Demon Attack Review

They can’t all be new releases. Sometimes life just has a way of throwing everything including the kitchen sink at you. So you don’t have the precious time to play a massive open world western, or a critically acclaimed RPG. But somehow you want to find time to play something compelling. This is why many early games can fit that bill, and often hold up today. One such game is a staple on early cartridge based consoles.

PROS: Enemy variety. Tight controls.

CONS: Not every version features the boss stage.

MAGIC: Imagic’s developers always seemed to perform it on the venerable VCS.

Released in 1982 Demon Attack is one of many titles that tried to build on the core concept set up by Space Invaders. It also has some inspiration from another early shmup; Phoenix.  Where Space Invaders saw you fighting a grid of ships from underneath the confines of shields, Demon Attack pits you against three enemies at a time. Destroy them, and another three will warp in. The game has this really terrific effect when the alien ships, and creatures come into battle against you.

Another thing to be aware of is the fact that each wave introduces new enemy types. Each with its own attack pattern, and weapons. So you should not expect to be going after the same ships over, and over. Or the same bullets over, and over. If you survive a wave without dying you’ll earn a 1-Up. This makes it very easy to get complacent. “Oh I’ll just stock up on lives, and never worry!”. But you should worry. By around the fifth wave you’ll find shooting enemies splits them in half rather than destroying them. You then have to take down each half. And you have to take them down quickly. Once you take down one the other will begin chirping like crazy before suicide diving toward your cannon. The back lines will then move forward taking their place.

While not one of the best looking games on the console, it’s visually a cut above what most of Atari’s own release had looked like up to that point. This is especially true of each of the enemy types. Demon Attack is one of the first 2600 releases to deliver such a wide variety of characters. Considering the limitations of the hardware of the time, and the limitations of cartridge space, it’s no wonder this is one of the first games worth picking up when starting a VCS collection. As a publisher, Imagic seemed to know how to push what was possible on consoles of the time. Like most games of the era there are several variations you can play by using the Game Select switch. Including some two-player modes where you alternate turns trying to out score each other.

Robert Fulop developed the game for the Atari 2600, and after Imagic had settled with Atari over the similarities in Demon Attack to Phoenix (Atari had home console publishing rights), it would go on to be one of the best-selling games on the system. There are no less than three printings of the game. A text label version, and a picture label version are the most common. You’ll find they’re often one of the cartridge variants you’ll see in a bundle of VCS games. After the crash, Imagic would find itself absorbed into Activision who would put it back out in their line of re-releases. This cartridge eschews the original Imagic style, and comes in an Activision shell, with a blue label. This version is considerably rarer than the common types, but is still far from impossible to find.

In any event Imagic had other programmers port the game to several other platforms of the time. The Intellivision, Magnavox Odyssey 2, Commodore VIC 20, Commodore 64, Atari 400/800, TI-99, and Tandy computer all saw versions of Demon Attack. Many of them have better graphics than the original version, and include a boss fight! Be that as it may the VCS original holds its own by having such fluid, and responsive controls. In fact, it’s better than many of the more advanced ports that released elsewhere.

Be that as it may, most of the ports are still quite good, and the boss fight can be pretty interesting as you transition between a surface, and space setting. Defeating it then continues onto the following wave. An interesting piece of info is that the 2600 version of the game almost had an end, as after the 84th wave the game would not continue. After release though, someone managed to get that far, and so the game’s future pressings added a line of code which made the game endless. Unfortunately, there’s no real way to know which cartridge will have the original run inside without actually getting to the 84th wave.

Demon Attack isn’t particularly hard to find these days, Especially not the Atari 2600 version. However, the Odyssey 2 port is an exception. Like many other third-party Odyssey 2 games, it isn’t something you’ll stumble upon in the wild all too often. Still, no matter which version you play is a fun time. Even if the box art does consistently make appearances in bad box art articles. Demon Attack may be a simple game by today’s standards, but it did a lot of things few other fixed shooters were doing. It’s an early game everyone ought to check out. For those who are curious but don’t want to invest in one of the platforms it appeared on just yet, it is in the Activision Anthology for the PS2, and PC.

Final Score: 9 out of 10

Cosmic Ark Review

Last time on the blog we looked at Atlantis. A game that combined defending the lost city during its death throes with classic arcade action. But this time we’ll be going over the sequel. Cosmic Ark plays completely differently than the previous game. None of the skills you learned from the previous game will help you here at all whatsoever. But fear not! It does continue where Atlantis left off.

PROS: Experimental game ideas gone right.

CONS: The planetary defense system.

SPACE NOAH ADVENTURES: ABDUCTION: Could have been an alternate title.

Remember the little ship that flew away when you finally lost in Atlantis? Well it’s actually a mothership, and it turns out that now you have to rebuild your civilization. How do you do this? By taking a page from the Old Testament, and rounding up pairs of living things. As well as sentient beings. Cosmic Ark  merges Noah’s mission of preserving civilization in the wake of a cataclysm with episodes of Unsolved Mysteries.

In fact you might even want to play this game while the Unsolved Mysteries theme song is playing. It did have a number of episodes centered around U.F.O. sightings, and alien abduction stories. It was one of the creepiest shows on television. But I’m getting away from the topic at hand here, so I’ll refocus.

Cosmic Ark is broken up into two stages. A space stage, and an alien abduction stage. Both of these stages alternate until you lose. Once again, this is a game about high score. In the space stage your mothership is in the center of the screen. You can shoot lasers above you, below you, and on either side by moving the joystick up, down, left, and right. Asteroids will appear in any direction, and you have to shoot them all. If an asteroid hits the ship, it explodes, and you have to play the stage again. You’ll keep going until the red meter below your score runs out, or until you complete the stage. Every collision drains part of the meter. Explode too many times, and it’s game over.

But if you succeed, you’re sent down to a planet’s surface. In this stage you pilot an away team in their own saucer. You’ll leave the mothership, and fly down to beam up two inhabitants. Once you have them on board, you fly back into the mothership, and go back into space, where you’ll play another round of the space stage. But things don’t go so swimmingly as the game progresses.

Every time you make it back to the first stage, the asteroids become faster, and the order becomes even more random. Eventually you’ll get to a point where it’s impossible to continue, and you’ll have to accept your final score. The second stage becomes more difficult in a few ways. For one thing, if you don’t abduct beings fast enough, the mothership will sound an alarm. If this happens, you need to quickly get into the mothership, and shoot down asteroids so you can leave, and go back into space. If the ship is hit, you go back to the space stage anyway, but with a much lower bill of health.

Successive trips to planet surfaces will reveal planetary defense systems. Laser guns will raise, and lower from the left, and right to shoot down your scout ship. If you get shot down you can send another before the alarm goes off. But note that if you are shot down, anyone you’ve abducted will fall to the ground, and you’ll need to abduct them again. So what you’ll need to do is act fast, and abandon the mission when you hear the alarms. Otherwise you risk  your mothership from being destroyed. Worst case scenario is you’ll repeat the same planet after the following space stage. Each planetary visit will change-up the kinds of organisms you’ll need to abduct too.

Of course, you will, again, get to a point where you’re unable to ward off asteroids, giving you a final score. Fortunately the game controls very well, and is pretty easy to get the hang of. Cosmic Ark stands out from the hundreds of other Atari 2600 games because of just how bizarre it is. Most other sequels will give you more of what you loved about their predecessors. Cosmic Ark takes chances with some weird ideas. But as crazy as it’s going to sound, it’s a lot of fun to play! Part of the fun is obviously the challenge of it all. But it’s also great trying to see what the people of each planet are going to look like. Kidnapping people in a makeshift attempt to rebuild your empire shouldn’t sound compelling. But somehow it is in Cosmic Ark. Demented. Twisted. But somehow a great time. If you have an Atari 2600, pick it up.

In the end you’ll lose, but once again, there’s a backup plan. When the mothership explodes, your scout ship survives the blast. One can only wonder how things would have gone if this had become a trilogy.

Final Score: 8 out of 10

Atlantis Review

Sometimes I like to go back, and jam on the games I grew up with. For a number of reasons. There’s the nostalgia. The memories of childhood Christmases, and birthdays. There’s also the fact that a lot of these games still hold up today. I can still enjoy them now as much as I did back then. Plus, it’s always nice to see people I have a few years on, discovering them, and enjoying them. Of course sometimes you might run into something from the past, you hope will stay there. But this game isn’t one of those.

PROS: Fast paced arcade action.

CONS: No matter how good you are, you will lose.

COLLECTOR’S GOLD: The extremely limited pseudo sequel.

Atlantis is a classic game for some very classic consoles. It takes the idea of Armageddon from Missile Command, and plays it out a bit differently in another setting. In this game instead of things taking place over a nation of cities during a nuclear war, it takes pace in Atlantis. You’re put in charge of defending the lost city as a race of extra terrestrial forces invade. The city has a number of important structures you need to protect.

You do this by using the three attack cannons peeking out of the sea. There are cannons on the left, and right corners followed by one in the center of the city. Ships fly above the city attacking you. In the earliest goings you’ll find the enemies aren’t much of a threat at all. They barely provoke you at all, fly slowly, and are fairly easy to shoot down. But don’t let your guard down. Because as time goes on they become much more brazen.

There are several ships you need to shoot down. Some of the designs borrowed from pop culture, they all can become threatening. There are the Constitution class ships from Starfleet,  Klingon D7’s, and Rebel X-Wing fighters. Generally the, two Star Trek knockoffs don’t become a problem until the third pass. Each ship makes a run above, getting lower, and lower if you don’t manage to shoot it down. On the third pass, they begin firing death beams over structures. The Star Wars knock off is actually the biggest threat to you, because of its high rate of speed. It will drop photon torpedoes on buildings in the blink of an eye, too. The one saving grace is that for some reason, destroying one, kills every enemy on the screen. You can also hear them coming, as their engines make a distinct, and stressful noise.

You shoot each of the cannons by moving the joystick in the proper direction while pressing the fire button. Push left for the left cannon, and right for the right cannon. Not pushing the stick at all, means you’ll be firing the center cannon. But keep in mind, the ships will also target the cannons too. So you can actually be left defenseless. If you can earn enough points, you can rebuild your cannons. But if all of the landmarks are obliterated before you do, it is all for naught. When you have a nail-biting wave take out your last cannon, you’re forced to watch the genocide of your people in horror. But there is a little bit of hope. When you lose, a tiny ship is seen escaping the ruins of Atlantis.

If you couldn’t tell, this game is a high score game. Which is one of the most common goals in games of the era. Still, it manages to tell a story in that burst of action, while being a fun game. Moreover Imagic also added a two player mode where each person manages a cannon, and work together to get a team score.

But it doesn’t end there, because the game was ported to a couple of other platforms, the Magnavox Odyssey 2, Commodore Vic-20, Atari 8-bit family, and the Mattel Intellivision. The Odyssey 2 version is probably the worst looking of the ports, while the Vic-20 has a much more detailed landscape. In between these are the Atari computer version. Basically, these versions are direct ports of the Atari 2600 original. But the Intellivision port actually takes a few liberties with the formula, making it feel like a director’s cut.

There’s an obvious upgrade to the graphics, making it look almost as good as the Vic-20 port. It also adds day, and night cycles to the game between waves of enemy ships. During the battles you’ll move a cursor around the screen shooting at the invaders. You still have, left, and right cannons. Pressing the left or right buttons on the controller will fire from the proper cannon. Pressing the zero key launches a saucer you can fly about the screen to shoot down threats instead of using the cursor. But if you crash it, or are shot down you can’t launch another one until the next day cycle. This version also changes up the look of the enemy ships to Tie Fighters, and other borrowed designs. When the night falls however, spotlights look to the sky, and the threats are only visible when in the light. This, and the attack saucer are pretty impressive features considering the time of release.

The end game is the same however. Enemies will bomb the landmarks until nothing remains except for your score, forcing your survivors to flee in a derelict mothership. Ultimately, Atlantis is one of the best console games of the era. It plays to each platform’s strengths, including the computer ports. It’s fast paced, and addictive. It’s still a really fun game to play from time to time, and it’s competitive. There was also a sequel, Atlantis II that was never sold. Atlantis II is actually not so much a sequel, as it was an upgrade. Think of it a bit like the progression from Street Fighter II: Champion Edition to Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting. The same core concept is there, but everything has been sped up, and tweaked to be much more difficult.

But Atlantis II was only made for a competition Imagic had created for Atlantis. Players would mail in their high scores in an attempt to win the rights to a vast cash prize. The top four players would be flown out to Bermuda for a chance to face each other for the money. The thing is more than four players were able to max out the score. So Imagic made the aforementioned tweaks to the game, altered the typeface on the scoreboard, and sent the winners this altered version. These players were given two days to play, and send in their highest scores again. Those winners were then selected to be flown out to a competition for the prize money.

As a result Atlantis II is actually one of the most sought after 2600 games due to the rarity. The few times they show up, they fetch upwards of a couple of thousand dollars. They’re also easy for con artists to fake because the game is the exact same cartridge as Atlantis. The only physical difference is an Atlantis II sticker thrown on the box, and cartridge. The only real way to know if the game is legitimate is to play it, and see if the numbers on the scoreboard look different.

But if you wanted to know if Atlantis saw a real sequel it did. It all centers around that derelict mothership I mentioned earlier. Atlantis would be followed by Cosmic Ark.

Final Score: 8 out of 10