Homebreviews - part 14
Entry posted by Nathan Strum
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I started writing a parody of the "Theme from Gilligan's Island" to introduce these, but that was too much work. Well, that... and it wasn't turning out to be very funny. 
So here, with no additional fanfare, are "the rest..."
Go Fish!
4/5
In Go Fish!, it's eat or be eaten. You play a tiny yet hungry little fish, and must eat other fish to survive. But you can only eat fish your size or smaller. Try to eat something bigger than you, and you'll end up as its dinner. If the bigger fish weren't enough, you must also be on the lookout for jellyfish, electric eels and sharks. Can you survive long enough to become the biggest fish in a little pond? Or will you end up as just so much fish food?
Go Fish! is an unusual game for the 2600. It's a game of patience rather than aggression. Being aggressive will usually just put you in harm's way. And while there are times when you have to respond quickly to get to safety, your fish isn't exactly fast, and the bigger it gets, the harder it is to maneuver. Go Fish! nicely mimics the sensation of being underwater, although sometimes this makes the controls seem a bit sluggish. Also, there are times when it seems to take forever for edible fish to appear, and for your fish to grow up. Fortunately, there is no penalty for not eating other fish, so you can often just lie in wait until dinner shows up. The downside of this, is that the game doesn't give you much incentive to chase down other fish. The pacing of the game picks up when starting on the harder difficulty setting, since your fish doesn't spend so much time being small.
The graphics are well done, although some of the fish are hard to tell apart. There are a lot of nice little touches though, like the smaller fish swimming away from you in fear, or electric eels lighting up as they swim by, or the seaweed gently swaying in the current. The sound and music are very good (and you can shut off the music, if you don't care for it), and there is high-score support for the AtariVox, too. Go Fish! is a well-done game, and an enjoyable one. It's just a different pace from a lot of 2600 games, and takes some getting used to. I recommend picking it up, especially if you're looking for a game without a frenetic pace, but one that can still challenge you in its higher levels.
Skeleton+
4/5
You're trapped in a maze with no escape, and living skeletons are pursuing you at every turn. If they catch you - you're dead. It's a good thing you happened to bring your Undead Disintegrator with you this morning, since the only way out of here is to hunt them down and wipe them out.
Skeleton is a rarity on the 2600 - a first-person maze game, and in this case, one of the best. While the graphics may not be as slick as Tunnel Runner or Escape From The Mindmaster, the gameplay is very addictive, and that's what matters the most. The game couldn't be simpler, following a series of visual cues (and audio ones - which are especially effective if you have a 2600 modified with stereo audio), you move through a maze, looking to hunt down skeletons. But if they touch you, they'll drain your life away, so you have to get close enough to kill them, but not so close that you risk getting killed. The first few are easy to kill, but as the game progresses the skeletons become more resilient. Skeleton+ really pulled me into its world. Since I never knew when the next skeleton was right around the corner, I found myself getting startled more than a few times. Very cool.
In some first-person games, it can become easy to get lost down dead-ends and get disoriented. But Skeleton+ avoids this problem because the maze is fairly open, and interconnects enough so that you don't have to backtrack all over the place to track down a skeleton. Plus, you aren't actually trying to find a specific location in the maze, so there isn't the frustration associated with having to know exactly where you are all the time. All you have to know is your proximity to the nearest skeleton, and the cues that the game gives you work perfectly. If I had one knock against Skeleton+ is that you can't back up. You have to turn completely around to go back where you came from. Additional types of enemies, weapons and maze types would have been welcomed too, as there's a a lot of untapped potential here. But as it stands, Skeleton+ is still an excellent game and I highly recommend it.
Space Battle
4/5
Space Battle is a shoot 'em up, where you have to destroy armadas of enemy ships, battle boss ships, then land safely to move onto the next round. Space Battle manages to separate itself from typical vertical shooters on the 2600 with several welcomed additions: you have to constantly catch fuel pods to keep your ship powered-up, the enemies move very unpredictably, and instead of just giving shields to the player, the enemies have them as well. Whenever you shoot an enemy, the rest of the ships in its group will raise their shields, so you can't shoot that group again, until you shoot some other group, first. This, coupled with its three different stages, really makes Space Battle challenging, varied and unique. I have to play it using steerable missiles (option 2) to last very long.
The graphics and sound are well done, although not as glitzy as some other homebrews. There are a few rough edges, and the game could have used a little more polishing here and there, like better gravity simulation during the landing stage and some other minor things. That said, Space Battle is a solid shooter, with enough unique elements to set it apart from the crowd, and most importantly - it's fun to play. It reminds me of some of the better, early 3rd-party games for the 2600. Space Battle re-captures some of the raw energy of those titles, but definitely in a good way. Well worth having for fans of shoot 'em ups.
Vault Assault
3/5
Vault Assault is a port of the classic arcade game Space Zap. You control the guns of a space station, and must defend it against attack. Enemies will appear on the four sides of the screen, then launch their weapons at you. If they hit you, your station is destroyed. Lose all of your stations, and the game is over.
Although Vault Assault is a pretty faithful port of Space Zap, it is missing one crucial element - the Attack Satellite that circles your station and attempts to crash into you periodically. The Attack Satellite helped to break up Space Zap into rounds, and gave the player something different to shoot at once in awhile. Vault Assault really would have benefited from this, because there is no break between rounds, and nothing different to shoot at. Just the same four enemies, over and over. Vault Assault is well done as far as it goes, with decent graphics and sound and a great "twitch" play mechanic. It's a good game for a quick action gaming fix now and then, but there's just not enough variety in gameplay or additional game options to hold your attention for very long.
That's it for this round of games. At some point I should 
be getting copies of Encaved and Elevators Amiss, so I'll review those whenever they get here. Plus I've got some store credit coming for the Elevators Amiss contest, so I'll probably have even more games to review.
I think these reviews are getting longer each time I write a new batch. On the plus side, the AtariAge store is just about out of games that I haven't reviewed, so this won't go on forever. 
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