Developed/Published by: Jon Perry / Mossmouth
Released: “October 1983” (18/09/2024)
Completed: 21/12/2024
Completion: Completed it.
After the experience of Ninpek, I played Paint Chase a couple of times and realised I’d have to complete a whopping twenty-five stages in one go to finish it, and I decided that I couldn’t be arsed and put UFO 50 down completely and played a bunch of other things instead. But after finishing Indika I thought I’d load it up and, uh… I guess it’s sort of funny that I should rail against the vision of UFO 50’s creators that you should have to “git gud” in order to finish games in this collection and for me to finish this quite easily on like, my fifth go.
Now, to be fair, Paint Chase isn’t exactly easy. A maze-painter game in the style of Crush Roller/Make Trax, as a wee race car the player is trying to paint in the majority of a level before the timer is up–while enemy vehicles spawn from spawners and paint the level in their own color unless you can destroy them. It’s a very clean, simple and rewarding design, which they evolve quite carefully across the twenty five stages via level and enemy design.
At first, you’ve just go the spawners, some speed boosts and enemy cars that you destroy by smashing into; but quickly the game introduces wrinkles such as buttons that change the level layout, and enemies that blast paint everywhere if you don’t get to them in time.
In fact, you can barely go a level without them introducing a new concept, which is almost certainly what is going to make you fail the game and have to–annoyingly–start the entire thing over again. While Paint Chase does feature some Pac-Man-style interstitials that help explain what enemies do, you still often find yourself on a level, see something like a red bomb, and then have to trial-and-error you way to working out that you can only destroy them easily by driving into them while boosting.
Now, this is a pretty classic bit of game design, really. I mean, I’ve beaten The Tower of Druaga, probably the most brutal “uh, try some stuff?” video game in history, but [taps watch] I don’t have all day here, and having to restart Paint Chase because I didn’t know what an enemy would do until I did it can, frankly, fuck off. For example, there’s an enemy towards the end of the game that I genuinely think is such a clever subversion–if you boost into it, as you want to do with basically every other enemy, you will spread the enemy paint across the screen as you skid. So the game now requires you to carefully plan when to hit a boost or not, adding another layer to the play.
Once I knew that… fun! Working that out by having to start the game again? No thanks!
I won’t lie–I looked up an enemy guide online for this, and once I knew what everything did, Paint Chase was a lot more pleasant. There are still some frustrating levels–the enemies you have to come at from a specific direction are never easy to deal with–but when you’re playing the game on a level playing field, it’s… fun, actually. Whisper it, but I could have happily played it for longer–the enemies allow for way, way more levels to be made than there currently are.
I won’t lie, though–I’m unbelievably happy that I was able to polish this off so quickly, and I think for some players even with an enemy guide this one might be a nightmare. But then I’m also sure that loads of players beat Ninpek on like their third try. Horses for courses.
