hapless hairballs that mindlessly wander back and forth, like Pookas, and more aggressive dirt devils that try to harpoon you with a spring-loaded spear. Like the fire-breathing Fygars, you'll want to take them by surprise, first stunning them with a blast of air before sweeping them up. If you're feeling saucy, use the carpets that serve as Rug Rats' rocks. Walk over them and they'll roll up, squishing any Baddons, Bilbolas, and Bigimbas they roll over.

The crown is the tasty thing in the middle
of this maze game, temporarily freezing
all onscreen enemies.

Rug Rats isn't just Dig Dug with a housekeeping theme, though! Well, it's MOSTLY that, with day-glo colors and the most aggressively irritating opening theme this side of Make Trax. Would somebody take Hell's squeaky toy away from Fido, please? There are also three valuables hidden in the debris... suck 'em up and a crown appears. Grab that and all onscreen clutter monsters are frozen in place, vulnerable to your touch. (You may have already gathered that this game isn't a wellspring of fresh new ideas.)

There's two other things worth mentioning about Rug Rats. First, it was designed by Jordan, as was most of Nichibutsu's work prior to the company's totally justifiable obsession with giant robots. Jordan spent the latter half of the 1980s making muddy military shooters for Seta, including Caliber .50, Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe's Brother, and my guilty pleasure Meta Fox, the white trashiest shooter ever made in Japan. Listen to that boss music and tell me I'm wrong!

Second, this is one of the games I actually played in an arcade... specifically, the Castle Pizzaria in central Michigan. Back in the 1980s, the economy of small towns was healthy enough that you could build a pizza restaurant that resembles a British castle, line the walls with arcade games, and keep that business going for several years. These days, the building is now owned by Main Street Pizza, a provincial restaurant chain. Admittedly, the pizza is pretty good (it had better be when there's literally nothing else to do in the restaurant...), but I miss the Castle Pizzaria's joyously tacky hometown ambiance.