If you know where to look, there are many arcade machine restoration videos on Youtube, whole channels devoted to them. This Halloween-themed video from Electric Starship Arcade is only one of them. It’s mostly about the process of fixing up the cabinet and has very little gameplay, but it does end with a fun sequence where they dress up someone as a vampire and, driven in a hearse, bring him out in a coffin to introduce it! (40 minutes) And if you watch it, it’ll haunt your view history, and influence Youtube into recommending more restoration videos to you, in a suitably spooky fashion. Ooooooo!
Another arcade classic strategy rundown, and again c0ncerning Donkey Kong. As the video rightly notes, the Springs board, a.k.a. Elevators, is most devoted players’ greatest barrier to playing to the kill screen, and even pros mess it up sometimes. I think it’s the worst part of the game, personally. Donkey Kong is great, says I, because it’s open to multiple strategies, while the later Elevators boards have to be finished a specific way, all because of those springs. That way is what this video (4m) is about.
Sadly the video has been made non-embedable, so it’s up to you to follow the link, if you care. The video encapsulates information on donkeykongforum.net (which it mislinks). That link is some hardcore geekery, of the kind beloved to Set Side B’s cadre of pixelated aliens, so please take a look.
Image from donkeykongforums.net.
Here’s the basics, in text form. Donkey Kong gets more difficult over the course of five “levels.” These are different from “boards,” a.k.a. “racks” or “screens.” In the corner of the screen there’s a notice, “L=X” where X is some number. That’s the Level. It goes up by one every time you finish a Rivets board.
The problem is, starting with Level 2, the spots at which the springs hit the ground is slightly randomized. The final climb up to Pauline’s platform is super dangerous, since Mario is vulnerable the whole way. Level 4 is the hardest difficulty for the springs on Elevators, and you have to handle it a very specific way: climb up to the first safe spot, wait for a spring that comes out bouncing at a specific location (near DK’s right foot) then running to another safe spot, then waiting for another specific spring speed to rush over and up the ladder.
So go forth and conquer the elevators, and as Coily the Sprite reminds us:
Our retro arcade strategy week is over, but this is a related video that I’ve been sitting on for quite a while. The Disconnector made a very nice strategy video (20 minutes) for Namco’s cult favorite cat-and-mouse game Mappy. It works as both an introduction and a guide to the game as it develops.
Not only is the information good, but it’s really well put together! Looking through the rest of their channel, while the post about other games (most recently about Robotron [8 minutes]) it seems to be the only strategy video of its sort. I hope they make more, I think they have a talent for it!
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).
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’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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
(grumble grumble… stupid WordPress…)
PES is an acclaimed and Oscar-nominated stop motion animator. They’ve done terrific work. One of their videos is game-related, and additionally references classic-era arcade games. Have a look (1½ minutes):
It’s hard to believe, but an “arcade” didn’t used to mean video games. Across “the pond,” to trade in ludicrous understatement, in “old blighty,” there is an amazing collection of old-style mechanical machines. Northern Introvert has an ‘alf-hour video exploration of them that makes for fascinating viewing!
Pretty hard to read. Is that supposed to be AAIMAIS?
Raimais is a sci-fi-focused maze game from Taito in 1988. Ryan Oliver, writing over at Hardcore Gaming 101, has written an excellent description of the game, including why you might be interested in it. Not only is it like a kind of Arkanoid-style revision of a pre-existing genre but with powerups, in this case maze games, it reminds me a lot of the early arcade and Atari 2600 game Dodge ‘Em. It’s got multiple routes and lots of secrets, including secret endings. It pulls some Druaga-style dirty tricks on the player: without a secret item, you’re doomed to get a bad ending. Even with it, you have to complete a sequence of Quick Time Events during the ending or your character gets zapped by a laser gun and just dies, no do-overs, no continues.
Furthermore, the hardest-to-reach ending was actually impossible to get! The game’s included on Taito Legends 2 from 2006, but there’s a more-recent Arcade Archives version (Switch, Playstation Store), that gives you the option of making the impossible ending possible.
This Arcade Archives trailer gives a good sense of the play without giving too much away (3 minutes):
Here’s a recap of links at the end of the HG101 article:
Sudden Desu, where the impossible-to-reach ending was first revealed
I’ve known about Raimais for some time, and in a reversal of the usual turn of events I had already read the gaming.moe and Sudden Desu pages before HG101 covered it. This is an excellent excuse to link to them though.
It’s a really strange game even without the context that your protagonist, a fan-waving Japanese guy running around from sunglasses-wearing agents, and occasionally celebrities like Michael Jackson (probably his first role in a Sega game) and a barrel chasing him around mazes, is based on a real person, Kakuei Tanaka, a prime minister in Japan in the early 70s who was taken down by a bribery scandal. When he gets caught by the suits, they put on S&M garb and Tanaka gets whipped by them! Here’s Kim Justice’s report on it (19 minutes). Here’s about five minutes of gameplay.
I can vouch that it’s playable in MAME, and it’s not even that bad a game, certainly better than Abscam, a pretty terrible Pac-Man bootleg that’s probably our closest version of it.
