Now we’re at 1982.
Both companies have brought out some impressive arcade tech, but Midway
was still only starting while Namco made Pac-Man. Here in 1982 is where Midway really gets to
stretch their wings. They’ll need to
bring their best because 2 of Namco’s more famous games came out this year.
Dig Dug(NAM):
While not anywhere close to as omnipresent as Pac-Man, Dig Dug is another one
of Namco’s big mascots that gets ported to everything.
Also like Pac-Man, it accomplishes so much
with its simplistic gameplay and art style.
Before Kenshiro made it cool, enemies are killed using a
simple air pump to pop them like balloons, but it requires getting into the right
position to do so as you make paths by drilling tunnels.
It’s easy to learn and harder to master than
you’d think, when you consider the falling rocks and enemies temporarily
phasing through the ground.
The chibi
sprites are cute and I love the Mickey Mousing in play, where the music only
plays when you’re moving.
Dig Dug is a
fun little game to plonk a quarter into and have a go at any day of the week.
Kozmic Krooz’r(MID): The big selling point of Kozmic Krooz’r
is its colorful arcade cabinet with a big mothership at the top, the goal of
which is to shoot and weave through enemies to reach its good tractor beam when
it rotates to the right side.
I’ve never seen it in person and re-releases of the game on
consoles obviously aren’t going to come with a big physical centerpiece.
Without that gimmick it’s a standard shooter
in a confined, single-screen space, albeit one with directional shot control
through the use of a rotating button, bringing to mind SNK’s rotary stick
shooter.
Robotron: 2084(MID): This game presents a story for
once.
Humanity has been taken over by
machines that have determined humans are inferior and are now taking over the
world.
You, a genetically modified
human, must gun down these armies of robots and protect the last remnants of
humanity from the robot termination squads.
This was long before the Terminator movies made this a popular setup.
This is one of the very first twin stick shooters; it’s not
a rotary stick like SNK’s older games. There’s a second stick to automatically
fire in all directions, something you’ll have to be doing at all times because
the amount of sprites that can be onscreen must’ve been pushing the system to
its limits. Being able to have tons of
sprites onscreen at once would become a flex as technology advanced so that
makes it even more impressive that it can flex that in 1982
With its fast and frantic gameplay and enormous enemy count,
Robotron can be overwhelming, but for the people who like that kind of
challenge, it’s fantastic.
This is a
game truly ahead of its time.
Pole Position(NAM): The simulated 3D effect Pole
Position has using 1982 technology is something to behold, but being one of the
first of its kind, it also doesn’t have the controls quite right. It feels like the car is in a fixed path
until it isn’t and it’s hard to control how much I want it to swerve. Making matters worse is that there’s no
mini-map so the turns sneak up on me, which it hard to react to because the car
controls like soap. Maybe it’s just me
not being able to adjust to an old-school driving game, but the
dazzling effect of the graphics doesn’t last.
Super Pac-Man(NAM): The first Pac-Man was a simple
game with a simple premise of navigating a simple maze and eating dots without
getting caught.
Super Pac-Man adds more
layers to make it a lot less simple.
Now
instead of dots there are different foods and they don’t cover the entire maze.
There are now blockades that must be unlocked by grabbing keys and in addition
to the power pellets there’s a new power-up that turns you giant and
invincible.
These innovation add to the
gameplay and should make it more fun, but it’s hampered by the controls, or rather,
the game speed that affects control.
Super Pac-Man is a lot faster than the original, which I
would normally tout as a good thing, but here it means there’s a lot more
precision required to go where you want to go.
When you approach an intersection in the first game, holding down the
control stick in the direction you want to go as you approach that intersection
will do the trick. It has a relaxed pace
that slowly ramps up, but in Super Pac-Man, there are not only more
intersections, but Pac-Man moves so fast that you need twitch reflexes to
navigate it all, which I don’t think works for a game that’s about scanning the
field and planning routes on the fly. I
don’t know about this one…
Joust(MID): This is the game that would lead to Balloon Fight
on the NES later. It’s a game
with only horizontal directional movement, where vertical movement is done by
flapping your ostrich’s wings and the goal is to hit the enemies at the right
angle to knock them off their birds.
It’s a neat premise, but how it controls leaves a bit to be
desired. It gets tiring having to
constantly press the flap button, movement on the ground is slippery and
movement in the air gets out of control because of how hard the ostrich bounces
off of the environment if it so much as lightly taps something. I swear the hitboxes are off too. Too many times it looks like I got a successful hit, but get hit instead. I like the idea, but it needed more play
testing.
Satan’s Hollow(MID): Satan’s Hollow adds to the horizontal
shooter formula with better innovations than King & Balloon did. In addition to shooting down swarms of gargoyles
increasing in number, the goal is to get a bridge piece from the left side of
the screen to the right side to build a bridge so that the eponymous boss can
be faced. For some levity against the
barrage of gargoyles and the missiles they drop, the player can activate a
shield for brief invincibility. Having
to move left and right while shooting, dodging and using the shield with good
timing gives the moment-to-moment gameplay a lot more depth.
Satan himself isn’t much of a boss though. He’s fast and rapid-fired pitchforks, but he
only takes one hit to take down and after that the game has you build the
bridge and fight him again with increasing difficulty. I still applaud it for having more going on
with it than other arcade games at the time.
This time it is Midway who had the more consistently good
offering. Dig Dug was great, but Pole
Position and Super Pac-Man both had quibbles with their controls that wore on
me before long. Robotron 2084 and
Satan’s Hollow, on the other hand, were both really fun and the mediocrity of
Kozmic Krooz’r and Joust didn’t detract from that. Dig Dug is the best game of the year, but
it’s all Namco had going for them, meaning the win for 1982 goes to Midway.
Meanwhile… I don’t have any Capcom or SNK games from 1982. No comparison.
Next time things are heating up further as both companies
release a plethora of arcade games to play.
Maybe Namco can take back the lead.
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