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.
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| 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...
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