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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 29, 1982)
nuttl'm iiuttViii u huh* A Galactic Neophyte Sees a Vision of Video Games in His Sleep, and Begins a Manual of Philosophy to Appease bis Conscience. TT V E L THREE Choose One. Enter A or B. A) You never play video games. B) Smart bomb my Swarmers; I'm ready for the Yliabian Dog Fight (Correa answer below.) You walk past. Dens of elearonic attraaions only repel you. You re fuse to play them on some obscure pretext or another They waste money, they make ugly sounds, they confuse or distraa attention to the extreme, they are the bastards of a technological age, they are foolish . or so you think. But you never play them, so you don’t know Perhaps you are wise to hesitate. Once the appeal of the video games has taunted you into a wrangle, all safety fades. Doubts enter your mind. You find yourself looking for quarters. You close your eyes and see rainbow explo sions. Again and again and again (Correa answer is B if you have read this far Proceed to the next level) LEVEL TWO Some basic, temporal strategies are laid for a number of games. If you still insist the games won’t graze you, hyperspace ahead to level three. If you expea solutions, proceed with extreme caution. The best general strategy for all elearonic video games is to prac tice. All the advice in the world won’t inform your fingers when and how to punch “thrust" with your index finger instead of “fire’’ with your thumb. Words can help, but experience means knowledge Games can be plotted in your sleep, on paper, or daydreaming — imagining the screen and envision ing your moves schematically — but nothing comes easy. Mastery takes quarters Much of the for what-it’s-worth advice below has been taken from the H-ATO computer system notes files communication network. Hun dreds of anonymous computer ad dias, sitting at terminals around the world, exchange information over PLATO on a myriad of subjects; video games, logically, have a file unro themselves. £=: TARGATE The sequel to DEFEN DER, STARGATE has all the wonders that made its predecessor the prince of video games, plus more. The landers, mutants, bombers, baiters, pods and swarm ers are still deadly, but you're fight ing new threats in addition: firebombers, fireballs, Yllabian space guppies, dynamos, space hum, phred, Big Red, and munch ies Since unlike most video games, the enemies attack you simulta neously, you might expect STAR GATE to be even more difficult than the high-test DEFENDER. But no, STARGATE has some minor DEFENDER bugs smoothed out. Smart bombs work more consis tently and don't slow the game down. The explosions look nicer, so that you might not even mind losing your planet. Mutants and landers move more slowly. Higher scores are easier to get Tips: The volcano spurting lava is a decorative distraction; ignore it. During the first wave, try ignoring most of the enemies and concen trate on saving humanoids from the capturing landers. Catch four hu manoids on your spaceship (being careful not to touch ground or they'll hop off), then fly into the Stargate warp box and be instantly transported to the fourth wave Don’t forget to use Inviso. You are invulnerable when you hold down the button with your right thumb, continuing to thrust and fire with your other fingers Inviso is great for gening out of a tight spot, so use it sparingly. If you get blisters on your right hand, you’re probably spending too much time on "thrust" instead of making good use of your vertical stick. (See Level Six for more sex ual theory.) Professional callouses appear on the left hand STARGATE wears your eyes out, but worthily. A few games leave you with multicolor hallucinatory afterimages for hours. s ONKEY KONG Mr Arakawa of Nintendo claims, with a giggle, that DONKEY KONG Is now the most popular game in both Japan and i America. The name comes from a bad translation of Japanese for "stupid gorilla." As the hero climbs to rescue the girl from the gorilla, he must use ladders, conveyer belts, and the ulique “jump" capability to dodge falling fireballs, fuel carts, and barrels The game was released in Japan in July 1981, and test-marketed in the States that same month. Nin tendo has ceased production of its other games to concentrate on DK, and the key to its special status Is psychological. DONKEY KONG has a role-playing feel, a narrative dimen sion usually lacking in games. No one knows what's in the barrels. EMPEST Atari’s Quadrascan non linear graphics moved from black and white (ASTE ROIDS, RED BARON) to color with TEMPEST, an ab stract space battle of shapes. Al though likely to undergo new pro gramming transformations in the near future, some controversy al ready rages about the best ways of playing it now. Some skip ahead to high levels for high points and last play; others proceed through the levels for a longer game but in equitable point accumulation If, instead of starting on level one you begin at nine, you’ll re ceive a bonus of ‘>4,000 points (but not the extra lives awarded for regular accumulation of 20K and 40K points). If you make it past level 11, you get 74K bonus points Some think spinning the knob to ward “expert" at game's beginning is, thus, "cheating," but it is a way for a good player to face a chal lenge sooner and get more points more quickly. If you make it up through level 16 the slow way, you don’t get as many points, which Is rather unfair. The color patterns change from blue, to red, to yellow, to light blue on the 49th level. Shoot spikers when you can, or they’ll come back out as tankers. You can tell If a tanker Is going to change Into two fuseballs or two flippers by looking at the center of the tanker A pink ish center reveals that it will change Into fuseballs. Many players sit on one tulte and fire at a steady rate of about 3 shots per second, until flippers ap proach Then they fire as fast as possible Some think this method, which can last up to 19 levels, is boring. Others think It’s smart TEMPEST is not cute, it is the re ductive essence of video game space battle, almost the idea of it put into abstract motion graphics. sFis ALAGA The Chicago manufactur ers, Midway/Bally, pro nounce it “GAL-uh-guh,” but some say “Guh-LA guh.” Either way, the game improves upon the space in vaders theme by having the attack ing inseas swarm down in flying patterns before lining up above to continue attack The key to ad vanced scores is to allow your ship to be captured by the Galaga’s blue beam; then, if you are careful to kill the captor with your remaining ship, you get your old ship back for double fire power against the insects. Stay near the center of the board when possible, dodging the insea fire carefully and swiftly. Re maining in a fixed position for the first two or three challenging stages works to best advantage, even when the dragonflies start spinning down in curleycue confusion ROGGER Not all video games pro vide space battle. FROG GF.R has the earthbound plight of the lowly frog try ing to cross the road and river without getting squashed or eaten Move as fast as possible; every second saved earns points. Move your frog forwards or back wards; don’t think you have to stay on a sinking turtle's back just be cause there's no log in front of you. The real key to a good third level play Is to use the alligator's tail as a leaping place; it doesn’t kx)k safe, but it is. FROGGER scores never range Into the astronomical, and there seem to be bugs in many of the machines sometimes your frog will jump in a different direction from what you expected Hut It's a game of simple pleasures anti survivals, almost with an anti technological theme Your graceful oomedttwn to reality after Intetgaiactir voyaging the Peace Frog _I. E V E L ONE The literature of video games Is fly Ivy night Ken llston's Irest.vellei. Mastering I'm Man. Tom Hlrsch feld’s How to Master the Video dames, and the many other pub fished attempts to circumvent loss frustration in the arcades can’t be of use beyond the life of the game machines, and most machines have a life expectancy measured in months rather than years. Does anyone play 1979’s original hit, SPACE INVADERS, except as nostal gia? Will PAC-MAN be an obsolete curio by 1983? Bernard M. Powers, director of marketing for the Bally’s Aladdin’s Castle chain of arcades, claims that PAC-MAN holds some kind of re cord, with a peak popularity that lasted a record 14 months. “It's on the downswing now,” Powers says. "The life cycle of games is critical. ASTEROIDS, which was released the same time as PAC-MAN, tasted six months. We hope for six months with any game. Those few long-lasting ones you fall in love with." New games about which nothing has (yet) been dissected by book include DIG DUG (an underground maze game), FRENZY (an improved and more difficult version of BER SERK), ROBOTRON (another high speed, humanistic save-the world drama from the makers of DEFEN DER), the three-dimensional ZAX XON, and TRON, a tour part game cleverly based upon the Disney movie. Already new chips and challenges have made PAC-MAN overly famil iar. MS. PAC-MAN, a ribboned danc ing female gobbler, Wes for atten tion. Uston’s careful patterns for the original PAC-MAN may still work on some machines, but the book is likely to be classic only in the sense that It was made obsolete upon publication. An article In Playboy recently gave strategies for CENTIPEDE, DE FENDER, and PAC MAN, but the pat tern for the latter differed con siderably from Uston’s model. "On the first three boards, the move monts of the four ghosts aren’t predictable, so pattern following is a useless and dangerous — af fair," was the Playboy Philosophy. Uston, however, brazenly gave use less and dangerous patterns to use, some of which worked on roa chines only In regional locations ai least for the first Ivoards, you are Ix'tter off practicing on paper, has ing your moves on the close obser vat ions done at familiar machines Remember, you can’t do a flawless board one pattern if you make any mistakes You’ll have to put in an other quarter, and start from scratch, which is frustrating. Answer books exist because win ning is both paramount and an iro (continued am page 14)
