A brilliant touch, as was the idle animation of the guy or gal wiping his/her visor between phases. Better yet, as you accelerated left or right your legs would tuck in underneath meaning that you had an ever-so slightly reduced collision profile when you were travelling at more dangerous speeds. This may sound an unnecessarily fiddly addition but in fact it contributed to an increased sense of involvement and another layer of challenge as movement around the game world demanded further concentration. This inclusion required the player to manually maintain position on the X axis while zooming about the place as opposed to being able to cruise effortlessly at a specified height in the arcade games. Your jet-packed character – in itself a charming twist on the functional spaceship of the Williams games – would convincingly descend to the bottom of the screen if left unattended. Other subtle yet significant differences included the addition of a little simulated gravity. To give an indication as regards to the difference in the levels of challenge, a typical game of Defender for me lasts a few minutes and my best score is in the tens of thousands, whereas on Dropzone I could play for hours and score in the millions, despite a comparable adversary points tariff. Defender was liable to drop frames and stutter when busy, whereas I recall – though this may be rose-tinted spectacles – my 800 XL maintaining a smooth 50 frames per second refresh rate at all times. However I’m not convinced of my own theory as the game still became wildly intense and frenetic – particularly during the periodical ‘Trailer Invasion’ bonus waves where the screen would be flooded with multicoloured sprites. This may have also partly been due to technical limitations, with the relatively modest hardware restricting the amount of sprites on screen. Outside of the arcades, where a high turnover and a fast return of quarters/ten pee pieces was required, Dropzone could offer a much more gentle difficulty curve even dozens of waves in it was still not as difficult as even the opening stages of the brutal Defender. Dropzone was much easier then Defender/Stargate for a start. Though patently a huge fan of the original arcade games, Maclean was both confident enough in his own abilities as a (first-time by the way) game designer, and aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the host platform, to make a few changes. Whereas Defender didn’t so much as offer a bare bones ‘plot’ on the attract screen, home computer cassette/disk inlay protocol demanded that Dropzone was at least afforded the semblance of a scenario to wit, a scientific research installation on Jupiter’s innermost moon (the volcanic Io) was under attack and you were employed to single-handedly protect the occupants. Defender II).ĭropzone shared the Williams cabinets’ gameplay fundamentals: a scrolling, wrap-around play-field with the player defending eight slightly abstract ‘men’ from a variety of both passive and (extremely) aggressive enemy alien sprite types equipped with only a rapid fire laser, a supply of screen-clearing smart bombs and the gift of reincarnation. Gold, Dropzone was a loving homage to Eugene Jarvis‘ seminal, and infamously severe shoot ’em ups Defender and Stargate (a.k.a. Developed by Archer Maclean for the Atari 8-bit series of computers under the pseudonym Arena Graphics and released by U.S. In the 1980s, when dedicated coin-op PCB’s lead the technological gaming charge (and before many of the industry’s legal teams were quite so hot on little things like Intellectual Property rights), one of the most coveted types of home computer release was the competent “arcade clone”. An appreciation of Archer Maclean’s peerless Defender tribute
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |