Worth a Look - March 2013

What's in this month's Worth a Look? A whole bunch of stuff, the biggest yet, in fact, with a bit of Star Wars in the form of pinball, top-down arcade racer, a sequel to a modern classic and a faux retro puzzle that will challenge even the most hardened arcade throwback and the official sequel to the most famous rip-off in gaming history.

Star Wars pinball

Developer:	Zen Studios
Publisher:	LucasArts
Platforms:	Android/iOS/Xbox 360/PlayStation 3
Price:	£1.32 - £6.99 (800MSP)
Demo available:	Yes

After Far Sight Studio's series of emulated pinball classics, Zen Studio's Zen Pinball/Pinball FX series is best video pinbal game around. While I would never say their designs are quite up to the legends behind the tables in Arcade Pinball, they do make some cracking pin games. Now they've turned their attention to Disney's latest acquisition — Star Wars. There are three tables in the pack, Empire Strikes Back, Clone Wars and everyone's favourite masked bounty hunter, Boba Fett. If you (still) like Star Wars and you like pinball, you probably don't need to know any more than that.

Bit.Trip Runner 2

Developer:	Gaijin Games
Publisher:	Gaijin Games
Platforms:	PlayStation 3/Xbox Live Arcade
Price:	£10.99 (1200MSP)
Demo available:	Yes

Gaijin's Bit.Trip series are wonderful celebrations of gaming origins and now there's a sequel to the one of the best in the series, Bit.Trup Runner. However, the Atari 2600-looking aesthetic has gone, in favour of something more modern, whilst still hinting at its retro origins. If I'm honest I prefer the original look, but this is still a cracking rhythm puzzle game. Whether it's worth a tenner is a different question entirely.

WRC Powerslide

Developer:	Milestone
Publisher:	Milestone
Platforms:	PlayStation 3 PSN/Xbox Live Arcade
Price:	£10.99/1200MSP
Demo available:	Yes

Milestone's WRC series may be the offical rally game of the FIA World Rally Championship, but it's always played second fiddle to Codemasters' Colin McRae/Dirt series. However, with this downloadable only spin-off Milestone are channelling Super Sprint, Micro Machines and many other classic top down racers. The game appears to use the same engine as the main series, so it has all the same physics for (unsurprisingly) power sliding and also bashing up the car models. Add a few friends and you've got one rowdy, rip-roaring racer.

Gem Chaser

Developer:	Electric Wolf
Publisher:	Electric Wolf
Platforms:	Xbox Live Indie Games
Price:	67p (80 MSP)
Demo available:	Yes

Having worked in the games industry for a few years means I'm friends with a number of bedroom developers, like the family behind Electric Wolf. They've been pretty prolific over the past few months, with each game improving on their last. Gem Chaser is their latest and by far their most challenging. The premise is simple, collect the gems that match the colour of Gem Chaser, which can be altered by jumping through colour changing portals. With strict time limits and devilish level design that means you absolutely must take the optimum path, this is definitely one for the more masochistic. Warning though, addiction will kick in way before frustration.

Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams

Developer:	Black Forest Games
Publisher:	Black Forest Games
Platforms:	PC/PlayStaton 3/Xbox Live Arcade
Price:	£10.99
Demo available:	Yes/No

Back in the mid-80s, a group of guys calling themselves Time Warp Productions, produced a platforming game called The Great Giana Sisters. It was a blatant rip-off of Super Mario Bros, right down to level design, and Nintendo were quick to bury it. However, 22 years later they resurrected it for the Nintendo DS and now, another 4 years later Black Forest Games have released this truly gorgeous sequel. This is up there with Trine and Rayman Origins as one of the most beautiful-looking platformers ever. Thankfully the gameplay is pretty nifty too and features a light/dark world mechanic that sees level geometry change as you flip between one world and the other. There's not enough of this sort of game on the PC or Xbox 360, so platforming fans owe it to themselves to check it out.

MTW

Top 10 puzzle games

One of my favourite genres is puzzle games. There have been some great ones over the years, with a couple of the very best starting in the arcade. Here's my list of my 10 favourite arcade puzzle games.

Check Man

My introduction to this little known game was actually via a clone on the BBC Micro B called Danger UXB; it's thanks to MAME that I got to play the original. The whole point is to collect the bombs before their timers run out. The catch, and with it the puzzle element, is that you can only walk on the tiles, which disappear after you step on them. It sounds simple, but it's pure pleasure.

Klax

This match three game sets itself apart from the pack by allowing the player to stack up tiles on the collector and drop them at will. However, take too long and tiles will somersault down the play field and off the screen. This is Klax's risk-reward system, whereby the ability to catch tiles before placing them can become a burden that makes you lose the game.

Magical Drop series

The first Magical Drop was released with barely anybody noticing. When the sequel was released on SNK's Neo Geo MVS machine, its popularity soared. I was introducted to the series via a clone, Astro Pop on Xbox Live Arcade, but having since played the second and third games, I prefer the original series.

Columns series

Another matching game, based on grouping coloured gems that cascade down the screen. The play can move the gems and also cycle their positions, always keeping them in a "column".  Columns may not be the most addictive puzzle game around, but it is as close as Sega came to having a Tetris of its own.

Puzz Loop

While you may never have heard of Puzz Loop, you will probably have played its biggest copy cat, Pop Cap's Zuma series. Swap the Mayan frog for a marble launching cannon and you have exactly the same match-three action.

Q*Bert

I'm not 100% certain, but Q*Bert may have been the first puzzle game I ever played. You can get into an almost zen-like state as you hop from cube to cube to change their colour. Gameplay-wise, Q*Bert is similar to Amidar, but Q*Bert was better looking and more elegant. In the world of Disney's Wreck-It Ralph, Q*Bert may be an abandoned game that nobody remembers, but not here on Arcade Throwback!

Dr Mario

One of my favourite puzzle games of all time is technically not an arcade game, because it came out on the Nintendo NES console, however, Nintendo released a cabinet based on the NES called Play Choice 10 and so Dr Mario was available in the arcade in certain versions of that unit. Phew. Not only is Dr Mario a brilliant puzzler, it's also incredibly challenging.

Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move

Can you believe there are people out there who have played several Puzzle Bobble games, with no clue about the platform game that gave birth to it? It would be sad if Puzzle Bobble — AKA Bust-A-Move — wasn't such a brilliant and adorable game. This is the grand daddy of all match three games and few have bettered it.

Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo

I said competitive puzzle action doesn't get much better than Bomber Man, but if any game could threaten that claim it's this from Capcom. I have no idea why it's part of the Street Fighter series, because in some ways it overshadows how brilliant a puzzle game this is. 

Tetris

Tetris is up there with Pac-Man and Space Invaders as one of those games that everybody has played, but in the case of Alexey Pajitnov's classic puzzle game, most people will have played it on a home machine or portable device of some kind. However, there were several arcade versions of this perfect puzzle game, my favourite of which is Atari's, which had a great two-player head to head mode and multiple difficulties.

MTW

Faux retro vs real retro

It's somewhat ironic that now modern consoles and PCs can produce high definition 3D graphics (which employ such advanced techniques as programmable shaders, normal mapped images and realistic physics) that a lot of smaller developers choose to make their games look like they were made for an 8 or 16-bit machine. I must confess to loving these faux retro games, such as Super House of Dead Ninjas, Jamestown and Fez, but the truth is a lot of the time all that is retro about the graphics are the visible pixels and the reduced colour pallet. Fez is a prime example, because as soon as the screen flips 90° to reveal the 3rd dimension the fact its running on a multi-core processor and dedicated GPU become strikingly obvious.

Fez is beautiful and brilliant, but visible pixels alone makes not a retro game.

I'm not knocking any of these games for their aesthetic, it actually taps right into the core of my nostalgia node, but at the same time I wouldn't want anyone to think they were really retro. Another such example is Retro City Rampage, a top-down action adventure in the same vein as the original Grand Theft Auto. The game looks like would run on a Nintendo NES, but again, it's doing things that are way beyond the power of Nintendo's old console — even if it was the console that ended America's video game crash of 1983.

However, before making Retro City Rampage, VBlank Entertainment were trying to make a similar game for the NES and they've now released a video explaining precisely what challenges faced game developers, both for home and arcade machines, back in the 80s and 90s. And we're not just talking about graphical challenges, but audio too. It's a great education for anyone interested in how games were made, so I urge you to watch it all (it is only 10 minutes)

Fascinating stuff, but that's not to say modern developers don't face challenges too. A Wii U might have exponentially more power than a NES, but with more detailed graphics, physics and sound comes exponentially greater memory, processor and storage requirements. In short, making games ain't easy, whether it's 1983, 1993, 2003 or 2013 and we should celebrate the fact there are people willing to go to such effort to entertain us.

MTW

Classic of the Month: Tapper

Manufacturer:	Bally Midway
Developer:	Marvin Glass and Associates
Genre:	Puzzle/Platform
Board:	Unknown
Year:	1983

Video games are awesome and beer is awesome, so surely the combination of the two would be even awesomerer? You'd be bang on with that one and if you really need proof (of what is essentially a universal law) look no further than Bally Midway's Tapper.

The game puts the player in control of a bar tender, who has to supply his demanding and increasingly bizarre-looking patrons with Budweiser (or generic root beer in a later, child friendly version called Root Beer Tapper). Tapper's pub has four bars, each with a door at one end and keg at the other. As the patrons appear you have to move to their bar, draw a pint of beer, then slide it down the bar to them, before they get to the end of the bar. When they catch the glass, they are pushed back a few feet. To finish the level you have to push each patron all the way back through the doors and out of the pub. But it's not as easy as just bombarding them with drinks. If they are still drinking, any subsequent glasses will fall to the floor and when a glass breaks in Tapper, you lose a life (well, a chance). To add more danger to the game, when a patron drains their glass they slide it back to you; fail to catch the glass and there goes another life. So you have to balance serving patrons with catching their empties. If a patron makes their way to the end of the bar, they will grab Tapper and carry him off and out of the pub — for some reason.

So the game has three ways in which the player can lose a life and if that wasn't enough, collecting the tips patrons leave (at various points along any one of the four bars) puts you at more risk of all three of them. So what on the face of it sounds like quite a cute and fun little game soon becomes as challenging and oppressively difficult as any other arcade game of the era. At the end of the day, Tapper wants your 10ps, so don't expect this to be a push over.

Tapper was released in 1983 and I think it's a pretty amazing looking game. The bar tender and patrons are detailed, colourful and brimming over with character — especially in later levels, when setting for the bar changes and the cowboys are replaced with sports fans, then punks and finally aliens (again, I don't know the reason for this). I can't help thinking that the bar tender looks like some distant cousin of Mario, but that's probably just a coincidence. As for the Budweiser tie-in, back then, here in the UK, Budweiser seemed like some exotic Yank beer, which must be refreshing and delicious, since it was always popping up in cool American culture, from action movies to rock videos. It wasn't until about a decade after the release of Tapper did I get to find out for myself that it was actually bland-tasting, overly carbonated piss. Give me a pint of Guinness any day! Tapper's still great though.

Usually, the videos I include in these posts just show someone playing the game on MAME, but every so often I find a video of the machine itself. In the video below you can see that as well as being a classic game, it's a classic cabinet. As well as a tap for a fire button for that authentic bar tender feels, it also has a bar at the bottom, which confusingly is something for patrons, not bar tenders. Oh well, it's a nice touch and a beautiful cabinet.

Root Beer Tapper was available on Xbox Live Arcade for a few years, until Midway went under and Microsoft had to pull all of their games. A nice touch on the Xbox version was the option to flick the right analogue stick down, a la the tap on the original cabinet. But it's gone now and even if you had the trial on your HDD (as I do), you can't buy the full version any more. Bummer.

MTW