Developed/Published by: Namco Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 15/04/2025 Completion: Got the “Happy Ending” by shooting down the Air Successor in Mission 26. Version Played: Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1
Sky Kid is, with some reservations, a wee hidden gem of an arcade game. I described it as a “strange little dead-end in the side-scrolling shooter universe” when I wrote about it, and while I stand by that, I wonder now if my framing is a little wrong because of the post-Xevious, post-Gradius context. Playing Sky Kid again in its NES port, I was struck by the thought that it might be as much inspired by something like Choplifter. While it doesn’t match in terms of design really at all, there’s a spiritual lineage: one is a “simulation” of being a helicopter pilot, and the other is a “simulation” of being a biplane pilot. The concerns in either are not that of Xevious/Gradius, where you move a frictionless collision box around, but one where you have to use your helicopter/plane using its actual characteristics to survive and succeed.
I do think taken in that framing I like Sky Kid even more. Revisiting the arcade version before giving this version a run through I was struck by how bright and attractive it is, the pleasure of doing loops, and how unbelievably rewarding it was to nail an enemy base with a bomb dead on.
Sky Kid on NES is an excellent recreation of that in terms of play, but unfortunately, it just doesn’t look anywhere near as good due to the NES’s more muted colors. At this point in the NES (or rather, Famicom) lifecycle, it’s a bit of a disappointment, with for example Ghosts ‘n Goblins doing a much better job of capturing the character of the original game despite having the NES palette to work with. It’s not as bad as Pac-Land, but it doesn’t look much better. Someone over at Namco was letting them down.
There is some effort made here to make this a different(-ish) experience from the arcade–there are more levels, a few of them are shooting galleries, you get some wee interstitial animations–but we’re still not at the point where NES games are diverging from their arcade counterparts to be particularly deeper or richer, and Sky Kid gets every bit as frustrating as it was in the arcade as you work your way towards the end of this. In fact, maybe more frustrating. As in the original, the design doesn’t support bullet hell, but bullet hell is what it gives you.
As with the original, this plays better as a score attack, but I think when you have the chance to come home with a copy of The Legend of Zelda or Metroid by this point… well, it’s not even been a year since Sky Kid came out in arcades and it already feels out of date. A biplane in a world of jet fighters: charming, but you ain’t picking it.
Will I ever play it again? I like the arcade version. I have the arcade version. This one isn’t necessary.
Final Thought: What I don’t have is Sky Kid Deluxe, the arcade update which has a range of minor differences. It was released by Arcade Archives for Switch and PS4, which I definitely support in theory, but absolutely cannot justify purchasing because… well, I’ve played Sky Kid twice now. That’ll do. Maybe I’ll see it in an arcade one day, I’d like to.
Developed/Published by: Jaelco Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 13/04/2025 Completion: Completed all 20 different levels (it loops.)
Well, more fool me. When I wrote about Ninja Jajamaru-kun, the game that precedes this in the series, I wrote that it “[didn’t do] enough to make me put up with ININ’s bullshit to get the sequels.”
Unfortunately, having a bunch of Nintendo gold coins to use up before they expired and seeing the Ninja JaJaMaru: Retro Collection going for $2.99 made me go “well, it’s basically free, why not.”
I’ll tell you why not: because… do ININ even like retro games? Are they just an avenue to prey on a group of willing suckers–i.e. retro game collectors? Because not only is the Ninja JaJaMaru: Retro Collection bare bones, it doesn’t even work correctly.
Now, feel free to consider this anecdotal because I’ve only tested this on my Nintendo Switch Lite–and no youtubers or the like have really covered this release in depth (I imagine it’s niche enough to not have done that well.) But if you try and play JaJaMaru no Daibouken with the included CRT shader on it creates so much slowdown that you actually can’t play the game. It completely tanks.
It runs fine if you don’t have the CRT shader on, but, frankly, I’m a CRT boy. I don’t care if it’s even that good a shader or filter (notable exception: the excretable one on the Astro City Mini) just as long as it does something to muddy up the graphics. The games were literally designed to be seen on a tiny crappy telly via a noisy RF cable, so it just feels wrong to me to see them all crispy and HD.
So that was $2.99 down the fucking drain–but at least I haven’t dropped money on the Turrican Anthology or something [“yet”–Ed.] But let it not be said I’m one for giving up. Thanks to my trusty Trimui Brick I could quickly and easily get set up to play this through with an acceptable CRT filter, and I suppose that’s the way I’ll play the rest of this collection (god knows I’m not picking up a Switch 2 to try and see if it improves the performance of a CRT shader…)
But, uh, let’s actually talk about JaJaMaru no Daibouken, eh?
It’s rubbish.
Will I ever play it again? No!
Final Thought: Oh, alright, I should probably say more than that. So… I suppose the interesting thing is that JaJaMaru no Daibouken came out just under a year after Super Mario Bros. (Ninja JaJaMaru-kun was released after Super Mario Bros. too, actually) and it’s the first obvious Super Mario Bros. clone I’ve played chronologically. Sure, it’s possible Pac-Land for Famicom was rushed out after matter of weeks in development (though unlikely) but that was based on a pre-existing design, and Wonder Boy doesn’t feel that much like Super Mario Bros. when we’re being completely honest.
But JaJaMaru no Daibouken feels like exactly what you get if you ask someone to take the art and engine from Ninja JaJaMaru-kun and turn it into Super Mario Bros.: it’s got side-scrolling levels, blocks JaJaMaru has to hit with his head to get coins and power-ups out of, and… well, I mean, that’s enough. It’s not exactly the Great Giana Sisters, but the “hit blocks with your head” thing is enough. Case closed!
I’ve previously mentioned that the original Super Mario Bros. doesn’t actually feel that good to play–we’ve just all misremembered that, because the later ones do–so I can’t really beat up on JaJaMaru no Daibouken for not controlling that well (floaty jumps and that.) What I can beat it up for is just being so bloody half-arsed. Levels look like they just threw down blocks in any old combination, and although the game features 20 levels, but half of those are boss battles that you don’t even have to complete–if you die, you just go to the next level and don’t even lose a life. And the game doesn’t have an ending or anything, it just loops. Which actually leads to the ridiculous situation that you can reach the “final” boss, fail to rescue Princess Sakura, and then… just go to the second loop. Deeply uninspiring.
JaJaMaru no Daibouken keeps a lot of the flavour of the (by this point) established JaJaMaru franchise, though, which doesn’t as much feel like something they did to differentiate as much as it’s just what they had lying around. The power-ups act like they do in the previous game and JaJaMaru’s uncontrollable frog pal Gamapakkun shows up too, albeit rarely. Though weirdly, the most interesting mechanic from JaJaMaru-kun, that you have to jump on enemies heads so you can shoot them, doesn’t show up here! (Maybe they thought it was getting too close to Giana Sisters-esque “let’s get sued” territory.) There’s an annoying learning curve in that you’ll never know which enemies kill you on touch and which don’t until, well, you’ve been killed by them, and weirdly one enemy that shows up right at the end, the Tanuki, can’t be killed but you can jump on their head to stun them. So… half of a mechanic from JaJaMaru-kun, for one enemy, just to confuse us, as a treat.
It’s all very inconsistent, but because of the terrible level design, you quickly work out that you’re just supposed to run through the levels ignoring all the enemies as much as possible. While it’s true this is optimum for Super Mario Bros. too, the level design there ensures you engage with enemies in interesting ways. Here your engagement is generally things like “oh an enemy spawned directly in front of me and killed me with a projectile before I could react.” or… actually it’s usually that one.
JaJaMaru no Daibouken is over very quickly, so it’s a very minor waste of life. But it is a waste, I won’t lie.
Developed/Published by: Infocom Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 18/04/2025 Completion: Completed it. 304/304 points (though points are random and I believe you get them all just in the process of beating the game.)
Phworr, eh lads? Etc.
Right, that’s me got all the 90’s video game magazine parlance out of the way [“you forgot ‘or something’ and to do a made-up Ed’s note”–made-up Ed.] so I can put my “pretending to be a serious games historian” hat on for the first Infocom game I’ve played since Trinity–surprisingly, all the way back in 2023. If you’ve been following along, you’ll be aware I’ve been picking and choosing Infocom games to play through, leaning towards the work of Steven Meretzky, and I’ve been looking forward to playing this for a while, his “return” to a more normal sort of adventure game after the big swing (and commercial miss) of A Mind Forever Voyaging.
Based on a joke title Meretzky posted on a whiteboard featuring upcoming releases for Infocom, Leather Goddesses of Phobos is a strange release, I think. Infocom had always made games for adults, but never “adult” games, and there hadn’t really been any commercial “adult” games for years at this point. Softporn Adventure came out in 1981, and unless you’re Portuguese and have fond memories of Paradise Cafe for ZX Spectrum that was about your lot. So it seems like quite a gamble for Infocom to release something that appears so risque–but then Leather Goddesses of Phobos isn’t really an adult game at all. In fact, it’s barely smutty at its most extreme, and Meretzky, wanting to drum up a bit of controversy after the failure of an anti-Reaganite art game, decided “sex sells” and Infocom as a group went for it: digging through Meretzky’s papers, he sent a sheet of possible game ideas to the other imps (this may have been the standard procedure at Infocom?) for his next game, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos won out, where its sexual content was expressed as “very soft-core; see Barbarella as an example.” (it doesn’t even go that far, to my eyes.)
(The sheet is quite illuminating in general, a kind of ideation that I recognise as a game developer. We have another attempt, I think, to court a bit of controversy with “The Interactive Bible”, an interesting if not-yet-fully-baked design idea “Blazing Parsers” and then something that’s optimistically trying to make making a game quicker, “The Viable Idea.” Personally, I’m sad we never saw an Infocom spaghetti western.)
Unlike some other Infocom releases, I don’t really have any personal history with Leather Goddesses of Phobos outside of memories of the (very) mildly titillating screenshots of its sequel, Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X! In fact, the main thing I have to say is that I only realised this wasn’t called “Leather Goddess of Phobos” after playing it for a bit, which won’t make me cry “Mandela Effect” as much as “Goddesses is such an inelegant word, it’s bizarre it isn’t just Leather Goddess. My brain was correct, reality wasn’t.”
But anyway, what is it actually like to play Leather Goddess(es) of Phobos?
I’ve been a bit up and down on the Infocom games I’ve played–some might say unnecessarily hard on them, judging them by the coddled standards of 2025. But Leather Goddesses of Phobos gets off to a good start. Unlike Trinity, where you essentially never know what you’re actually trying to do overall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos more or less immediately has a character hand you a laundry list of items to collect, and then you go “oh, I guess I just have to collect these, then.”
As good as that is, it’s also a little… underwhelming. Having picked and chosen, I’m aware that I’ve not seen everything that Infocom has to offer, but I’m still surprised that I haven’t played an Infocom game since Deadline (their third game) that gave me any sense of anything except a static world. Leather Goddesses of Phobos gives you a Floyd-like companion (Trent, or Tiffany) but they barely seem to exist, and even when you meet characters in the world they feel so… un-interactive. Maybe, at best, they take part in a little vignette.
I suppose with Leather Goddesses of Phobos I’m really realising–and perhaps chafing against–the limitations of the text adventure at least in the mid-1980s. In some respects, you want a text adventure to have the feeling of a book; limitless, enveloping imagination. But in other respects, you want to play it like a game. You want to be reacted to. It’s probably, why, to be honest, characters have been so sparse in these games–because when you try and interact with a character, and they don’t do anything, or it feels wrong, the illusion of being on an adventure is broken. You’re not reading a book, you’re on a dark ride and suddenly the lights slam on and you’re aware you’re looking at a mannequin, not the king of Mars.
Somehow, the fact that characters in Deadline might like… walk into another room just abated that, and I’m not asking for characters to roam across the planet here, but maybe if they piped up a bit more. Felt a bit more worth talking to. The issue with making a “funny” game is that so much of comedy is character work, and here, really, the only character is the parser.
But I’m being a bit harsh, because Leather Goddesses of Phobos is otherwise an extremely solid classic rooms and items, bread and butter text adventure. The best I’ve played since Meretsky’s own Planetfall, and arguably the best I’ve played full stop. It’s understandable, accessible, and I never had to use an Invisiclue to the point where it just told me what to do–well, except in one particular case.
That one I’m just going to spoil, actually. One of the things that makes Leather Goddesses of Phobos work so well is how well integrated the feelies are. Sure, I don’t have the box to hand, but there’s a comic which includes a couple of direct hints for some puzzles, a map which is unbelievably necessary and helpful, and a scratch and sniff card, which I’m sure nearly 40 years later is completely useless even if you opened a brand new box, but which is a really cute and silly B movie-adjacent idea that’s perfectly fitting. One of the things it does is prompt you to “smell” things in the game to work out what they are (which it thankfully tells you in text–scratch and sniff cards have always barely worked). Early in the game (for me–the game is fairly open ended) you sniff and discover some chocolate, which, of course, you’ll hang on to. Later, for reasons, your mind will be transferred into a gorilla. But you’re not strong enough to break out of the cage. I assume you can see where this is going: you need to eat the chocolate to get strong enough to break out of the cage.
You know, that famous thing about gorillas. That chocolate makes them strong.
This is, obviously, nonsense. The only animal-related fact I know about chocolate is that it kills dogs and I certainly wasn’t hanging onto it in the game expecting I’d use it to kill a poodle or something [“you said ‘or something’ after all”–90s Ed.] Considering that banana is one of the most recognisable smells you could possibly use on a scratch-and-sniff card, I had to assume that Meretsky simply thought that giving you a banana would be too obvious a solution so went with the impossible to work out chocolate, but I couldn’t find anything in his notes to reflect that. According to the ever reliable Digital Antiquarian, Meretsky tested the scratch and sniff scents on the other imps to select the most recognisable scents to then use in the game, and I do think it adds insult to injury that one of those chosen scents actually *was* banana! But it’s used elsewhere!!!
I even found a playtester who complained about this exact puzzle:
“It is reasonable to not eat the chocolate and even suspect the sugar rush, but why oh why would you put the chocolate in the cage?”
I suppose he’s more complaining that this game features more than one puzzle which requires hindsight, and to be honest, they should have fixed those too. But in general, Leather Goddess of Phobos is logical and fair, while still managing to make puzzles funny and clever–the best of The Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy without the worst of it. There’s a puzzle about kissing a frog that will immediately put you in mind of the famous babel fish (and which made me laugh out loud) and a puzzle involving a mysterious machine and wordplay that is so perfect and silly that it’s maybe one of my favourite things in an adventure game ever–possibly worth the price of admission alone.
The game does still undercut itself though–for seemingly no reason. There are definitely ways to manufacture yourself a no-win, dead man-walking situation, for example, all of which I miraculously managed to dodge due to the order I did things in, and I definitely had a few puzzles where by all rights I was just lucky to not have to resort to clues. One object on your list you need to specifically look somewhere you might not look to find, and then you need to be really specific with the parser to do what you need to do to get it. Another requires a vignette that you need to be in time for (though that one I immediately sussed what was up–the “dead end” was just so suspicious to me. But I reached it almost at the end of the game–if I’d got there early, I could have had to replay nearly the entire game.)
The game’s maze–which people find famously annoying–is a perfect example of how the game undercuts itself. You have the map in hand. You have the required clue. If you’re patient, it’s actually really satisfying to navigate it, and I did so… and then the torch I was using burned out, and I had to do the whole thing again much more efficiently. Close to hundreds of turns. It was so unnecessary! I was having fun!!! Why punish me for not being perfect!!!
These moments, however, are far rarer than you’d expect. I noted above that the game is fairly open ended, and I’m not sure if there’s a “preferred” way to work through the game, but as I said above in my playthrough I never entered a vignette where I didn’t have something to hand I needed (though it’s possible, I’m sure) and if I got stuck somewhere there was always somewhere else to go for me to solve something else. I never put this down annoyed–well, apart from the fucking maze. Well, not the fucking maze–the fucking torch (I honestly did think the maze was clever.)
I think the thing about Leather Goddesses of Phobos is… it’s probably as good as one of these things is going to get without a much more modern design philosophy. You know what you need to do and every time you sit down and play it you get a little closer to doing it–and it’s charming while you do it. But it’s never sexy. I did play it on the “LEWD” setting and took every opportunity for a bonk, because I’m still thirteen at heart, but my dander remained unfrothed; it doesn’t even reach the heights of Alter Ego! I guess I’ll see how I get on with [checks to-play list] Leisure Suit Larry??? Eugh!
Will I ever play it again? You know, it’s possible. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. And I will play Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X!, which I don’t believe anyone likes. Because why not.
Final Thought: In some respects, Leather Goddesses of Phobos suffers for not being something special like A Mind Forever Voyaging, but it also sort of is, as the last true success Infocom would release before the company began an unstoppable slide into oblivion, and for that alone it should be celebrated. At the very least, if you like text adventures, though, you know how to play them, and you can live with the idea you might have to reload a save on occasion, this is a solid couple of tevenings. Oh sorry, I mistyped… tevenings. There must be a mysterious machine around here somewhere for that…
Developed/Published by: Jon Ritman, Bernie Drummond / Ocean Software Released: 05/1986 Completed: 01/04/2025 Completion: Finished it. God help me I finished it.
It all seemed so simple.
Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond’s “Head Over Heels” is a big video game (or should I say, computer game) in the personal history of Mathew; bought because it was so lauded in the likes of Amstrad Action, it really did blow me away once I played it: a true adventure featuring two protagonists with different abilities that you have to use together. It seemed like a work of genius to me.
So when I was looking over 1986’s releases, I noticed the pair’s previous isometric action adventure, Batman, and thought it might make sense to play. See if the magic of Head Over Heels was there from the beginning, and set the table for a replay of Head Over Heels at some point in the future.
I’d consider Batman a bit of a joke in the non-UK gaming community, probably because anyone who is looking up Batman video games is going to discover that the first Batman game is a ZX Spectrum release that features Batman wandering around an isometric, bizarrely decorated Batcave looking for parts of the “Batcraft” where the enemies look like melted dogs and basically touching anything kills you. It’s just so weird, lol!!!
What’s generally forgotten in the discussion is that in the mid-1980s, no one gave a fuck about Batman. It had been nearly twenty years since the TV show and Wikipedia notes that even Batman comics circulation had reached an “all time low” by 1985. His fortunes would turn around rapidly–The Dark Knight Returns would actually start being published before Ritman and Drummond’s Batman would come out–but considering the era, from Ocean’s perspective it will have been an opportunistic gamble: grab a cheap license on death’s door and try and squeeze some more juice out of it. And they did give it to one of their best developers, who’d already given them a lot of success with the Match Day franchise. Clearly it wouldn’t matter too much that he could barely remember who Batman was…
Anyway–I’m just going to cut to the chase here and say that this took me about six months to finish, and as a result I’ve lost most of the specific game history I’d dug up about it and all that remains is a lot of vague “I read somewhere that Ritman said…”. So don’t quote me on anything but my memory is that Ritman has been quoted as saying that he wanted to best Knight Lore, and then Drummond came in and started drawing like a cyclops head with flippers and he was like “alright!”
Knowing this, I should probably have played Knight Lore first, but getting into Rare’s entire back catalogue would be a whole other thing, so I can just say that even with a prior understanding of the isometric action adventure, Batman is a brutal experience.
First things first: it’s really hard to parse visually on the original ZX Spectrum. The environments are surprisingly detailed, but because it’s all in monochrome, it’s really quite hard to discern what everything is, and no way to tell what’s going to kill you when you touch it. I had hopes that the Amstrad CPC version with its wider range of colours might fix that, but there’s no consistency from room to room so it sort of just looks insane.
If you want to play this in 2025 with normal human eyes, there’s a fantastic remake by Retrospec (that’s, er, fifteen years old itself), or you can go back and play “Watman” a DOS remake from 2000 (so closer to the release of the original than now.) However if you’re really determined to play this (which I don’t recommend) what I recommend is to play the MSX2 remake. It’s pretty much what you’d imagine the ZX Spectrum original to be if it had full color–right down to the performance.
And, of course, then you get the ability to quicksave and load, because without that I’d have never been able to finish this in a million years.
The version I played looked like this. Significantly easier to parse.
It’s not simply that Batman is full of things that kill you. It’s that the game is designed to force you to play perfectly from the first screen. Enemies seem to have a truly random movement routine (hope you love shuffling around waiting for them to select a direction away from you) but that’s not an issue as much as that there’s no leeway in the collision detection, and in fact the game is designed around that, generally requiring that if you want to make a jump you actually have to position Batman so he’s got about one pixel left on the platform he’s “standing on” so you can reach the next. Hilariously, the manual makes excuses for this:
“To make certain jumps it is necessary to hang by the ‘merest thread’ on the edge of the Carbon Re-inforced Batcloak – you may need practice to perfect this feature!”
This isn’t even the funniest excuse in the manual, which also notes,
“The Joker and the Riddler do not appear ‘in person’ in the game, as Batman is all too familiar with their image. The henchmen they have selected are unfamiliar to Batman and this further complicates his task.”
So yes, the game is exacting. And with 150 rooms to explore, it’s also bloody confusing. It’s actually not as non-linear as you might think–a lot of directions you go don’t really head anywhere–but once you get deeper into the game your head will spin, and every game over feels like being kicked full in the groin when you realise how difficult it’s going to be to get back to where you were (although the game features a save system of sorts based on when you pick up particular collectibles, it’s unforgiving at best.)
And on top of all that, the puzzles are intense. I will have to go back to Knight Lore to see just how complicated things are there, but it’s a bit like when you go back and look at things like Wizardry or The Bard’s Tale. You’d expect that these genre originators would be simple, but somehow they’re significantly more complicated and off-putting.
Here, you can sense Ritman almost understanding how to provide an on-ramp for players as the game is designed that you first collect Batman’s gear, slowly growing his abilities as you go (you can’t even jump at first) in a smaller section of the map that’s particularly linear. But one of the very first puzzles will kill you multiple times because it requires that you walk the wrong way on an invisible conveyor belt and then do a pixel perfect jump????
It soon gets absolutely absurd. I’m not going to lie. After beating my head against this game for months off and on–struggling to understand the maps I was able to find (isometric maps on paper are confusing!)–I eventually just started watching and carefully following someone’s playthrough on YouTube (a playthrough that, notably, they die a bunch of times on.)
I usually love using contemporary maps and walkthroughs. But you try and work this from Amstrad Action Issue 9 out (it spreads over two more pages!)
This revealed to me that certain screens had insanely unintuitive solutions that I just don’t think I’d ever have worked out. The screen where you have to catch a wizard’s hat and then catch an enemy on top of said hat otherwise they’ll block your path. The screen where you have to manipulate several teapots to reveal a completely hidden piece of the batcraft. Or my favouite, the screen where you have to time dropping a spring on the top of an enemy’s head so you can ride them and jump off at the right time to get to the exit???
I have no idea how anyone did any of this in the first place. Playing Batman has to be ones of the most demoralising gaming experience I’ve ever had, genuinely feeling like being trapped in a carnival funhouse until I can solve a rubik’s cube while a car alarm goes off (don’t play this without making Batman’s footsteps silent…)
I’m aware, though, that a lot of people don’t feel this way, considering it’s been remade so many times! Which actually makes me extremely worried that Head Over Heels isn’t the masterpiece that I remember it being.
Well, guess I’ll find out soon enough!
Will I ever play it again? I played it more than anyone ever should.
Final Thought: Certain things just aren’t worth beating, and I’ve definitely given up on things before, but my fealty to my memory of Head Over Heels really was overpowering to the point where I thought I had to, that I would simply find something here. And to be fair, by the end of my playthrough, I was dying far less, and I could probably get through a significant chunk of the game now legitimately if I really wanted to.
Developed/Published by: Interplay Productions / EA (original), Krome Studios / InXile Entertainment (remaster) Released: 12/1985 Completed: 05/02/2025 Completion: Finished it.
I’ve been itching to play an old school western RPG recently–really want to see some numbers go up–and got really excited when I discovered The Gold Box Companion, a companion app for SSI’s legendary Dungeons and Dragons RPGs that–because I was too young for them at the time–completely passed me by.
However… I couldn’t help but feel I’d be skipping a bit too far forward on my (personally imposed) chronology if I jumped to playing Pools of Radiance–I wasn’t satisfied when I played Pirates! that I had the historical context I wanted–that I nosed around a bit to see if there was something I’d previously skipped that might fit the bill.
Hence: The Bard’s Tale.
Now, I’d previously skipped this because I’d heard that it was, frankly, a bit boring. Actually, I was basing that entirely on The Digital Antiquarian saying “long before the end of the first Bard’s Tale it’s starting to get a bit tedious” which probably isn’t entirely fair. But what drew me back was that The Bard’s Tale is one of those games that I think many who grew up in the “video game magazine” generation have–a game that I read about two sentences about but was always longing for.
It’s funny the things that lodge in your mind, isn’t it? Here’s the reader’s letter from Amstrad Action that’s stuck with me since literally 1991:
“Well, if this dork wants it so badly, it must be great!”
What’s funny is that in the intervening, uh, thirty years [“lies. The 90s are ten years ago”–Ed.] I managed to forget, I guess, that Amstrad Action’s “Balrog” ran an entire “The Bard’s Tale Club” section culminating with a short walkthrough just a few issues earlier.
Interestingly, I think this is one of those things where I can see myself maturing in real time–in the matter of months I went from a wean who skipped the Balrog section because it wasn’t about, like, arcade games, to a wee guy who was at least interested in them. That or a guy pretending to be a gnome caught my eye.
All I remember is that I’d missed my chance to get The Bard’s Tale. So, here I am, thirty [“ten… I’ll go as far as fifteen”–Ed.] years later, finally living my childish dreams.
First: if I’d got this in 1991 I’d have been completely baffled by it. Within a few short years I’d be playing Ultima Underworld, but I didn’t really even play that properly, and The Bard’s Tale requires, like Wizardry, a deep understanding of RPG character creation and party management. And also like Wizardry, it’s about as brutal as an RPG can get, killing your party or giving them debilitating, expensive-to-cure status effects that require you shlep all the way back to a temple to solve, in maps that wrap (no! Not again!!!) and are absolutely louping with spinners, traps and dark zones.
In some respects, I’m lucky that I mostly relied on luck and parental largesse to get computer games.
I’m also lucky that there’s a remake of The Bard’s Tale in the form of Krome Studios’ The Bards Tale Trilogy: Remastered, which rights-holder InXile Entertainment had them make (after, interestingly, a remaster from the team of one of the original developers, Rebecca Heineman unfortunately fell through). I’ll be honest, I was originally not planning on playing it, because it has genuinely awful Super2xSal-quality upscaled art. The game looks like this:
When in its best contemporary ports, it looked like this:
I know which I’d rather look at, though in some respects I thank god that the remake came out before they could us AI to upscale it all and make something that looked even worse. The benefit of playing this (nasty) looking versions outweigh the pain of looking at it though, because not only does it make a lot of quality of life improvements such as a shared inventory and doubled experience, it plays perfectly with a controller–so you can even play it with a Steam Deck comfortably.
If you’re a purist, however (and I don’t actually blame you) I have to admit that the version I played isn’t exactly The Bard’s Tale, as the “trilogy” version aligns all three games design, so in this version there are distance mechanics in the combat (enemies can start some distance from you and you have to advance on them) and bows and arrows are added, which I suspect changes the feel of the combat quite a bit. But to be honest, I can live with it. And I never used bows and arrows anyway.
Enough personal history. For the real history, you can of course go to someone like the aforementioned Digital Antiquarian, but it’s worth noting that even though The Bard’s Tale entered my own personal history in 1991, it was released in 1985 and is, I think surprisingly to modern eyes, the best selling computer RPG of the 1980s, selling a reported 407,000 copies.
I say surprisingly because The Bard’s Tale hasn’t lingered in the cultural imagination the way that RPGs such as Wizardry or Ultima have. It wasn’t first; it didn’t inspire much (Japanese RPGs were already divergent by 1985) and the series didn’t evolve any better than Wizardry did. By 1991, the year I discovered it, a cash-in construction set was released for anyone who hadn’t already moved on to the more active style of dungeon crawler begat by Dungeon Master, and it wouldn’t be seen again until The Bard’s Tale in 2004, which is a Bard’s Tale game in name only.
If you’re wondering what made The Bard’s Tale so successful, but then so irrelevant, it comes down to the fact that it is, ultimately, just a Wizardry clone that happened to come out on the popular C64 with nicer graphics than Wizardry years before Wizardry would reach the system, and be pushed by the already mature (and not yet fully soulless) EA.
Designed by Michael Cranford, it was his second attempt to directly make a Wizardry killer after HesWare’s apparently flawed Maze Master. For some reason, The Bard’s Tale is particularly known for the development team all sniping at each other publicly for years after the game’s launch (it even makes the Wikipedia) but it’s all so “he said, she said” and feels kind of… un-illuminating about the game. At least, it doesn’t add anything. The only part I find particularly interesting is that this game is officially called “Tales Of The Unknown: Volume I: The Bard’s Tale” because (and there is some argument over this) the series was supposed to be called “Tales Of The Unknown” but–and this might be a sign of EA’s encroaching soullessness–it was felt “The Bard’s Tale” was better known, so it got dropped.
(And if you’re wondering why I find that interesting, it’s because it would happen again with The Legend of Kyrandia, which was actually supposed to be the “Fables & Fiends” series. I’m not sure how many more examples of this there are.)
Anyway. As I said above, writing about the experience of playing The Bard’s Tale feels almost exactly like writing about Wizardry, bar for a few twists (I like to believe if they’d kept to “Tales Of The Unknown” maybe the sequels would have diverged more.) The main twist people get excited about is that you navigate the town in the same way that you navigate the dungeons (step-by-step 3D movement) but let me tell you this–it just means you have to do an annoying amount of schlepping about and fighting piddly enemies when you want to heal or level up, and I’d honestly rather a menu. The thing I felt like I felt I did the most in The Bard’s Tale was stand around outside the “Review Board” save scumming to try and make sure my level up rolls were good…
The rest of the game, despite featuring several dungeons, ultimately boils down to what you’ll do in Wizardry–try and find the best way to grind so you can kill the final boss. In the original game, this was a particular repeatable battle, which led to one of my best ever “this is too specific, that’s not how memes work” memes, clattering out to complete silence:
What a hilarious meme! You should repost this a hundred times.
But in the remake, which has a smoother curve (and only lets you do this battle once) you can get away with just ordinary grinding (thankfully). Now, the game does actually feature some puzzle solving–you do have to find and collect certain items–but moreso than Wizardry, I realised how much I miss a “proper” quest and side-quest system. Here you have to notice text prompts when you step in certain squares (which zoom off the screen immediately in the remake which means you’ll never see them–a big mistake) and piece them together, but getting deeper into dungeons is grimly unrewarding when that’s all you get. I started my game mapping this properly, but the maps get worse than Wizardry even faster! So much of the dungeons in this game are made up of “dark” squares that you feel like you’re navigating almost the entire game blind, to the point where I almost can’t imagine trying to complete this without having another map at hand and the in-game automap (I can hear the hardcore crusty RPG types rolling their eyes here…)
It could be alleviated, perhaps, if you could enjoy the combat, but there is almost no strategy to it. While it may partially be a flaw of the remake (where the updates fly off the screen at a hundred miles an hour) The Bard’s Tale has a bizarre difficulty scaling where you start by having your entire team killed by a single mouse holding a feather duster and about an hour later are fighting a squad of forty vampires at once. While it’s extremely funny to imagine them trying to all squeeze into a corridor, the problem is that your melee characters are just meat shields for your magic users. I made myself up the kind of squad that gets recommended for The Bard’s Tale and as much effort as I put into my critical-hit focused “Hunter” character (usually my favourite kind of RPG character! I love them crits!) I barely noticed them doing anything at all with their piddly single hit on one enemy compared to my magic users, who by mid-game have a spell that can wipe out every enemy you’re facing in a battle at once.
The game’s focus on the magic users makes it seem even odder that the series ended up going under The Bard’s Tale moniker. While your melee types are stuck in their starting class, your magic users are expected to change class each time they fill their classes’ spellbook, and they start again from level one keeping all their stats (quite unlike Wizardry…) meaning that by the end of the game you have spellcasters who look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime hiding behind a flesh wall. The only reason you can’t ignore melee completely is that your magic users’ armour class is so bad–and that matters when you’re facing off against four squads of sixty enemies at least some of whom might get an individual hit off each before you’re able to hit them with the equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
(This magic user focus is symbolic of author intent, however. As Michael Cranford would explain in his GDC post-mortem of The Bard’s Tale and its sequel, he was “bored” by melee combat and was interested in making a game with seven different spell-casting classes that your characters would learn until they were able to become archmages, with melee combat your fallback when you ran out of mana. Although this was cut back to four classes with the archmage showing up in the sequel, this original idea explains everything about why The Bard’s Tale plays the way it does.)
But let’s be real here: the majority of The Bard’s Tale you spend not save-scumming level ups to make sure your spell-casters can mow down enemies like they’ve got a gatling gun is spend stumbling around in the dark or in battles you barely notice happening. The only real moments of tension are when you get given one of the many annoying status effects (reload–it’s not worth the hassle) or when you have to get out of the dungeon, because the game (sort of interestingly?) gives you absolutely no way to regenerate mana unless you’re outside1, so your grinding sessions are always limited by how long your mana lasts. But because you get so many level-ups with your magic users, it’s not much of a problem (by the middle of the game, I was staying down collecting three or four level ups before bothering to climb back out of a dungeon.)
The problem, sometimes, with playing a game like this is that devoid of the context–an old home computer, months of free time, it being the fucking 1980s–you play it as the object it is, rather than the experience it represented. Everything I’ve said is all true, but if you were loading this up on your C64 (or Amstrad!) with a bundle of paper maps in front of you and the latest “Bard’s Tale Club” tips, nursing your RPG party across months, slowly getting deeper into each dungeon, finding and writing down all the clues, I can see The Bard’s Tale as the evolution–a small evolution, but an evolution–of the Wizardry design it is.
You could recreate this if you really wanted! But the problem is that there are simply more fun, deeper, more interesting, less punishing ways to spend your time not even now–even then. Playing the first The Bard’s Tale, the same as playing the first Wizardry, you understand why they died out so quickly for not adapting. When they aren’t all you’ve got, they aren’t what you want.
The funny thing is, that I’ll still remember The Bard’s Tale fondly. Not for when I played it–but when I imagined it.
It looked like this on the CPC, too. Still better.
Will I ever play it again? You can continue the series seamlessly in The Bard’s Tale Trilogy, but the dungeons in the first game are so horrible I would never do this to myself.
Final Thought: Alright, you’ve read everything I’ve written and you still want to play this. You want to say you’ve played the most important RPGs! I get it. So next time, for supporters only: How to beat The Bard’s Tale!
You can find magic items that let you regenerate mana in dungeons but I never found any. And there’s the occasional regen spot in a dungeon, but I only found a couple. So the point stands, largely. ↩︎
Developed/Published by: A.G. Cartlidge / Gemini Released: 1983 Completed: 02/12/2024 Completion: Delivered five presents to Santa.
Altogether now, in our best Noddy Holder impression: It’s CHRISTMAS! And here at exp. Towers that means we… play through ropey old Christmas games that we’ve dug up because maybe it’ll make us feel festive, although normally it just makes us shake our head in despair, thinking about a situation where anyone received these games and then had to play them because they didn’t have anything else to play.
So here’s Sleighbells1 for BBC Micro, which I think is the first time that arguably the UK’s most important home computer has shown up here on exp.. As part of the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project, it exposed entire generations to computers for the first time (and the BBC Micro was still being used in some schools until the mid/late 90s so it crossed from Boomers all the way to late Millennials). While I think that the most understandable point of comparison for non-Brits might be the Apple II, being a more expensive, sort of schooly “real” computer, I don’t think that really captures the utopian nature of the BBC Micro and the associated project (which you can read all about in NESTA’s excellent “The Legacy of the BBC Micro” white paper): an attempt to create a wide cultural change where the general British public would become truly educated in the tools that were going to change the entire world. To not just watch computers change everything: but take part in it.
When you think about that–and especially when you read the white paper–you can’t help but become a bit disappointed in the world we live in now. How computers work has become completely unknown to the average person, and our ability to control them has become ever sanded off as we get pushed into walled gardens and proprietary systems, and our governments seem to have absolutely no imagination in trying to actually transform society, at best hoping corporations might help regions “level up” rather than just suck money out, but mostly trying to keep enough blame on immigrants and minorities that struggling people don’t stop and consider a better world might be possible.
Sorry, this isn’t very Christmassy, is it?
Now. I’d love to follow this train of thought to explain something that I’ve often wondered about–that the BBC Micro seems to get discussed so much less in retro circles than contemporaries like the ZX Spectrum. Is it possible that utopian promises, long dashed, simply make us too ashamed to remember the venerable Micro? That it reminds us, always, that another United Kingdom was possible?
Not really. It’s just that the BBC Micro was really expensive, most people only played educational games or used LOGO on it, and commercial games outside of a venerable few were… a bit crap. Even compared to the likes of the Speccy.
But back to Sleighbells. While it does seem like Santa’s Sleigh Ride is the first Christmas game ever (look, I’m just not going to count Christmas Show and Tell) I keep finding new Christmas games that could easily be the second–it seems like 1983 was a big year for Christmas for some reason.
Packaged in generic box art and featuring absolutely no sleigh bells, Sleighbells is a multi-screen game that probably has some arcade inspiration but I’d be very hard pushed to work out what it is. Narratively, Jack Frost, who always seems to have a problem with Santa, has stolen all the presents, and so as Santa’s assistant you have to venture into his secret cave and steal them all back. You do this across four screens:
On the first screen, you have to get to the entrance while avoiding a gang of snowmen who make a beeline towards you.
On the second, you just have to run through the cave, avoiding the snowflakes that fall.
On the third, you… do the same thing again, but there are snowmen popping out of the ground and there’s a bat flying about that will kill you literally the instant the level begins unless you move forward immediately. Fun!
On the fourth, you’re supposed to catch the presents being pushed off ledges by… spiders(?) and move them to the left of the screen. The presents can squash you and that bloody bat is still there, but there’s absolutely no time pressure or anything so the first time I played this I just stood thinking I was “collecting” presents and wondering when the level was going to time out until I realised I had to move them one by one to the edge of the screen.
And that’s it, although it loops if you haven’t gone completely doolally with all the excitement.
This is, of course, rubbish, only remarkable because of how annoyingly difficult it seems at first (the snowmen mob you immediately, and that bat can fuck off) but once you get it it’s just a test of patience really. It does have a very festive title screen with a bleepy rendition of Jingle Bells, but that’s about as far as I’ll go.
Festive vibes ranking: LOW
Will I ever play it again? No!
Final Thought: Something I would be remiss to mention is that the spirit of the BBC Micro does live on in the form of the Raspberry Pi, which does see lots of ordinary people learning how to hack away at a very open computer format, even it is usually just to get a media server running, or a emulation box. It might have been nice, as Ian Livingston pitched, if the device had led to a second Computer Literacy Project as the BBC Nano though.
It’s Sleigh Bells on the title screen, but “Sleighbells” on the box. I guess I’ve decided house style is to say the box is correct. But this probably doesn’t come up much outside of slapdash home computer games. ↩︎
It seems contrarian for me to open this by saying this is definitely the best game of 2024 and it’s definitely going to be my favourite game of the year… but it’s true.
The thing, I suppose, that makes that kind of wild, declarative statement seem so difficult to declare is that… games are just so broad, aren’t they? Playing something like Thank Goodness You’re Here! is so unbelievably different from playing, say, my favourite game of last year, Hi-Fi Rush, that it doesn’t feel as easy to say as declaring one movie “the best film of the year.” I mean in that case, you still just sit there and watch a movie. There’s not quite the same… granularity of experience. I mean even if you were talking indie games, Balatro touches such a different part of my brain from Thank Goodness You’re Here! So how could I ever, really, compare them?
Well, you know what? Sometimes you gotta just stick your flag somewhere, and my flag goes in the top of a Yorkshire pudding, and when it unfurls it’s the flag… of Yorkshire. Which surprised me, because I’m Scottish, so normally it goes in the top of a Scotch pie, and it’s a Saltire, so I guess I really like Thank Goodness You’re Here!
To describe it, though, which is what you’ve paid for, Thank Goodness You’re Here is a non-evil Untitled Goose Game. You play, in some respects similarly, an agent of chaos in a small town: a tiny man with… jaundice(?) who has been sent to the town of Barnsworth to help the mayor, but end up in the tangle of everyone’s lives. You help them do things that sound explicitly rather simple like mowing a lawn to buying some soup… but it’s not simple at all.
Unlike Untitled Goose Game, your tiny man isn’t just a wee dick; you’re actually helping people, it just happens to be in a very anarchic fashion. You rise to the level of the town, rather than lowering it, so outside of a few smacky bum-bums, you never feel like you’re bullying anyone… well maybe that guy with the chimney. But the joke works.
It would be regressive to describe this game as “weird” or “crazy.” What it is, and what makes it so brilliant, is that it’s so British. If you love the era of British comedy that brought us things like Look Around You or Alan Partridge, you’ll feel right at home here, and I was genuinely laughing all the way through this. Mileage may vary: some jokes and sequences are unbelievably puerile, some are a little smutty; some are… disturbing, but there’s a joyful nature to this whole thing, and it’s all so rapid fire that if something falls flat, it’s not long before you’re laughing about something else.
I think also that the game has a near-perfect take on interactivity for this kind of story-based experience. Outside of special sequences basically all you can do is slap things or jump, but everything is reactive, and the level design is cleverly focused; your path through the game is a sequence of designed loops that you can’t deviate from, but as a result you don’t suffer from the kind of downtime you can struggle with in more open adventures and which can ruin immersion.
Here you’ll never return to an area and discover it static, how you left it, and have to waffle around trying to find X or Y; you’re always moving forward onto Z. I can hear the criticisms, but at least for me this never felt restrictive; the only issue I really had was feeling that I had to put the game down regularly lest I finish it too quickly–though it’s surprisingly lengthy for something featuring so much bespoke art and sequences, at almost five hours.
To be honest, the game manages something that I wish designers of interactive experiences–think your Meow Wolfs, your Sleep No Mores–would learn from, which is how to always be guiding your player forward through a space and yet still allow them to experience it at their own pace. Sure, it has the benefit of being able to lock doors behind you, and there aren’t 300 other tiny men with jaundice trying to do everything in it at the same time (though I’d love to see that?) but I couldn’t help but be impressed with the flow.
(This may relate to me seeing Sleep No More before it closes just before playing this, finding it a hard to navigate mess of meaningless rooms in a warehouse and thinking it was fucking rubbish.)
The reason, really, that this is my game of the year already is that it’s trying to do something specific and it’s doing it as unbelievably fucking well as anyone probably could. Your dexterity won’t be challenged, your brain won’t be taxed, but they don’t need to be. Sure it’s a funhouse mirror, but if someone was to ask me “What’s the UK like?” from now on, I’ll probably just say “Play Thank Goodness You’re Here!”
Will I ever play it again? Absolutely. Not for a long time, I think, but I didn’t technically see “everything” according to the achievements, and I’d like to.
Final Thought: For categorisation sake, I would like to mention that I do think that Thank Goodness You’re Here! is largely specifically English, and Northern English at that, but there are enough commonalities and it features a big role for Davey Swatpaz that I think it’s fair to think of it as extremely British anyway. And speaking of the excellent casting, Matt Berry is in this and as always he’s brilliant. There are few games where I’d say “I really hope you run out and buy this” but there are few things that are such polished diamonds, and even though this was funded by Panic, who apparently have enough money that they can piss it up on a wall on the world’s most niche handheld (hey, I still bought it) smaller games are having such a rough time of it that when they’re good we should really, you know, reward that. Don’t just do it for me; do it for Tiny Tom. Or Big Ron.*
Developed/Published by: Human Entertainment / Nintendo Released: 13/12/1991 Completed: n/a Completion: Won a few matches in exhibition and then tournament, but didn’t keep going for reasons I’ll explain.
There’s an international football tournament on, which means that, as usual, I want to play a football game so I can imagine that Scottish people could ever be good at football. As I didn’t have anything particular to play in mind I took a look for what was immediately accessible and fell upon Super Soccer, the SNES’s first footy game, and one which has some nostalgia for me.
An unusual sort of nostalgia, really, because I won’t ever have played it at the time. I mostly remember this as being one of the early hyped titles of the system in the UK. It wasn’t a launch title–I believe that the system launched with Super Mario World as the pack in and just F-Zero and Super Tennis on offer—but had to have come out pretty sharpish (Wikipedia actually lists it as releasing on the same day in the UK as the system, which feels wrong to me). Using mode 7 to create a 3D effect at a time when the most “3D” a football game would have felt was the three-quarters side-on view seen first in Atari’s Basketball (and when most people would consider top-down titles like Kick Off superior anyway) it really looked like a huge step up to me at the time, and I remember pouring over the screenshots in TOTAL! (my Nintendo magazine of choice) with this image sticking out in my mind, featuring the TOTAL! writers cartoony personas:
Even at the time though, I remember thinking… wasn’t the game going to be much harder if you’re running towards the screen?
Yes, Super Soccer has the exact problem that a small child in the early 90s could foresee, and a few others too. But let’s not get too negative too quickly, because in its way, Super Soccer plays a decent game of football. Er… sort of. You’ve got the ability to target a pass (and change who you target), do a low pass/shot, and a high shot when you’ve got the ball. When you don’t, you can do the traditional sliding tackle, but also the more unusual “shoulder barge” to knock your opponent away from the ball. This is generally considered by players a bit of a liberty that Super Soccer is taking with the rules of association football, but I have to say it functionally doesn’t work any different from non-sliding tackles you generally get in other games, except that the punishment is a bit reversed. In most games, sliding tackles are the dangerous ones, likely to end up in a yellow or a red card, here your shoulder barge does seem to be implied to be more of a rugby tackle and you can easily end up with a red immediately off them, which generally seems to come if you do it from behind (but it might also be totally random–I ended up with a game with 4 players being sent off, so I can’t really be sure.) There’s a bit of risk/reward, let’s say.
Once you get used to the controls–and if you’re playing in the direction where you can see the goal–this is… fine! The most major issue really is that there’s no indication of which player you’re actually controlling, so in particular the targeted pass seems basically useless because it’s got that thing where you pass, but you’re moving in a direction, so the guy you’re passing to you switch to control and they… run away from the ball. In general though the ball sticks to your player so you can rely on careful low passes and dodging around to try and keep possession, and when defending just hope for the best. Goals aren’t effortless, but really only because it’s hard to get into position for them; if you can basically line yourself up just inside the goal posts on either side you’ll almost certainly score, which makes them a bit underwhelming. Or impossible, if you’re running towards the screen, because the goal doesn’t even come on screen until you’re practically running the ball into the keeper’s hands.
This would be a perfectly fine knock-around footy game–and I bet it was for anyone who had two controllers and at least one mate–but for the fact that it’s so bare-bones. The first huge problem, of course, is that you can’t play Scotland in it, which immediately docks it half the score it would get if I gave out scores. You could, like… play Italy or something and just pretend they’re Scotland, I guess. The second problem is that the tournament mode is just a slog through every team in the game from the worst to the best–not really a tournament at all.
I was sad to not be offered a group stage and knockout rounds, but it’s something I could live with bar one other aspect of the tournament mode: You’re locked to 5 minute halves, and the game stops the clock regularly (you know, unlike actual football) meaning that the average tournament game you’ll play will take upwards of 15 minutes. I looked up a longplay on YouTube and the poor guy had to play over three and a half hours!
It’s a bit strange considering exhibition mode lets you choose halves of 1 to 99(!) minutes long, and I suppose the question that might be raised in people’s minds might be “well, if the game is good, does it matter how long the halves are?”
It’s weird, right? It feels like it shouldn’t, but pacing is everything. Football is all about that hunger for a goal or that desperate defence, and without a sensible time limit in either direction tedium starts to set in. The time limit in a football game is like the health bar of a boss. It doesn’t matter if it’s fun to dodge their attacks or wail on them; the longer it takes, the worse it feels, even if you’re just going to do the same thing to the next enemy.
(It’s worth noting that the official greatest game of all time, Sensible Soccer, limits halves to 90 seconds.)
It’s made worse here really by the fact that half the time you’re playing facing the screen, meaning you generally get 5 minutes to try and score enough that the next five you’re just clinging on trying to defend. It’s like the game was designed to feature the kind of boring fucking football that ruins international tournaments. “Score one lads, then settle in.”
All that said with 90 second halves I’d probably have played this through. There’s a very funny wee twist at the end where the ref steals the trophy and forces you to play the ultimate Nintendo team to truly become world champions, but it’s hardly worth getting there for it as it is.
Will I ever play it again? I did save my mid-tournament playthough but this is one best left in memory.
Final Thought: There are some interesting… well, mildly interesting changes between the original “Super Formation Soccer” release from Human in Japan and the global release from Nintendo, including slightly changing the player sprites which barely feels worth the effort, but there must have been some reason???
Developed/Published by: Parker Brothers Released: 7/1982 Completed: 21/04/2023 Completion: Got a high score of 1216 on easiest, but also played it in smart bombs/solid walker modes. I could do better! Trophies / Achievements: n/a
As a hardcore follower of everything I’ve been up to, I’m sure you already know I’ve been working my way through Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, but what you won’t know, probably, is that when I reached Attack of the Mutant Camels I had a minor crisis: do I go on and play it without the foreknowledge of The Empire Strikes Back for Atari 2600, or do I go back and play that, even though it’s jumping several years on from where I’ve got in the Atari 2600 catalogue? But today is also the last day to pre-order a physical copy of exp. 2601, so writing about another Atari 2600 is almost promotional.
It gets me started on playing through all the Star Wars games chronologically, too, because it’s, surprisingly, the very first licensed Star Wars game. You’d probably think that would be Star Wars in the arcade (the very first arcade game I ever played, fact fans!) what with it being based on the first movie and everything, but nope, it’s this, released over a year earlier but still two years after The Empire Strikes Back. It’s unclear if the decision to go with The Empire Strikes Back was an attempt to catch the (two year old) zeitgeist or was design led–there’s an interesting contemporary interview with the designer Sam Kjellman and programmer Rex Bradford in the January 1983 issue of Electronic Fun with Computers and Games where Kjellman says “we considered the Death Star scene in the first movie” but there’s not much to make of it either way (there’s a great paper prototype image in the article, though.) And weirdly… Atari’s arcade Star Wars would be released the same month as Return of the Jedi in cinemas!
The Empire Strikes Back is a post-Defender game–one of the earliest, in fact, to not simply be a direct clone, following really only Choplifter on Apple II (Chopper Command, ironically also helicopter based but a “true” Defender clone predates it on the Atari 2600, though). Using the Battle of Hoth as its setting, the player controls a snowspeeder and is attempting to defend Echo Base from the approaching AT-AT Walkers, with a game over if they manage to make it to the base (which unfortunately isn’t marked in any way other than it is, I guess, just off to the right somewhere.) Unlike the movie, however, where AT-ATs are famously impervious to the snowspeeders attacks, here you are stuck shooting them to death, with each taking 48 shots to die, colour cycling so you know how damaged they are, because you can’t knock them over or anything. In fact, rather hilariously, the manual makes a point of the fact that you can’t shoot their legs, which is probably the one bit of them that would make sense to shoot.
There are, however, lots of surprising quirks and designerly touches to what would, otherwise, be a fairly straightforward shooter. The game has the usual overblown “32 games” claim that 2600 games basically always did (4 modes in single and two player, with five difficulty levels, basically) but the modes include the ability to make the walkers solid (which actually feels sort of more right, even if it is harder) and to add “smart bombs” which the walkers can fire and which follow you around and you need to shoot to survive (which I can take or leave). Whichever mode you play, walkers occasionally reveal flashing weak points you can shoot to destroy them instantly, which creates this interesting risk-reward as you have to fly around them to try and shoot the weak point in time, putting yourself in danger.
Most interestingly, however, you can actually repair your snowspeeder by landing it, up to two repairs per life, with your snowspeeder able to take up to five hits. And if you can survive for two minutes without dying, you “use the force” and are invincible for 20 seconds and can then repair your snowspeeder up to two more times. So the game also layers on damage management–you don’t want to be constantly repairing, because you lose precious time and you only get two, so you have to very carefully track how many hits you’ve taken, especially as the walkers get more and more powerful the more you take down. There’s honestly quite a lot going on.
There is, however, no ending to the assault, as it’s a pure score chase. Released earlier in the 2600’s lifetime it might have been saddled with a time limit (after two minutes and forty-five seconds the rebels escape…) but it’s definitely better this way even if you really don’t get a breather. This fact, however, leads to the rather absurd fact that Video Review magazine enlisted SF author and legendary prick Harlan Ellison to write a review of this despite the fact that he had never played a video game and clearly hated them. Readable in a couple of his essay collections (I borrowed a copy of Sleepless Nights in the Procrustrean Bed from archive.org, which cements how essential its borrowing library is for research) it’s a genuinely rather unhinged screed in which Ellison accidentally implies that he’s had sex with a non-zero number of ten year-olds:
“No ten-year-old I’ve ever encountered can write Moby Dick, create a Sistine Chapel fresco, or fuck with any degree of expertise.”
I guess at least he didn’t enjoy it???
Anyway, he spends most of it whining that you can’t win, referencing the Myth of Sisyphus because, you know, he’s sooo clever.
I’m not particularly interested in having an argument with a long-dead self-confessed nonce–in fact I rather enjoy that he was so pleased with his zingers that he wrote a post-script a year later where he crows over the video game crash. And I suspect he forgot all about this by the time he would, hypocritically, declare himself “greatly amused by the prospect of ‘a game that you cannot possibly win’” with Cyberdreams 1995 adaptation of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (according to the Digital Antiquarian in a brilliant article as always.) But I will say that Kjellman and Bradford’s take on The Empire Strikes Back is better than it really has any right to be. The controls are far from perfect, and the game struggles massively with the fact that your snowspeeder’s position on screen often makes it hard to react quickly to walkers or their attacks. You can almost see the Llamasoft inspiration in how much the game makes you feel like you’re an annoying fly, buzzing around a quadruped, as you have to carefully “loop” your snowspeeder around in front of or behind the ship trying to maximise your hits (unless you have to suddenly dash for a weak point.) But there’s something there, and you can strategise–the manual recommends a farming strategy where you weaken the front and back walkers so you can have more time destroy the ones in the middle, and while it’s hardly Geometry Wars or anything, there’s a pleasure in attempting it.
Enough of a pleasure, actually, that I played this for much longer than I expected. For 1982–the year of Dig Dug and Deadline–The Empire Strikes Back ain’t bad! Lighten up, Harlan!!!
Will I ever play it again? I could be convinced to. I suspect I’d rather play it again than the next Star Wars game chronologically: Star Wars: Jedi Arena.
Final Thought: Ellison ends his postscript, joyful at the video game crash:
“At moments like these, I find my reluctant acceptance of the transient nature of the human race ameliorated. Perhaps the cockroaches won’t take over in my lifetime.
On the other hand, the spirit of James Watt is still with us.”
![Sky Kid [Famicom/NES] (Namco, 1986)](https://expzine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/sky-kid-nes-front-cover.jpg)
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