The hell of Tiger Heli

Heli-No.
(image from Moby Games)

Okay, so I started a Toaplan retrospective and have yet to finish it. But I just had to share this phenomenally pissy review of Tiger Heli early, because it's reminding me of my wild days as the editor of The Gameroom Blitz. Also, Tiger Heli just plan sucks. What the hell, Toaplan? If you were going to make games like this, you might as well just go back to Orca and make Springer 2: Spring... Into Crap! 

Toaplan quickly course corrected, making some of the best shooters in the latter half of the 1980s, but good lord, what an inauspicious start to their career.

Yeah, Springer is awful too. It's like Donkey Kong, if Shigeru Miyamoto suffered a head injury while he made it. I mean, continually. 

TIGER HELI

Played: In a tiny hometown arcade, and also the NES

I’ll just put it on the table right now… this game sucks. It was the absolute last resort for bored gamers in my town’s short-lived arcade. When the line for the Choplifter machine went out the door (fair play, it was pretty awesome!) and the pinball machines weren’t doing it for you, your only option was… Tiger Heli. Miserable, life-draining Tiger Heli. The Bremmelo of the ball, the chain-smoking, three hundred pound date that you had to take to the prom, because you just weren’t getting anybody else. (Don’t ask where that metaphor came from.)

You don’t play Tiger Heli. You try to play Tiger Heli, and it actively fights you at every step. The enemies’ shots are much too fast to realistically avoid, hidden bonuses require a million shots to reveal, and the wimpy machine gun you’re given by default jams if you dare to use turbo fire. I’m sorry, I was attempting to save my fingers some grief and find some enjoyment in the game, but I forgot that enjoying yourself is literally punishable by death in Tiger Heli. Did I actually run out of bullets? You do know that this is a video game and I can have as many as I want, right? There’s not a shortage of pixel clusters that look like bullets.

There are power-ups in Tiger Heli. This is a 1985 game, so don’t expect to be blown away by them. In fact, don’t expect to blow anything up with the Mini Helis, revealed by collecting red and white crosses on the playfield. (Red Cross? I have a medical emergency… I have a severe fun deficiency in my blood. I blame Tiger Heli.) You’ll get them, they’ll stick around for a minute shooting tiny bullets either forward or sideways, they’ll get nicked by an oncoming bullet, they blow up, and you’re right back to your original weaksauce shot. Yaaaay.

The power-up mechanics feel a lot like Irem’s Image Fight or Jordan’s Thundercade, and neither game is one I’d regard as a high point in the genre. (No matter what the Japanese think. Sorry not sorry, but Image Fight blows!) This makes Tiger Heli the lead vampire in a family of shooters that suck. Not blood, the other thing. You get the idea.

Tiger Heli isn’t all bad. Mostly, but not entirely. The graphics have a palatable geometric look… they’re simple by Toaplan standards, but effective, particularly the diamonds that peek out of the ground and those vast expanses of ocean with the swirling white peaks. Also, when the Micronics port for the NES came out, nobody could honestly say that it sucked any more than the arcade game. They both suck; the NES port just sucks in an NES kind of way.

Really Getting into Consoles, part one

Playing retro video games is great! But sometimes, just playing them isn't good enough... you want to get under the hood of these old systems and see what makes them tick. 

That wasn't possible in the 20th century, but thanks to BASIC compilers like Fred Quimby's Batari BASIC and Oscar Toledo's exemplary CVBasic (this thing is really good, like, you have no idea), the ability to make real retro games on real retro hardware is well within reach for the most dedicated gamers.

As it turns out, I've made games for a variety of retro game systems and computers, and these are my personal experiences coding for some of these machines. I'll warn you up front that this is going to get technical... and biased... and excessively long-winded. Also, there aren't any pictures yet. I'll add some later; probably including snapshots of games and demos I've personally made.

Atari 2600

I should preface this by saying that my development environment was Batari BASIC, which handles a lot of the heavy lifting of programming the Atari 2600 for you. You're not scrambling to stay one step ahead of a scanline... all that's handled for you in the background. This limits your horizons and tends to make games designed in Batari BASIC a little samey, but at the same time, it lowers the bar of Atari 2600 game development from "impossible" to "possible" for 99% of amateur coders.

Under normal circumstances, you'd have to "chase the scanline" to
make an Atari 2600 game. Imagine playing a game of Lumines,
except the beam is moving down instead of sideways, and any
mistake you make could be catastrophic. It's... not a fun way
to make a video game. I'm amazed Howard Scott Warshaw
has any of his marbles left.
(image from LaunchBox)

 
Even with Batari BASIC, you'll get a peek behind the curtain of the Atari 2600's internal workings, and you'll quickly understand how things function. The 2600 uses an all-purpose chip called the TIA to handle both graphics and sound, and neither are particularly accommodating to the user. 

Along with a simple background (typically blocky and symmetrical, to save on cartridge space), the Atari 2600 uses player-missile graphics, which can be set over the background without affecting it. Think of them as caveman sprites and you've got the right idea. The player is the larger of the two, up to eight pixels wide and as long as you need it to be. Missiles and the ball can also be eight pixels wide, but are simple lines or squares. You get two players, two missiles, and one ball... if you need more, you're going to have to find sneaky workarounds.

The fact that one of the playfield objects is literally named "ball" makes it clear that the Atari 2600 was purpose-built to play Pong and Breakout games, but clever programmers found ways to stretch the feeble hardware to its limits. The player objects can be a single color per line, resulting in added detail and definition. Activision used this all the time in its games, and visually, they're a quantum leap ahead of Atari 2600 launch titles like Street Racer and Star Ship. 

Player objects can be reused for multiple characters, typically at the cost of severe flicker. One player was shared between four monsters in Pac-Man, and that rapid swapping is painfully obvious to the player. One solution is to restrict player objects to their own vertical sections of the screen. This is easily done in a shooter, but in a maze game where multiple characters close in on the player from all angles, not so much!

There's not much you can do with the Atari 2600 sound generator, baked into the TIA. Some notes are missing, so trying to play them will result in the disapproving shriek of a buzzer instead. If you have great musical aspirations, either leave them behind or add a sound chip to the cartridge, like David Crane did with Pitfall 2. Some people remain nostalgic for the digital grunts and squeals of the Atari 2600 sound processor, and it does do explosions like no other game system, but don't expect much more than that.

Expansions for the Atari 2600 are numerous, and range from the relatively minor- games like Omega Race included extra RAM on the cart, a boon when the stock system only has 128 bytes to spare- to strapping a jet engine onto a Volkswagen Bug. Many of the games released by Champ Games use an ARM CPU (yes, like the kind you find in modern smartphones) to boost the Atari 2600's abilities, and boy does it boost them! The system is still restricted to the "rules" of the TIA chip, but games like GORF, Tutankham, and Super Cobra outpace the official versions by CBS Games and Parker Brothers to an almost embarrassing degree.

The Atari 2600 is an incredibly primitive system; the absolute bare minimum for effective game development. Trying to make games with it is like planting seeds in rocky soil... but damn is it satisfying when they eventually take root and blossom into flowers. Like they say about New York, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

ColecoVision

You can make good games with the Atari 2600. You can make better ones, more comfortably, with the ColecoVision. 

Now when I say "ColecoVision," understand that I'm talking about a wide range of game systems and computers from the early 1980s. They all use the TI9918 graphics processor, the SN76489 sound processor, and the Z80A processor, which means that you're getting roughly the same experience whether it's an actual ColecoVision, or Sega's SG-1000, or the MSX computer. There are minor differences in the formats (a new sound chip here, more RAM there), but they're largely inconsequential.

Whatever you want to call it, the ColecoVision is a solid baseline for game design. You're getting a healthy 16K of video RAM, versus the ZERO K of video RAM on the Atari 2600. This means that you don't have to babysit a scanline with the nervous fervor of a helicopter parent. Once something is on the screen, it stays there until you explicitly tell it to go away. This not only opens the ColecoVision to genres that would have been functionally impossible on the Atari 2600 (text adventures! Pretty much anything with text in it!), but takes a lot of weight off the programmer's shoulders. You're free to do the fun creative stuff, while the computer does all the tedious, computer-y stuff. As it should be!

When overlaying sprites on ColecoVision, it's important that the two colors
never touch, or else the sprites will fight for priority, and you'll get shimmering. 

Graphics are built from a combination of tiles (exactly what it sounds like; square chunks of graphic data, artfully combined to create images) and sprites. Sprites are 16x16 pixels in size and restricted to one of the ColecoVision's fifteen colors. Sprites can be layered for multi-colored characters, but know that putting more than four of them together in the same scanline will cause flicker. 

You can technically have up to 32 sprites onscreen at once, but a good designer will recognize the ColecoVision's limitations and use sprites sparingly, and keep them at a safe vertical distance. Janelle Jaquay's ColecoVision port of Donkey Kong used three sprites for Mario, making him seem like he was pulled straight out of the arcade game, but thinned out the number of onscreen barrels to compensate, resulting in a compromised experience. 

Similarly, I had to limit the output of "Plinkies" in Operation Hibernation to keep too many of them from falling on the same scanline as Byron. He's made from two sprites, in contrast to Mario's three, but there's still potential for flicker, and it does show up in the fish ladder bonus stage.

Sprites can only be one color, but a single tile can be up to fifteen! On the downside, only two of these colors can share a single eight pixel line. It's not good enough to be a good artist on the ColecoVision... you've also got to be a smart one, carefully piecing together tiles to respect the system's limitations while still effectively expressing yourself. Visually "busy" ColecoVision games tend to look very angular as a result of the 9918's limitations... which is why I suggest you stick with black backgrounds. They're a fitting canvas for old-school video games, they use up less storage, and you can cheat an extra color out of sprites, on a system without a whole lot of sprites to spare.

Sound on the ColecoVision is provided by the SN7 chip, and is perfectly competent. The Atari 2600 squawks when you play certain notes, but the ColecoVision has a wider musical range, covering six octaves. It also has three sound channels, with a fourth noise channel providing explosions and the roar of engines. If you're a practiced musician, you can get some respectable tunes out of the ColecoVision... Spy Hunter is proof enough of that. (Frenzy's pause music is similarly impressive, but terrifying. What the hell, Coleco?) If you're me, you'll muddle through.

Do be aware that the bounty of enhancements in the ColecoVision comes with some trade-offs. Explosions on the SN7 are... fair, but don't have the raw, window-rattling impact of the bangs and booms on the Atari 2600. Also, the ColecoVision color palette is gallingly drab, with sickly yellows and almost browns that leave tarnish on Coleco's claim of the arcade experience at home. 

The ColecoVision color palette, which sucks,
in case I haven't already belabored the point.

Here's a personal example. I've been at work on a game called Lucky Stars, which mimics the fun and witty banter of the 21st century revival of Let's Make a Deal. The characters in Lucky Stars look very much like LMAD's real-life hosts, at least as much as the TI9918 will allow. However, "Way Waynee" is an off-putting bronze, while "Oneggin Megma" isn't just white... he's ghost white, as pale as Jim Gaffigan on the surface of the sun. It's just ugly, especially when you're migrating from Atari's more vibrant consoles.

Also, the ColecoVision doesn't have much in the way of hardware features. It doesn't have built-in scrolling, so any scrolling you attempt will look ugly and off-putting, like the colors. You can hit a switch to double the size of sprites (all onscreen sprites. Well, it could have been a useful feature...) but you're not going to be blowing anyone's mind with Treasure-level special effects on this hardware. Even the 2600's TIA chip let you squash, stretch, and multiply players, but you're not getting any of that here. You can't flip tiles, you can't flip sprites, you can't swap palettes... there's a lot you can't do on the ColecoVision, actually. If you design software for this barebones format, you'd better make sure the core gameplay is excellent.

Nintendo Entertainment System

I haven't done much with this system at all... just a couple of demos, including Byron freaking out at a flashing screen. Nevertheless, it's become clear to me that the NES is not the super system I believed it was in 1988.

Designed as a cost-friendly version of the arcade hardware used in Donkey Kong, the Nintendo Entertainment System does offer critical improvements over the ColecoVision and its kin. It can handle scrolling either horizontally or vertically... the ColecoVision can't. The NES can flip tiles and even sprites, conserving precious video RAM... the ColecoVision can't. Instead of 15 lousy colors, the NES has a palette of 52 moderately better ones, with about two dozen available onscreen at any given moment.

However! There's a catch. (There's always a catch with technology this early, it seems.) The NES is restricted to a "rule of fours," where no more than four colors can exist inside a tile, and no more than three colors (plus a transparency) can exist inside a sprite. Tiles must be placed strategically to make the most of four segregated micro-palettes, an annoyance to the pixel artist. (An additional four micro-palettes are available for sprites, but they're best reserved for sprites, which typically consist of black, white, and a defining color.) You'll notice that in official NES games, many of the tiles have three shades of the same color to boost detail. It achieves that effect, but this also makes NES games feel square, tiled, and inorganic.

Also, while the NES has double the memory of the ColecoVision, it's got a small fraction of the VRAM (2K versus 16K! Holy lobotomy, Batman!) and a slower clock speed. You really feel it when you code for the system, and have to drop a damn WAIT statement for every four lines of graphics so the little toaster that barely could can catch up. It doesn't make me eager to code games for the NES, even though I was a card-carrying member of the Nintendo cult in the late 1980s. Who didn't want to make a Nintendo game back in 1988? Anyone who looked under the hood of this jalopy, apparently.

Sega Master System

Oh, Sega Master System! I didn't appreciate you back in the 1980s, but looking back, I should have. This is the peak evolution of the purely 8-bit game system... it simply does not get any better than this, if "this" ends at 255.

Sega's previous console, the SG-1000, was basically a rebadge of the ColecoVision with the serial numbers filed off. However, when Sega engineer Hideki Sato got a hold of the hardware, he quickly determined, "Hey, color limitations suck ass. Color clash likewise sucks ass. Let's not have that in the sequel. Let's also have color with saturation, so yellows look bright and sunny, and not like that disgusting crust you get in your eyes when you first wake up in the morning."

And so he set about making a Sega-branded successor to the TMS9918 with all of these features. NO color clash! Put any color from a palette of sixteen hues (selected from a large, if often redundant, total of 64) anywhere you please. The world is your oyster, the display is your canvas. It makes a monumental difference in the creation of pixel artwork. Oops, I just put a brown pixel right next to a white AND a gray one! And there's a pink pixel and a blue pixel somewhere in the tile, too! Aren't the hardware cops going to take me away for that? No, not on Master System. Just relax, unclench your sphincter, and let your artistic side take over.

Sprites offer similar freedom to the user, with another fifteen colors (plus a transparency!) that can be used however and wherever you like. Genesis does what Nintendon't, even before there was a Genesis, apparently! This reaps huge benefits in games like Rampage, which approaches a near-Sega Genesis level of detail, versus the laughable NES version. Add the ability to flip tiles, and the ability to stamp tiles over tiles without leaving ugly black boxes around them, and you've got one ridiculously overachieving 8-bit machine in the Sega Master System. No wonder the Brazilians are still using it in 2026. No wonder I'm making games for it!

As a Super ColecoVision, the Master System retains some of its sire's quirks. There's no hardware sprite collision, so you're going to have to manually determine if two sprites are touching by comparing their onscreen positions. The SN7 is the same (Sega rebranded it, but there's no effective difference), and comes up a little short next to the best music on the NES. It's a bit of a soprano, so don't expect the thunderous percussion of, say, Fester's Quest or Batman. The resolution on the Master System remains the same as it was on the ColecoVision, and at a respectable 256x192, it doesn't really need to be any higher. In fact, back ports from the Game Gear to the Master System often look better because of the increased screen real estate. 256x192 starts to feel pretty luxurious next to the Game Gear's crushing resolution of 160x144...

Bottom line? The Master System is deceptively great hardware. It didn't get that kind of love in the software department, but it's getting it now. Mighty Cuphead Adventure jumped over the NES and went straight to the Master System, ensuring players a genuine 8-bit experience that doesn't skimp on the visual delights. I've already made two games for the Master System, and I literally cannot conceive a situation where I will use the full span of its power. It's the place to be if you're making a game for real retro hardware.

(Shame about the lack of buttons, though. Just two, with pause on the front of the system itself? Come on, Sega. Come oooooon.) 

That's a Paddlin' (Barbarricade dev retrospective)

 

That's another ColecoVision game in the can. This time it's Barbarricade, a Breakanoid where the wall holds a grudge. This is the first original ColecoVision game of its kind with support for analog controllers, a feature Spectravideo's Flipper Slipper and Bit's Strike It! both lack. 

(Of course, you can play the game with a joystick, with three speeds for the title character, but I don't really recommend it. It's just not how you want to play these games.)

And what's so special about Barbarricade beyond the sharp analog control? It's a straightforward game, a little more complicated than Breakout but without the overload of power-ups in Arkanoid. There are five kinds of blocks. The blue ones can be destroyed with no threat to the player, but the red ones send the parting gift of a "stab," a winged dart that will slice your paddle in half. Green blocks award high-value coins, while gold blocks send your ball back to you at double its usual speed. Finally, there's concrete, which doesn't break at all, but can be used to deflect the ball toward breakable blocks. Every block moves down one tile after three serves, making things increasingly tight for the player if they don't finish the stage quickly.

It's a simple set-up, but it works well enough... you have to be mindful of what your ball is about to hit at any moment, and respond appropriately. Survive for twelve stages and you get to fight the master of this militia of malicious blocks, Nolan Contendre. Batter him with the ball for a while and he'll be sent back to his world of high colors and chunky resolutions!

Barbarricade was an easier project than my four other games. It's a brick-breaker. The biggest challenge was getting convincing movement from the ball, and from deflections. Normally you'd use decimals to adjust the trajectory of the ball at a minute level, but the ColecoVision prefers to work with integers, or whole numbers. My solution was to use the ones as tenths and the tens as ones, and use a constant speed variable along with a "bank" variable that determines how many pixels, if any, the ball moves in a single frame. If the speed variable is 25, the ball will move two pixels in the first frame, then three pixels in the next frame, since the leftover 5 will be combined with the 5 in the next frame. 

This, combined with twenty points of deflection on the paddle, results in more trajectories for the ball, and more spontaneity in the gameplay. I used to make brick breaker games for my VIC-20 as a kid, and generally, the ball's movement would be stiff, generally moving either one space either straight up or diagonally per frame. There's a lot of angles for the ball in Barbarricade, and it makes a huge impact on the gameplay.

Barbarricade also has a handful of features you might not expect from a ColecoVision game... the first, of course, is the boss. You battle a parody of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, who fires lasers from his eyes as a fireball bounces around the screen. The second are "carrots," special bonuses for finishing stages without losing a ball or with the blocks dropped all the way to the bottom of the playfield. It's a bit like an achievement, but a whole lot more like the secret bonuses awarded in Sega's grossly unappreciated Astro Blaster. The third is a level select which opens up as you clear stages... reach stage four on your own and you can return to it in subsequent plays.

Finally, there's a hidden mode based on the extremely old arcade title Clean Sweep, a brick breaker without any bricks. How does this work? Well, the ball sweeps up dots, only changing directions when it hits the playfield walls or the paddle. It's not a great game, but adding the Clean Sweep stage was trivial due to the simplicity of the logic. The ball touches a dot, it erases it and you get points. That's it. It's there if you want it, but you'll probably only want to play it once.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Oscar Toledo Gutierrez, the creator of CVBasic, for his continued diligence in refining and expanding his compiler. None of my ColecoVision games would be possible without it, and the addition of analog controls in the latest build only broadens the horizons of developers like myself. Also, props must go to Willie from ArcadeUSA, who tested the game on real hardware with a Roller Controller, and also found a bug with the stabs that wasn't evident on an emulator. If you set tiles outside the playfield, emulators like GearColeco don't care, but the real system sure as hell does! That's since been fixed.

Proposed Master System port

So what's next? I'm thinking "Master System port." There's already an SG-1000 version of Barbarricade, codenamed "Canary..." it wouldn't be tremendously hard to redraw the graphics for SMS, giving them a welcome burst of color and detail. Heck, I could even expand the cartridge to 128K and add in a bunch more stages. Twelve was all I could fit into the ColecoVision game, but that could easily be doubled or tripled on the Master System with bankswitching. Maybe I could even add a versus mode for two players! The expanded hardware offers a lot of possibilities; ones worth exploring. It doesn't hurt that native Master System games will also run on a Genesis, or that Master System games look ten times better on a Master System than SG-1000 games do...

As X-Pected

Well, the results are in from the MSXdev 25 competition. The verdict? Operation Hibernation was selected as the 16th best of the fifty entries, while Eye Brawls nipped at its heels in 17th place. It's about where Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons landed in the last contest, except not really because that was out of a pool of 31 entrants. So I still lost, but I lost more gracefully this year. Hooray for a more dignified faceplant.

I won't even argue with the results. There were many games in the contest that were objectively superior to my own, including "how the hell did they do this?" polygonal showcase DELTA and the more technologically humble but meatier platforming challenge Chrono Runner. There's also Boobie (Chikubi) Ninja, an arcade-quality platformer where all the characters have naughty anatomy for faces. (Look, I don't get it either, but the gameplay and production values are both terrific. Let the man have his boob faces.) 

With the avalanche of quality titles in this year's MSXdev, I didn't have a realistic chance of victory. One of the other contestants made a pretty good point, though... the contest accepts entries for both the prehistoric MSX (just a stone's throw from being a ColecoVision) and the more advanced MSX2 (which gave us Metal Gear 2, among others). Games for both formats are pitted against each other, which makes about as much sense as having a cross-country race between high-performance sports cars and children's sports car beds.

Distressingly, this is not a child's
race car bed.
(image from OddityMall)

One of the contestants, DavePlunder, expressed deep annoyance that his own game, Space Bash: Contact!, landed in seventh place. He complained that the format of the contest effectively denied victory to entries designed for the less powerful MSX. I have a hard time disagreeing with this... Space Bash is an exceptional game considering the limitations of the original MSX, and those limitations aren't taken into consideration in a contest where games for 1983 hardware are expected to compete against releases for later systems with more RAM, more colors, more clock speed, and (in the case of the Turbo-R) an entirely different processor.

It's hard to overstate just how impressive
Space Bash looks on MSX1 hardware.
None of what you're seeing here comes
easily on a system that only lets you
draw two colors on a single line, and
all the color choices are barf.
(image from the Space Bash Itch IO)

Someone made the counter argument that Space Bash did outperform a good many MSX2 games in the contest, but that doesn't disprove DavePlunder's earlier point. His game got to where it was with a massive technological handicap, the equivalent of getting bronze in a Olympic sprint with a boat anchor clamped to your ankle. Gee, you didn't win! I can't imagine why! Guess you should have tried harder... maybe spend a few weeks in a Dragonball Z capsule with the gravity turned up to max.

Another poster observed that if your game is creative and clever enough, it could overcome all technological limitations, which is either tremendously naive or has the bitter tang of weaponized aspiration. "You can do anything if you just believe!" "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!" "Maybe you can make the next Tetris!" "These excuses make it easier for me to ignore the obvious inequality of a contest featuring three generations of increasingly powerful hardware!" Yeah, whatever gets you through the night, buddy.

I'm... satisfied with my position in the contest. Even if it had been split into MSX and MSX2 categories, my games would have been soundly thumped by Space Bash, Chrono Runner, and Shift. It's too bad those games didn't get their rightful due, though. Splitting next year's contest into two tiers- MSX and MSX2- would go a long way toward addressing this.

 

 

Also: Byron is a bear. He's a friggin' BEAR. The game is called Operation Hibernation. He's eating fruit to fatten up for the winter! His bonus stage is a fish ladder! Hello?! "Dog character," geez. How many dogs do you know that hibernate for the winter? 

(No, you can't say raccoon dogs! They're dogs that think they're raccoons! Dogs with an identity crisis don't count!)

The Tower of Retro-Babble: Technos

Yoshihisa Kishimoto, the creator of Double Dragon and Renegade, recently passed away. Guess which arcade game publisher just got pushed to the top of my review queue?

(image from Logopedia)

It's hard to overestimate the significance of Double Dragon in 1987. Technos had already pioneered the beat 'em up genre with Data East's Karate Champ, and the side-scrolling beat 'em up with Renegade, but Double Dragon further upped the ante with a grittier setting, two player gameplay, and a deep combat system. As butch martial artists Jimmy and Billy Lee, players could punch thugs, grab them by the shoulders as they're stunned from the opening blows, then either fling them away or hammer their skulls with repeated strikes from an outstretched knee.

It's not quite mortal combat, but Double Dragon is definitely brutal combat. Enemies don't fly off the screen with a single kick like in Kung Fu Master, and there's no referee to stop the fights... these rumbles are for keeps. Even weapons are not out of bounds... hurl a barrel at a knife-wielding Williams, or snatch the whip from a kinkily dressed Linda and give her a taste of her own medicine!

Spike and Hammer...? Who the
heck came up with that, anyway?
It's like how Ralf and Clark from Ikari
Warriors were renamed Paul and Vince
for some reason.
(image from ToyArk)

Double Dragon was big business for Technos, with home ports for every major late 1980s game console (NES, Master System, and Atari 7800!) and a wide range of merchandise. There were comics, cartoons, toys, even a film! The runaway success of Double Dragon convinced Technos to publish its own games in America, starting with the beloved River City Ransom. 

The game (along with the rest of the Kunio-Kun series) was a lighthearted, kid-friendly bookend to Double Dragon, with squat high school toughs smacking each other around with chubby limbs and bicycle chains. The Double Dragon and River City series have had crossovers, prompting squeals of delight from nerdy young gamers years before Marvel vs. Capcom or Super Smash Bros.

Technos games have a distinct feel, with weighty characters who fully invest those pounds into each strike. When someone takes a punch (or a dodge ball) to the face, they reel from the impact... and if they've taken too much damage, they gasp for breath to warn the player of their impending demise. The deep grappling system and "heavy" feel of Technos games lent itself especially well to wrestling, with Technos releasing Mat Mania in 1985, and the wonderfully flashy WWF Wrestlefest arriving six years later.

Here now are reviews of the Technos games that popped up in local arcades... and they popped up a lot in the Malt Shop, the almost legendary college arcade in Mount Pleasant. A handful of these Technos titles were discovered in truck stops, gas stations, and laundromats throughout Michigan.

The Combatribes

Technos fans like to think of this as the real Double Dragon 3, and who can blame them? The game charitably titled Double Dragon 3 was a hot mess. However, it's probably more accurate to call The Combatribes a spiritual successor to Renegade. Each "act" isn't a fully realized level with a starting point and a destination, but an enclosed arena, with enemies pouring in from the edges of the playfield. So many enemies. So many freaking enemies.

Even for a beat 'em up, The Combatribes is astonishingly repetitive. You'll battle an unholy number of copies of the same two goons in each act, followed by a boss that could take a direct hit from a nuclear missile and walk away with light bruising. Your energy meter, displayed at the top of the screen as a number, quickly drops, forcing you to drop in fistfuls of coins to keep the action going. It's not as exploitative as the micro-transaction filled Double Dragon 3, but it's still pretty quarter-thirsty. You're not going to finish this one with skill alone, unless rapidly tapping the insert coin button is considered a skill.

Yeesh. This just makes me want to
go to "Tone-it-down Land" instead.

On the plus side, The Combatribes feels like a genuine Technos game, with the same heavy handling and brutal attacks, but vibrant settings like theme parks replacing the sepia-toned apocalyptic wastelands of Double Dragon. The characters are appropriately detailed and beefy, and their attacks are even more vicious than the ones in Double Dragon, with the skulls of thugs getting smacked together and driven into the pavement. It's not a bad time with three players, but The Combatribes lacks the variety and technique to stand on even ground with real classics like Final Fight and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Double Dragon

Double Dragon not only pioneered the side-scrolling beat 'em up, but was the undisputed king of that genre for several years, eventually getting toppled by Capcom's gorgeous Final Fight in 1989. It's not just that Double Dragon looks great for its time, with brawny, exquisitely detailed sprites battling against hauntingly dreary urban landscapes, or that it feels as good as it looks, with sure-footed character control and strikes that land cleanly on solid opponents. It's the technique in Double Dragon that makes all the difference. 

Double Dragons! Double Williamses
and Lopars, too!

You're not swatting away an endless procession of cardboard ninjas (looking at you, Bad Dudes...), but getting into protracted rumbles, first punching your opponent to soften him up, then moving in for the kill with a few knees to the skull and an overhead throw. Weapons and environmental hazards add to the variety, and the player's enjoyment. Rob a thug of his knife, then give it back to him blade-first for big damage and a splash of red at the point of impact. See an oil drum? Pick it up, then hurl it at a massive Abobo to cut him down to size. Chasms and waterways are also handy ways to dispatch goons... just don't fall into them yourself!

Double Dragon is a fantastic experience, marred by two issues. The first is that it's running on hardware that can't handle it, resulting in an obscene amount of slowdown in a game with an already relaxed pace. Things get downright painful at the end of the factory stage, where the crowd of enemies and the rolling conveyor belt leave the CPU struggling to keep up. The other beef is that Double Dragon insists on saddling the player with platforming challenges that don't work well in the context of a beat 'em up. The final stage with its bricks that burst out of the walls is infuriating... if there's a way to get through this without getting ragdolled around the screen by stone pillars, I have yet to find it.

Despite all that, Double Dragon is a great game... and the best way to play it is on the Game Boy Advance. Double Dragon Advance is a remake from Technos successors Million that takes stages from the first two arcade games, strips away the bothersome slowdown, and adds even more technique to the combat. There are now blocks and parries! You can sit on a thug's chest and pound him in the face until he begs to blink away into oblivion! You get a sweet pair of nunchucks, and you don't even have to pay an extra quarter for them like you did in Double Dragon 3! 

Double Dragon Advance is one satisfyingly savage beat 'em up, and represents Double Dragon at its absolute peak. The series has never been better, and it will never be better than this.

Double Dragon II: The Revenge 

This is one of those times where the console version eclipses its arcade counterpart in popularity. Double Dragon II was a blockbuster release for the NES, promising true two player action while the previous game offered a weaksauce versus mode. The colors were brighter, the new set pieces were more creative (how's about a battle aboard a helicopter with a loose airlock?), and the new spinning roundhouse kick makes short work of any nearby Shadow Warriors... if you've got the reflexes to pull off this advanced technique!

Been there, done that. Although
last time, I wasn't fighting an
obese Terminator. You'd better cut
down on the pasta la vista, baby!

Then there's Double Dragon II in arcades. It's got the same bi-directional combat as Renegade, with a left and right attack button along with a jump. However, the levels are either weirdly iterative of the first game (hey, there's that shipping warehouse with the conveyor belt again!) or creatively strained. I'm fighting in front of an active wheat thresher, because apparently Billy and Jimmy Lee don't have the common sense to walk around it. The new characters are slight redesigns of the old ones, and the new weapons aren't particularly exciting... shovels and hay bales, really?

Double Dragon II is playable, even fun when the CPU can keep the action at full speed. (It usually can't.) It just feels like an oversaturated repeat of the first game, while Double Dragon II on the NES goes to great lengths to distinguish itself from its own predecessor. It feels like a legitimate sequel; bigger, bolder, and more inventive than before. Double Dragon II in arcades is just more of the same, disguised with a beard and an eyepatch.

Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone

On the corner of woeful game design and cynical consumer exploitation, you'll find Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone. This game was outsourced to lesser known (and just plain lesser) developers East Technology, and the difference in feel from the last two games is distressingly obvious. Gaunt versions of Bimmy ow, okay, BILLY and Jimmy stiffly hobble around the world, beating up each country's hoods with attacks that never seem to connect. It looks like an overreaching Master System arcade port in motion, and players expected better from the third installment of one of the biggest arcade hits of the late 1980s. 

But wait, there's more! Each stage typically starts at a Weapons Shop. You're invited to come on in, take a look around, and spend REAL MONEY on extra fighters, extra weapons, and extra health. This isn't such a big deal now that emulation lets you credit-feed to your heart's content, but in 1990, no arcade-hopping teenager on a tight allowance was going to spend real money on in-game digital content. Any fool who did part with their money was "rewarded" with lame partner characters and weapons that were freely strewn throughout the streets in the first two games.

Roney? Really? With a name like that,
he'd better have muscles.

The larger problem is that Double Dragon 3 doesn't deserve the player's first quarter, let alone the bucketful it's expecting from players. It sucks. The unappealing characters shamble across the screen like corpses, collision detection is squirrely and imprecise, and the fist-to-face impact of the previous games has been pared down to an unenthusiastic finger flick to the forehead. As threequels go, Double Dragon 3 is every bit the flaming disaster Jaws 3 and Godfather 3 were in theaters.

It's worth pointing out that there was an overhauled NES version of Double Dragon 3, with a game engine actually designed by Technos. That at least makes it feel like a legitimate Double Dragon game, but it's not one of the better ones. The difficulty is almost comically high, and combat isn't as satisfying as it was in earlier games. It's like the designers desperately didn't want to make this, and punished the players for its existence. Sorry kids, but if we have to suffer, you have to suffer along with us.

Mat Mania

Technos provided the button-mashing blueprint for wrestling games with Mat Mania. As the up and coming wrestler, "You," you'll tangle with such made-up superstars as Insane Warrior! Karate Fighter! And Coco Savege! Er, SAVAGE! Tenderize their steroid-packed muscles with punches and kicks, then lock up for a grapple and let loose with a devastating piledriver. Get your opponent weak enough and you can finish the match with a pin, announced with scratchy enthusiasm by the referee. "One! Twoooo! THWEEE!"

I don't like where this
is going...

It's telling that pretty much every wrestling game in the 1980s played just like Mat Mania. You start each fight with simple punches and kicks, wearing the opponent down and working your way up to the crowd-pleasing finishers. Double taps of the joystick send you (and You) running into the ropes to set up a clothesline or a diving pin. Climbing a turnbuckle is as simple as walking up to it. It's all easy to understand, but deceptively deep. Mat Mania was a solid foundation for future wrestling games, and there's not much to the design that needed to be changed or improved.

As for the graphics? It's 1985, so the characters lean toward the small and comical. Mat Mania is about on par with Konami's Yie Ar Kung Fu visually, although it does capture some of the glitz of mid-1980s professional wrestling, with hot-headed announcer Cory introducing each match, and the wrestling network's broadcast flickering off into a dead grey screen if you've been beaten. You'll just have to drop in another coin to restart your wrestling career. Talk about Pay-Per-View!

Renegade

Say what you will about Renegade, but it's an important step forward in the evolution of the beat 'em up. It pioneered the elevated side-view perspective that practically all side-scrolling beat 'em ups use, and there's a sense of brutality in the fighting that's missing from contemporaries like Kung Fu Master or Yie Ar Kung Fu. In a typical fight, Mr. K first flattens a thug's face with a few punches, grabs him by the collar, kicks him in the groin a few times, then hurls him over his shoulder, possibly into the ocean or off the edge of a thirty foot high subway platform.

These guys don't come off their
bikes until you KICK them off their
bikes. Aw, you just got tire marks
on my brand new leather jacket!

Renegade is a mean, gritty game, especially in the kid-friendly arcades of 1986, and especially when it was brought to America with all new graphics. Instead of high school delinquents, you'll go mano-a-mano with greasy thugs, biker gangs (sometimes jump kicking the gang members off the bikes as they're riding them!), and prostitutes. If you lose, they'll rub salt in the wound with a digitized insult. If you win, it'll be by the skin of your teeth. Renegade is tough, giving the player a single life and no continues. (Advice? Tweak the DIP switch settings to give yourself another life and tone down the difficulty to a somewhat manageable level.)

There's one other thing worth mentioning about Renegade... it uses a bi-directional combat system, with one button attacking to the left and another attacking to the right. Pressing the left attack button while facing left makes Mr. K punch, while pressing the right attack button while facing left makes him kick in the opposite direction. The idea was to let the player defend themselves from two angles, but Renegade's bi-directional melee combat isn't as handy or intuitive as the omni-directional firing in Robotron: 2084 or Smash TV. It was worth a shot, I guess. (Probably wasn't worth revisiting in Double Dragon II, though.)

Super Dodge Ball

The game you dreaded most in gym class comes to arcades, without the bruising and hard feelings. As a high school dodge ball team, you rise up the ranks by beating the other teams... to death. Team members don't just walk off the court when they're tagged with the ball... you'll have to pummel them repeatedly, draining their health bar until they leave the arena and this plane of existence as angels. (And you thought Blades of Steel's fist fights were hardcore.)

This sporty off-shoot of the Kunio-Kun series is most fondly remembered on the NES, and frankly, it's a better game there. The characters are smaller and less detailed, sure, but they're also faster and control more tightly, making it more fun to play whether you're gunning for the championship in single player mode or hurling rock-hard dodge balls at your friends. There's even a free-for-all mode that erases the court divider, letting you get up close and personal with those dodge ball strikes.

There's no question that the NES version of Super Dodge Ball is the better game, but at least the arcade version looks nice. Each country's court is adorned with famous landmarks in the background, and every team has its own super sized captain, who can take more damage than his puny teammates and also possesses the Power Shot. Race across the court and throw the ball as you approach the divider and it streaks toward the opponent at mach speed, three times stronger than usual and just as tough to catch. The Power Shot play mechanic works better on the NES, like pretty much everything else about this game, but at least it's there.

WWF Superstars 

WWF Superstars is a perfectly adequate wrestling game that suffers next to its amped-up sequel. It's better than the NES Wrestlemania game for sure, and better than most wrestling games available at the time, but it's light on content, as well as the flair fans expect from the WWF brand. There are six wrestlers available, and while they're recognizable as Macho Man, Hulk Hogan, and... uh... Honkey Tonk Man, they're kind of shrimpy and plainly drawn. And while the game plays well enough, it doesn't go out of its way to impress the player.

Even the cut scenes are lacking next
to the ones in WWF Wrestlefest. Gene
Okerlund looks like a constipated
Joe Polito.

Like Galaxian and the original Streets of Rage, WWF Superstars is a competent game doomed to languish in the shadow of its follow-up. Why pay for the dress rehearsal when you can have the full performance?

WWF Wrestlefest

Compared to the relatively timid WWF Superstars, WWF Wrestlefest goes way over the top in its presentation. Wrestling superstars like Jake the Snake Roberts and the Big Boss Man have never been bigger, there's driving music and color commentary from an unseen announcer, and the action is peppered with gorgeously drawn cut scenes featuring the Legion of Doom and Mean Gene Okerlund. If you know who any of these people are, you'll be thrilled. Even if you don't, just drink in the sights and sounds, because they're some of Technos' best work.

Wrestlefest offers two play styles... the Royal Rumble, where every wrestler piles into the ring and the last man to remain inside wins, and Saturday Night Main Event, a standard tag team mode. Like a real WWF match, wrestlers don't stay on the sidelines even if they're tagged out, running interference if their teammate is pinned. It keeps the bouts tense and exciting... even if you've made a pin with one wrestler, you'll have to use the other one to keep it.

That's a whole lotta ugly dudes.

Fundamentally, WWF Wrestlefest isn't much different from Mat Mania, but it's the spectacle that makes it so memorable. There's an avalanche of digitized voice, the characters are even larger and more detailed than the ones in Street Fighter II, and the artwork captures the essence of each real-life wrestler beautifully, with Hogan cupping an ear to hear the cheers of the crowd and Earthquake bouncing around the ring before landing elbow first on his opponent. In the world of arcade wrestling games, WWF Wrestlefest is top-card talent, as legendary in its own ring as its wrestlers are in theirs.

Xain'd Sleena

Technos goes off the beat 'em up path with Xain'd Sleena, a side-scrolling science-fiction platformer that takes place on a half-dozen different planets. Xain (who looks like a 1980s version of Halo's Master Chief) is armed with a wimpy hand blaster and a jet pack, which isn't strong enough to let him fly freely, but does provide enough power to let him double jump. His goal is to infiltrate enemy territory on each planet, plant a bomb on their headquarters, and escape into space before the explosion leaves a crater where the enemy base used to be.

Hey, Empire! You're about to get Xain'd!

Xain'd Sleena is an aggravatingly fidgety game, with power up capsules offering weapons (none impressive, and some laughably weak) at random and enemies delivering inconsistent damage. Sometimes you'll just get a scratch from an enemy encounter, but sometimes the attacker will put you on life support. The larger aliens will ignore your "gage" completely and just stomp you into orange marmalade on contact. The especially annoying shooter segments between planets dispose of the health bar entirely, ensuring that every collision with the unrelenting swarms of ships is fatal. 

It's a nice looking game for sure,
especially for the mid 1980s.

So it's not a great game overall, but Xain'd Sleena gets by on presentation alone. Each planet you'll visit is distinct, and the science-fiction artwork is some of the best you'll see in a 1986 video game, with rocky outposts set against a sea of stars and alien rainforests teeming with the deadliest wildlife in the galaxy. The artists on this project get an A for their work, while everyone else on staff just gets an "Eh."

 

The Tower of Retro-Babble: Sunsoft

 

Image from... I'll be dipped, Sun Denshi.

I've been a little off my game as of late, so we'll start off slow and review a couple of games from Sunsoft. Sunsoft is well known to kids who owned an NES... it was one of the star players among Nintendo's licensees, stumbling out of the starting gate with weak ports of Midway arcade hits but quickly finding its footing with exquisitely polished and satisfying games like Blaster Master, a video game adaptation of Tim Burton's first Batman movie, and a ballsy continuation of Spy Hunter that's actually a better sequel than Midway's own Spy Hunter II!

Not a perfect NES game, but
a really flashy and ambitious
one, with more special effects
than you'd expect from an
NES game. Sunsoft understood
the assignment.
(image from Game Fabrique)

(I didn't review Spy Hunter II in the Midway chapter of this feature. Honestly, it didn't deserve it. The game tries to bring the action of Spy Hunter into the third dimension, but the sorry hardware makes it look like an antique next to OutRun, and the aggravating stop-start gameplay doesn't hold a candle to the non-stop excitement of Roadblasters. The artwork from Brian Colin doesn't save Spy Hunter II, and even seems out of place in an sleek action game about vehicular espionage. But I digress.)

Sun Corporation didn't have the same presence in the arcade space, however. The only Sunsoft games I've personally seen in an arcade were Kangaroo and Route 16. While Kangaroo did pretty well for itself as a Donkey Kong substitute for Atari, Route 16 didn't get much press or media attention, and was relegated to a port on the feeble Emerson Arcadia 2001 alongside other loser coin-ops like Kaneko's Red Clash, Tehkan's Pleiades, and Konami's Turtles. 

(As Jeremy Parish pointed out in one of his videos, the good video game systems get Frogger! If you're the Odyssey2 or the Arcadia, you have to settle for Turtles. Stop crying, Odyssey2, I saw what you already did to Popeye.)

The wacky wild Waku Waku 7 cast,
courtesy of Alchetron.

Sunsoft had more luck with the Neo-Geo, publishing a solid if slight fighting game in Waku Waku 7. That game's explosion of creativity and style demonstrates just how much the company had honed its craft since its arcade debut in the early 1980s. 

Kangaroo
Played: An ice cream shop in Nashville MI 

Donkey Kong was one of the blockbusters of the early 1980s arcade scene. The competition bought the home rights before you could get them for your own game system, and you're feeling serious pressure. What will you offer your customers as a substitute?

For Atari, the answer was Kangaroo. Kangaroo is a lot like Donkey Kong, right down to featuring primates as the bad guys. These pink monkeys are a whole lot smaller than Donkey Kong, but there are a whole lot more of them, climbing up and down the trunks of the trees bracketing the playfield. Beware any monkeys who've climbed onto the branch where you're currently standing... they're armed with apples, and they're not afraid to use them!

In your corner is Mama, the game's leading marsupial. She's delightfully animated, capturing all the silly charm of real kangaroos with big, floppy feet that make a big, floppy noise whenever she walks. She's also armed with a pair of boxing gloves, letting her punch out nearby monkeys and their pelted produce. The fruit prizes hanging from the trees give Mama points, and a bell replenishes the supply with more valuable prizes. Don't spend too much time harvesting pineapples and strawberries, though! Your joey is held hostage at the top of the screen, and the longer you wait to rescue him, the more likely you are to be nailed by a stray apple (or get your gloves stolen by a gorilla. No, not that gorilla) on your way up.

It doesn't take long before the
game starts showing its teeth.
This is the second stage.

There are four stages in Kangaroo, ranging from a straightforward climb up a handful of ladders to punching out a totem pole made of monkeys to some vicious platforming challenges. Mama is fragile and doesn't have Mario's solid center of gravity, making the gap-filled second stage a perilous climb. It doesn't help matters that you have to jump by pressing up, leaving the gameplay feeling even more wobbly and imprecise. Will you make that next jump? Probably. Maybe. I think so?

Still, Kangaroo isn't a bad stab at the Donkey Kong formula. It's playable enough even with the slightly sketchy controls, and it manages to distinguish itself from, and even elevate itself above, other arcade platformers of the early 1980s. Kangaroo also has mountains of personality; enough to get its own cartoon series, airing alongside Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. in Ruby-Spears' Saturday Supercade. Granted, it wasn't a good cartoon, but it's more than Burgertime or Roc 'n Rope ever got.

Well, at least Ruby-Spears thought
these two deserved equal billing.
She's "K.O. Katy" the Kangaroo in
the show, by the way. Also, Paul
Dini wrote this episode, because
upcoming cartoonists have got to
eat too. Look, it was either this
or Rubik the Amazing Cube!

Route 16
Played: In a Mount Pleasant movie theater

If you're looking for Route 16, you'll find it on the corner of Rally (X) and Venture-a Boulevard. It's effectively a fusion of those two games, with the player driving a race car to sixteen city blocks to steal bags of cash. Each block is a maze, but they're not tidy, symmetrical affairs like the one in Pac-Man, often snarling themselves into tight spirals with dead ends. When you visit a block, get all the money and get out quickly, before one of the patrolling green cars spots you. If green cars corner you in a city block and there's not a checkered flag nearby to turn the tables, you're as good as roadside scrap. Also, do mind the bombs (gulp).

Money bags have a nasty habit
of turning into oil, which slows
you down. You'll just have to
wait for it to change back... and
hope the other cars don't find
you first!

Route 16 frequently switches views, from a map of the city with you and the rival cars displayed as tiny dots, to the interior of the city block, with its tangled maze structure and hidden prizes in full view. You'll have to strategize on the map screen where to go next, then dive into the city block to harvest its goodies and escape before you're noticed by the other cars. It's a pretty good hook... it's just a shame that Route 16 handles like a jalopy next to the buttery smooth ride of Rally-X. The graphics are blocky, the slightly stuttery cars flicker even when there's no logical reason for it, and the soundtrack is coarse and high-pitched. 

Whatever this game used for hardware should have been left in the 16th century, but at least Sunsoft gave the game a slight glow up on the Famicom with Route 16 Turbo. Its graphics are more detailed, and there's even an amusingly hopeless attempt at a camera zoom in the transition from the map view to the block view. Mode 7 it's not, but at least the designers made the effort!