One Star Gaming #5

Entry posted by nester January 28, 2008

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"The Epic Struggle of Bug Versus Pumpkin"

Fire Fly for Atari 2600

The scene for this entry is a long, boring Saturday afternoon. Most of my friends have gone out to have fun without me. I am now home alone with a couple of hours to fill before any chance of human interaction comes my way again. I sit thinking about what I can do to fill this empty, hopeless time. "I know!" I say to myself. "I'll play Fire Fly!"

The above story is true, and it does say a lot about what goes into the brain of your humble blogger. However, before you call me an ambulance, I should note that my game play is for purely intellectual reasons. What, that's even worse than playing it for fun? Oh well, let's move on to the game.

Video game collecting, like most collections of things more than a couple years old, is divided among people who were there and people who weren't. I fit into the latter category. Some of you are old enough to remember all these old games when they still had their boxes and instructions. People my age more commonly buy Atari games without any information about them at all. For many Atari games this is not a problem. The games are usually self explanatory and easy to understand after the first couple of minutes while playing. Fire Fly, however, is somewhat inexplicable. It seems that the more I play this game, the less sense it makes, and unfortunately, deciphering the game's odd premise is the most fun I've had with this game.

Fire Fly is a cheaply made shooter put together by a tiny company that really didn't seem to care. You control some sort of bug that flies to the right and shoots things. There are 5 different things to shoot at, and I imagine that they were supposed to each provide a different kind of challenge. However, they're all basically the same. You just need to position yourself close to the middle and shoot when the time is right. Sometimes you have to get out of the way of projectiles. You keep cycling through these creatures until you are finally brought down or you get bored and turn the machine off. Either way it will probably only take a couple of minutes.

Usually I don't make much out of a mediocre shooter, but what really gets me about this game is the odd premise. The background in this game is completely black except for the flowers at the bottom of the screen. This would imply you are in some sort of a garden. Since the game is insect based I guess I can buy that. The enemies, however, are unlike any bugs I've ever seen. The first screen finds us confronted with a Galaga look-alike with some sort of dot flying around it. If you touch this dot you die. If you keep on flying and ignore it you live. That's about all I can figure. The next screen has what appears to be a flaming pumpkin in a continual state of free fall. It doesn't look happy, and you feel like you're doing it a favor by killing it. The next screen has three creatures that look like devil cats. They are all connected so you only have to shoot one of them. This is followed by what looks like small flies, falling honey pots that don't fight back, and I'm gonna say grasshoppers that look a little bit like kitchen sinks.

In a way this game intrigues me. The hero seems to be a tortured soul. He is stuck in a dark world fighting the same series of strange monsters over and over again. He can never reach the flowers, and even if he were to get that far down he would only appear at the top again. Even the harmless looking characters can bring instant death just by going over to say hello. Yes, the main character certainly is trapped in a lonely world for which he can't escape.

Or is that me? After I played this game on that fateful Saturday I quickly called up my friends and ventured back out into the real world. It was nice breathing in the fresh air again. The sun was shining and the birds were singing. This game really helps put life back into perspective. If that's what you're looking for in a gaming experience than I highly recommend this game. However, if you're looking for an entertaining shooter, than I recommend just about anything but this.

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Mezrabad 148

Posted February 2, 2008

Heheh. I enjoyed this review, not just for the information but for the lonely soul theme. Figuring out some of the old games is a real challenge sometimes and half the time one can end up feeling that it was a waste of effort as the game can turn out not to be worth it. Still, exploration isn't always about finding the cool places to which to invite others, it's also about finding the awful places about which to warn others. Thanks for the advance warning.