C O I N O P S H O P #2 by Eugene Jarvis 7/15/82 Its Sunday night and Andy Rooney is bitching at me again. Time for a Smart Bomb, or better yet Hyperspace to some new coordinates. SEX and DRUGS and VIDEO. SEX and DRUGS and VIDEO. Pre-Monday manic depression is setting in. No wonder Andy Rooney is always whining on Sixty Minutes. SEX and DRUGS and VIDEO. SEX and DRUGS and VIDEO. I`m jaded and burnt and I need a rush. SEX and DRUGS and VIDEO. The first two are out - too many side effects. And no home game will satisfy me now. I need the high tech high the newest of new to lift me from my Sunday night blues. I check into my local branch of SPACELAND, the first intergalactic arcade chain. Thats right boys and girls. Its a Sunday night date with the pixels. Video Games aren`t just for breakfast anymore. They`re mentally theraputic, and a helluva lot more exciting then my shrink`s couch. Andy Rooney should play them more often, but then he`d be out of a job because he`d stop bitching all the time. Over to the changer for a nickle bag, and then on to the newest of new. There it is !! Kangaroo by Atari. (licensed from Sun Electronics). My new score. Virgin game-flesh. For sure, for sure. Gag me with a coconut!! Right off this looks a lot like Donkey Kong, the game that cost me my last real job. This could be trouble... It`s basically the same idea as Kong except you`re not an Italian plumber rescueing his sister, but a mommy kangaroo retreiving junior. On the playfield you got your usual platforms, ramps and ladders. You start at the bottom and work your way to junior up top. But there`s no Kong in sight, just scads of nasty monkeys. (Baby Kongs????) I guess the Italian plumber didn`t get to his sister in time. The control is Donkey Kong with an added twist. Using your 8-way stick, up is leap-up, upper-right is leap-right, upper-left is leap left, left is left, right is right, and down is duck (very useful for avoiding fastball coconuts). The incorporation of the jump function into the joystick feels nice on the gut level. Next to the joystick is the Punch button. This is the funnest part of the game. The Punch button allows you to deal knockout blows to the monkeys and their numerous droppings. Once you`re able to master the controls and elementary monkey psychology, the first two rounds are a cakewalk. The monkeys get you in three ways. They throw coconuts at you, drop apple cores, and run into you. There`s no excuse for running into the devils as you can always punch them out. Jump over the low coconut shots, and duck the high fastballs. As for the apple cores watch out as they sometimes will take a strange bounce or two. You can punch the apple cores for extra points. During the first two rounds it`s fun to hang around and deck a few extra monkeys for points. If you loiter too much, Rocky IV will come out and spar with you - time to move along. The third round is a killer. Baby Kangaroo is sitting up in a cage on top of a bunch of monkeys. The idea is to knock the monkeys out from underneath to lower the cage, and then jump in to save Junior. Sounds easy, but the monkeys are constantly sneaking under the cage almost as fast as you can punch `em out. But if you can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, and bob and weave your way through the numerous coconuts and apple cores, you can be a hero for a day. Don`t take too long, or the nasty monkeys will reach the apple core factory and you`re dead meat. The fourth round is like the first two except meaner. Then it`s back to the beginning again. A jolly good frolick into the old outback, but you play four rounds once - why play `em again. The champ is warm and ready for the next score. T R O N : the hype, the movie, the game, the bitcheness of it all. Imagine... racing light cycles, battling tanks, and the nasty MCP on a 3D electronic landscape. I move in for a closer look. No 3D landscapes here. The game is flat as a board. Then what are all these people crowded around for? I wait my turn. I`m up. I grab the glowing joystick, and check out my phosphorescent control panel. This IS bitchen. The first thing you do is select one of four phases to play. I move the dot to blue, and I`m on a grid with a lot of multiplying bugs. I`ve got to wipe out the grid bugs and move into the center hole before my timer runs down. The control is neat. I use the joystick to manuever, the rotary knob on the left to aim. The joystick trigger fires your gun. The grid bugs were simple. No real challenge here. What`s next. I choose green and its MCP cone time. You try to knock out cylinder blocks Breakout style, moving your way into the cone. The catch is that the blocks scroll left to right, so shoot them on the left first. That was easy. I even got a 1000 point bonus for wiping out all the blocks. Now I`m riding a blip that supposed to be a light cycle, trying to cut off a bad guy. Its a lot like the Atari VCS cartridge Surround, with the addition of using your trigger as a speed control. The bad guy is slow and dumb and in no time I`ve got him in a box. The last phase of level one is the tank battle. Pretty much your basic tank game, except for the new control. The joystick moves your tank, the rotate knob aims your turret, and the trigger fires. The playfield consists of a rectangular maze with a center warp zone which will hyper you to a random place when you move into it. It takes three shots to kill the bad guy tanks, while they need just one to do you in. The trick is to hide behind corners and pick the enemy tanks off with rebound shots, or duck into an aisle and get off three quick shots and get out. Don`t get caught on the same aisle with an enemy tank for an extended period of time or you won`t be able to avoid his shot. This first level tank is a joke, and I ambush him with three quick shots and I`m on to Level 2. I pick blue, but to my surprise there`s no grid bugs in sight, just three tanks barelling down my ass. Evidentally the color choice has nothing to do with game selection. When you choose a color you`re just assigned a game at random. So why bother? Because the key here is that you THINK you`re selecting a game even though it`s random. It`s a subtle way of screwing the player while he thinks he`s screwing the game. More on this later. Level 2 is tougher than Level 1, but not too bad. The MCP cone and the grid bugs are walkovers, but facing three tanks or three light cycles at once can get a little iffy for the neophyte. The trick to handling the light cycles is not to try to box the bad guys in, but box yourself in. Just build a little box for yourself and eat up the territory at slow speed, while the bad guys burn themselves out. The tanks are trickier. Remember to shoot around corners and get off those three quick shots. Avoid getting caught in long corridors without exits. Level 3 is where the amatuers head for the showers. The bugs are no sweat, but the cone is a toughy. It really moves and the motion is reversed, right to left this time. The light cycles can be had with the box-yourself-in strategy. However, facing 6 or 7 tanks at once may not be suicide, but its damn close. Pros and masochists only beyond this point. All in all TRON is a little disappointing. After all, what can live up to 20 million dollars worth of hype? But can they get away with replacing 3D computer excitement with 4 mediocre recycled games. In the Corporate Video mentality of the 80`s, it`s the packaging that counts, not the substance. The bottom line is the key. Why waste precious corporate resources to create a good game when you`re already paying top dollar to Disney for the name? But wait a minute! If this game is so bad, why am I playing it so much? Am I really having fun, or do I just think I`m having fun? In this era of Corporate Video it`s hard to tell. Final score: Corporate Video 1, Player 0. The game is called Tutankham by Stern.(licensed from Konami). I guess either the Japanese haven`t learned how to spell, or they figure the Americans can`t pronounce Tut`s real name. I know I can`t do either. Someday I guess computers will do all that kind of stuff for us, while we concentrate on the really important things in life. Like shooting cobras and gorillas, and gathering treasure in Egyptian tombs. Now this looks easy. You use a joystick in your left hand to move around in the maze, and fire a laser left or right with your right hand stick. You can`t fire up or down- otherwise they`d have to think up another way to screw you. That might require actual thought process. Lookout!! A puff of smoke and four cobras are after me. I blast `em with my bidirectional laser and grab the first treasure - A bucket full of diamonds worth 250, not bad! To get from the top to the bottom of the maze you use a warp gate, a sort of space age Roman arch that moves you to a companion gate in another part of the chamber. Be careful here, the gorillas like to hang out under these arches. Keep an eye out for the gorillas, cobras, and other heebie-jeebies. They electrocute you if they touch you. Especially avoid vertical passageways if enemies are close. You are defenseless here because you fire only left or right. In order to enter the next tomb, remember to get the key to the door on the way. Its not required to claim all the treasures so don`t take unnecessary risks. However, the more the merrier! My big beef with the game is that you can`t stand still. When you release the joystick you continue to move in your previous direction. So in order to stay stationary, you must constantly jockey back and forth, a real drag. Tut is fun to play, but it can get downright boring after a while because its exactly the same thing each time. I may not be back next week, but all those tokens I dropped into it aren`t going anywhere. Now I`m getting desperate in my quest for the newest of new, the spacier space, the rushiest rush. There`s nothing new left on the video side and Oh My God I`m heading for the pinball lineup. Grodie To The Max !! Is pinball dead? People use to ask that question all the time. The bottom line here is that as long as somebody bothers to ask, it isn`t dead yet. Nobody`s asked that question in a while. Of course no funeral`s complete without a casket, and here`s two bright shiny ones standing side by side. Gottlieb`s Caveman, and Mr. and Mrs. Pac-man by Bally. I used to play a lot of pinball in my former day and it`s damn exciting. The only problem is that video came along and blew everybodys mind with the infinite possibilities of an electronic graphic display. But for nostalgia`s sake I give the old plunger a pull. It`s a bird, it`s a plane, no it`s a vidi-pin. That`s right, if you can`t make it with a mediocre pinball machine throw a low grade video in there too. 1/2 + 1/2 = 1. Right? Two grade B items together make a dynamite double bill. Not likely here. With Caveman, the equation is more like 0 + 0 = 0. Let`s get down to the nitty gritty. Caveman is your basic one-level pinball with a video screen stuck right in the top of the playfield. Like all pinball games you bat around a steel ball with your flippers and there`s lots of complicated rules that sound like they were devised by the IRS involving bonus multipliers and the like. The real action here, if you could call it that, takes place on the video screen. By deftly flipping the ball into either the top rt, or top left, the ball dribbles down into a hole and its video-time Caveman style. With a joystick you manuever a trogdlodyte in a dinosaur maze. You want to run over Brontosauruses, Triceratops, and Pteradactyls. But watch out for the red Tyranosaurus. If he gets you its game over Homo Erectus. Compared to the pinball half of the game, the video game is intrigueing. But compared to any real video game its a real woofer. You have to give Gottlieb credit for coming up with the vidi-pin concept. But I`m sure the original concept didn`t involve marrying a dog video to a firewood pinball. Unfortunately with Caveman you have an idea that is about ten thousand years too late. But does this mean that pinball is dead? Of course not. But if sex and drugs are losing out to video, pinball has really got to hustle. QED.