Year: 2025

Sundry Sunday: “They’re Not Like Us”

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

I have a bit of fondness for the Chaotix, the oddly-named Sonic side characters, just because they’re so bizarre. They’ve never headlined a game themselves, and actually haven’t been playable that often, but they keep turning up.

They started out as helpers in Knuckles Chaotix, that bizarre 32X game that kind of played like Sonic, except instead of Sonic you had Knuckles, instead of Tails you had one of a randomly-selected number of weirdos including Vector the Crocodile, Espio the Chameleion, Charmy the Bee, and also Mighty the Armadillo, and robotic challenge characters Heavy and Bomb. And also, you were connected by a chain, that made playing something like having your fingernails pried off.

The Chaotix Detective Agency. What idiot decided these loonies should have a private investigator’s license? Espio (purple) tries so hard to be cool, with his anime poses and his spiked wrist and ankle bands; Vector (green) looks tough but is really friendly; and Charmy (yellow) is a goofball.

The nebulous word “Chaotix” was declared in Sonic Heroes, the other major game where Vector, Espio and Charmy are playable, to be the “Chaotix Detective Agency,” where they presumably make their anthropomorphic animal living hunting down child support evaders and doing miscellaneous disreputable work. After that, they’ve stuck around as bit players in the Sonic saga, always on the sidelines but frequently present. After all, the Sega All-Stars Racing games need bunches of characters to match Mario’s populous cast, and the Chaotix help to do that.

So, there’s these two reptiles and an insect that hang out with Sonic and pals for some reason. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and i guess a third unspecified person) are a crocodile, chameleon and bee.

Early concept art of Sonic in a band, with a bunch of forgotten animal friends, and what may be Vector’s first appearance. Look out for that guitar-playing chicken Sonic, he wishes you ill!

Yet, I like them! They’re nuts! If your world is gonna have anthropomorphs in it, that no one questions the existence of, then there should be more than just the heroes. That’s who the Chaotix are: True Neutral hangers-on in the Sonicverse. If they make a Sonic 4 movie they rightfully should be in it, although I wouldn’t put any money on it in any way at all. Also, I like that, addition to wearing headphones constantly, when tall and thin Vector jumps and spins, he becomes a loop.

I don’t care what you say, that’s just cool.

So we move on to the videos. In this animatic (1½ minutes, by sideofmeggs, audio by Jehtt) they ponder their existence in a way they’re never allowed to do in the games.

In this one (also 1½ minutes, by Jehtt, they’re in some way responsible for all of these), they decide to forget about being detectives and try to make a Youtube video.

And (1 minute, yes by Jehtt) here Shadow the Edgehog (not a typo) tells them how to be popular on Twitter.

(EDIT: Forgot to embed the third video, also fixed a couple of textual problems.)

The @!#?@! of Q*Bert

Fourth of five retro arcade strategy posts this week, how about we learn how to play the swearingist classic game: Q*bert.

Here’s a video that covers what each of Q*bert’s five levels is like (18 minutes):

You play Q*bert, and at first it seems simple. Level 1, you jump on each cube once. Slick and/0r Sam may change them back once in a while, but you can just jump on them again.

Level 2, you jump on each cube twice. That makes each level twice as long, but still not much of a problem. The rising difficulty here comes from more and faster enemies.

Then you reach Level 3, and Q*bert becomes a much different game. Now jumping on a solved cube unsolves it. If you don’t work out how to handle this, levels can drag on indefinitely. It’s a bit of a wall for players here, and Slick and Sam become much more annoying.

Level 4 is similar, except you have to jump on each cube twice, and jumping on one after it’s complete changes it back to the intermediate color. But worst is Level 5, where jumping on a solved cube changes it back to the original color. This is a huge change, for it means the pyramid can actually become unsolvable without using a Disk, or waiting for Slick or Sam to come in and reset some of the cubes. For more details, I refer you to the video. You know, the one I embedded a few paragraphs up. Go! And if you think that’s nuts, check out what happens in the unreleased sequel Faster, Harder, More Challenging Q*bert (GameFAQs link).

Here’s another strategy video (10 minutes), with tips by Jody Martin, released to the Youtube channel of Starfighters Arcade. It more basic in focus, but is more interested in explaining enemy behavior and how to react to it.

Something I’ve thought is interesting about Q*bert, which is also true of Pac-Man, is that it’s like a turn-based game, but where you can play around with the timing of the moves. I’ll try to explain.

While both games let you decide when to make decisions, both encourage playing in a discrete, point-by-point way. When Q*bert lands on a cube, there’s a limited number of decisions they can make, other than waiting to make your move. In Pac-Man, your moves are constrained to the maze paths, but you can turn slightly early, you can pause when you hit a wall, and you can double back at any point. You usually don’t want to pause or double back in that game, because they introduce uncertainty in patterns (although a few patterns rely on them, which makes them much harder to perform). Q*bert is resistant to patterns, using pseudorandomness to affect the paths of the balls and most enemies, and the player’s ability to break out of the rigid temporal confines of that game’s movement is more helpful.

Contrast both games to Robotron and Defender. Those games have “free” movement, they’re not confined to a playfield with limited choices but let the player move around how they want. In actuality they’re games where the turns are taken in real time each frame. That adds a much greater role for player skill, but it also requires you to be much more precise.

Defender Strategy

Defender’s difficulty is legendary. Craig Kubey in The Winner’s Guide to Video Games said it was like being locked in a closet with a swarm of killer bees, and I actually think that’s not overstatement. And yet, people have flipped Defender’s score counter many times in a single game.

In an 18-minute strategy session, Joe Dearman explains the basics of playing Defender well, but I’m afraid if you don’t have a certain base facility it might be hopeless. Although I’m generally good at video games, I don’t seem to have it myself. Take a look and see if this looks like something you might be good at, but be warned, Defender’s controls themselves are complicated, with a lever and five buttons, although I dunno, game controllers these days tend to have many more than that. It is important, however, not to underestimate this game. It will rapidly annihilate you if you aren’t very good.

Both Defender and Robotron 2084, mentioned yesterday, were made by Williams, and designed by Eugene Jarvis, who still works in arcade game production today, or did last time I checked.

Another thing these games have in common is they’re very adjustable. Operators can choose starting difficulty, ending difficulty and on which wave it’s reached. This thread at arcade-museum.com breaks down the different romsets and differences between them. The earlier roms, “Blue” and “Green,” are generally harder, and increase in difficulty through 99 possible levels. The most common and latest set, “Red,” only has 30 effective levels.

At the higher numbers of Blue and Green, weird behavior can be seen. Defender has an enemy called the Baiter, which exists to harass the player if they take too long in clearing a wave of other enemies. At maximum difficulty Baiters become hilariously numerous, the game sending them in about once every two or three seconds. Watch a few minutes of this game with the wave difficulty settings cranked up to maximum from wave 1 (39 minutes). The extra ship level is set it easier than normal, needing just 5K to get an extra, and it’s set to restore all the Humanoids every wave, but that’s mostly to make the game possible, although there does exist video of someone surviving maximum difficulty with ships and Humanoids at normal settings, up to a score of 909K. (1 hour 7 minutes, somehow).

Here is the first of those two links, I’ll leave the other for you to click on if you’re interested. Both of them have the amazingly persistent Baiters, and in both of them the player manages to hold up under the pressure, for a while anyway.

Robotron 2084 Strategy from arcadeimpossible

It’s the third of this week’s classic arcade strategy find posts, and today’s dedicated to the original twin-stick shooter, Robotron 2084.

Robotron’s what I’d call a very pure game. It’s simple in play, nowhere near as complex as Eugene Jarvis’ first game Defender, but deep despite it. The left joystick moves, the right joystick fires, and until you get used to that you’ll have short games. In fact, you’ll probably have short games regardless. It is ruthless.

These videos feature host “Greg” and star player “Darrin,” who is the one giving most of the advice. The first video covers the first nine waves (5½ minutes). They set the template for the game: there are theme levels that cycle every ten waves. There are Spheroid, Quark, Brain and, for levels ending in 9, Grunt waves that completely surround you with enemies right from the start, and each poses its own kind of challenge.

The second video covers intermediate-level play, and wave beginnings (7 minutes):

The videos mention three parts, but it appears that only two were ever uploaded. They mention a site in their descriptions, robotron2084guidebook.com. In the 12 years since the videos were posted that site’s gone dark, but being a text site it’s pretty well preserved on the Wayback Machine, and has lots of good information. They also mention video on the high score site scoreground.com, but sadly it’s also defunct, and the mentioned video that was hosted there is probably lost. If there’s one good thing about Google, I guess, it’s that they let Youtube videos persist on their site for decades without culling them too much.

Donkey Kong High-Level Basics

Continuing with this week’s theme of classic arcade strategy videos, these Donkey Kong videos are from a variety of Youtube sources.

Rob O’Hara on basic strategy (9½ minutes). Note that he’s playing on one of those multi-machine emulators so the sounds are a little off.

arcadeimpossible talks with former world record holder Hank Chen (22 minutes):

Getting deeper into the weeds now. Here’s a high-level strategy video on just the Barrel (a.k.a. Girders) boards (41 minutes!). All the following videos are from Chambers_N Gaming:

Was that a lot to say on this one subject? Well hold on, that was just part 1! Here’s part 2, which is another 42 minutes!

And here’s detailed strategy on the Rivets (a.k.a. Ziggurat) boards, although it’s “only” 19 minutes:

That a single game can inspire so much discussion so long after its release speaks volumes about the quality of its design. A lot of it has to do with how much randomness is in the game. Even the best players die sometimes! Donkey Kong is heavily resistant to rote patterns, although there’s still things the player can do to subtly affect each board, and make it more manageable. On the Barrels boards, on higher levels, you can affect when barrels decide to come down ladders by steering towards them as they reach their decision point.

Classic Arcade Tips: Phoenix & the Centipede Trap

Let’s have a week of tricks & tips for retro arcade games. Here’s one you don’t hear about too often, Phoenix, and one still popular, Centipede.

Phoenix is a standard old-school space shooter. Your spaceship is affixed to the bottom of the screen, where spaceships should be affixed as God and Kazunori Sawano (designer of Galaxian) intended. It’s got a bit more atmosphere than most of them from the time, and is particularly known for being one of the first video games to feature a boss battle, with a big flying saucer with shields to chip through.

One trick in Phoenix, the result of a bug: if you shoot three enemies in rapid succession as they ascend upwards onscreen, you get 200,000 points! This is a gigantic amount, in the video below (18 minutes), which is blurry so you can’t really tell.

The interesting thing about it (which is explained here) is, it’s not a bonus. The score is set to around 204,000 points. If you had a higher score (which is very unlikely in Phoenix) then you lose points because of it.

As for Centipede, there’s a clever trick that takes advantage of a number of converging aspects of the game. First, nothing affects the playfield mushrooms globally (this was corrected in its sequel Millipede, making it ineffective there); second, the Spiders that emerge and periodically clear out mushrooms from the bottom of the screen never touch the first two rows on the side they emerge from; third, centipedes that make it to the bottom of the screen and cycle up and down through the player’s area can get caught by carefully-placed mushrooms at the side of the screen; and fourth, a trapped centipede may halt game progression, but it doesn’t stop scoring, as Spiders, Fleas and Scorpions will continue to emerge into the board, which are worth significant points by themselves.

The result is: The Centipede Trap. Observe (video by “pat,” 12 minutes). If you want to skip right to the trap in action, you can jump to an appropriate place here.

I’ve known about the trap for a long while, it was reported in an issue of my favorite classic arcade magazine, Joystik, in a feature interview with early arcade champion Eric Ginner, where he laid out how to make it, and how it could be useful. It’s a pretty boring way to play, but it works. It doesn’t make the game completely boing, Spiders can still be a big threat, and if one makes it across the screen from the opposite side without being shot it still has a chance to eat the trap. But it does give the player an opportunity to clear the upper reaches of the screen of mushrooms while the centipede is pinned in.

If it’s done on the first wave of each set of twelve, the one where a whole centipede emerges at the start, then Fleas won’t ever appear to add mushrooms, and you can actually clean the entire board of mushrooms, excepting the ones that make the trap. Fleas emerge, on most boards, when the number of mushrooms near the bottom of the screen get too low, but are programmed never to appear on a full-centipede board.

I’ve got some interesting strategy video finds for other classic arcade games coming up over the next couple of days, I hope you’ll like them!