nuskadamo

[la recensione della collection di per sé arriva fra qualche giorno forse]

"LLamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story" is a purchase that sparked plenty of joy within me, or at least that's what that japanese interior design lady would say if she had a knack for old european computer games. I look forward to writing down a proper review once i'm done reading, seeing and playing all that there is, so expect it to be a fat one. In the meantime, here's some of my thoughts about the individual games in the collection!

City Bomb
The first of many unofficial arcade conversions listed here, which was originally gonna be named after some sort of UK related skirmish going on at the time with another country for edgy effect, before cooler heads prevailed. You control a plane going back and forth above a row of buildings, slowly descending with each cycle, with the task of bombing them all away to ensure a safe landing.
Haven't played the game City Bomber was trying to emulate, and this simple premise as is doesn't have any holes, sufficing just fine as a cheap solo project in the early 80's computer scene, but i'm gonna assume the original is leaps better, with its higher frame rate allowing faster and more precise gameplay. Two and a half stars.

Rox 64
Jeff's very first Commodore 64 game, completed in just one day, according to the man himself... and it shows.
You play from inside a lunar base, and you can launch missiles at three different angles to stop meteorites from hitting the moon's surface, with 3 screen bombs allowed for when you're on the ropes.
In spite of the better hardware allowing for a consistent frame rate, Rox 64 is an overall downgrade compared to its Vic-20 predecessor, getting rid of the feature to cancel your missile launches past a certain treshold, having a more subdued surface destruction effect and showcasing graphics that didn't exactly push the boundaries of the Commodore.
Sometimes the base will explode before touching the ground in the intro animation. I think it's because of a specific input... never bothered to figure out which one. One and a half star.

Abductor
Yeah, this one reeks. It's a vertical shooter where the gimmick is having to stop the space ships from kidnapping the humans at the bottom of the screen, and it's got a couple of cute ideas like being able to shoot off the ships that caught a human before they leave the screen to free them, or the human skulls falling from the sky and hitting you once they get killed, but everything else is just so so awful. Sometimes ships will spawn from below you, killing you instantly with no way to predict their entrance, and everything you can actually see moves way too fast to be shot at reliably, plus there's the fact that to free the kidnapped humans from the corners of the screen you gotta acquire a special ship, and its shooting pattern still makes that inconsistent. Half a star.

Laser Zone
The first game in Jeff's developer career where his more psychedelic and artistic side starts to become apparent, in spite of a fairly basic gameplay formula. Laser Zone is a shooter where you control 2 ships at the same time, one moving vertically and one horizontally, both tasked to shoot at the invaders before they reach their respective floors. Most of the shooting will naturally be straight forward, but you can also tilt one of your ships diagonally to defend the other one in case an enemy got out of its range. You can... but you won't. It's a very clunky process.
While the Commodore 64 version has colorfoul graphics, bizarre looking enemies and an elaborate interface, it lacks the snazzy text animations that would frequently pop up in its Vic-20 predecessor. The Vic-20 also had this extra rule where you can only shoot from a given ship if they are positioned on the dotted half of their axis, a rule which thankfully was later removed. Three stars.

Matrix: Gridrunner 2
I'm gonna talk about Gridrunner in better detail within the Jeff Minter documentary review once i get to it, for now i'll just state that the sequel is a direct improvement in almost every aspect, and that i wish Digital Eclipse would have done a remaster for this one instead of the original, even if i understand the historical and emotional value it holds. You have better freedom of movement, your targets engage in a new pattern once they reach the bottom of the screen, there's more enemy variety and the visuals for the backdrop are more elaborate. This last aspect ends up inconveniencing you more than anything, because the moving grid makes tracking what row your targets are moving at less intuitive, and you already have so much to pay attention to. Three and a half stars.

Andes Attack
I've been wondering for the longest time where titles like Fantasy Zone and such took inspiration from for that very specific circular, multidirectional shmup gameplay, and apparently it all comes from an arcade game called Defender. Jeff Minter tried adding his own twist on the formula, replacing humans with llamas like he would become famous for, but that bit of extra visual flair is nowhere near enough to save Andes Attack from being a disaster. The ship has only one movement speed and takes up way too much space compared to the arcade original, hugging either side of the screen at all times which i've never a been fan of in this specific kind of shooter, and your projectiles are frustratingly finicky compared to anything the enemies can throw at you. The lack of mini-map is unacceptable, as you'd never know when a llama is being kidnapped if it's not happening on screen. One star.

3D3D
Not quite the tridimensional adventure this game presented itself as in magazines and advertisements, 3D3D is still an impressive piece of software considering the time of release ('82) and the hardware at hand (the Vic-20). You're tasked to climb a ten floor labyrinth recreated in faux 3D sprites, finding holes in the ceiling that you can climb on, and taking as few actions as possible along the way.
I haven't gone too far with this one admittedly, but if had the intention to i'd probably draw a grid of each floor right on a piece of paper as i enter it, keeping manually track of every step i take. 3D3D penalizes your final score for opening the map multiple times or checking where the holes on the ceiling are, so i don't know if my approach would be considered cheating or not, but i do like it when older games require you to use pen and paper in some capacity. Three stars.

[recensione breve stavolta chiedo scusa]

Bugdom, yet another of many many games that have been laying dormant inside my PC for unspecified millenia, up until i decided to do some spring cleaning. I knew it was an Itch.io download credited to an account using the owner's real life name, so i felt slightly mean having to write a negative review over something that i assumed was just yet another uncreative nostalgia driven N64 themed passion project, but no... this is actually a port of a '99 Mac computer game, developed by a proper studio and meant to wow Mac users as a pack-in for certain desktops. Was there ever a point in time in which being an Apple peruser was not costant humiliation ritual?

A fair disclaimer that the Itch.io page specifies how this isn't a 1:1 recreation of the game, adding modern controls and fixing some bugs, so the vanilla version may either have been even worse before these fixes, or it's the "fixes" themselves that caused a lot of my many issues with Bugdom.
You play as Rollie McFly, a blue beetle that rolls but doesn't mcfly. Rolling is an imprecise ordeal, you get too fast too quick, collisions (which often tend to not match the level geometry) will interrupt your momentum at any corner and worst of all, the mechanic is tied to a meter that depletes way too fast, even when you're just standing in place.
Refilling said meter is exclusively dependant on you breaking the right coconut among the many scattered throughout the level, hoping they hold a mushroom instead of the very useless collectables, of which the game never tells you how many in total there are and how many you missed.

I suppose the character models are cute, even if not animated terribly well, but the levels themselves have less going on than the N64 platformers this game is clearly trying to emulate, even though under a different context than what i originally assumed. The music is certainly something your ears can process and your brain can interpret. That goes for the sound design as well, but not always, because there is a bug that will shut off SFX for once in a while.

So many enemies cannot be properly killed off, even when you ram them with the rolling attack, and it's annoying. Very little to like here. Well, alright, the level transitions are nice.

[non vedo l'ora di bombardare qualche dodongo]

I had the monumental privilege of playing the Zelda CD-i games on original hardware growing up, not to brag or anything. My lil brother is huge into collecting, and had his start when he was still barely a teen, with the CD-i stuff being one of his first big gets. Outside of the many memorable YTPs (shoutouts if the words DINNER BLASTER still live rent free in your head after all these years) that many a child around my time have been subjected to back in the day, i do also have fond memories of playing those games with said lil brother, so Arzette is something i've been very intrigued by as soon as i became aware of its existence.

Once i was done with my playthrough, i had the itch to purchase the developer diary as well, just to see what was going on behind the scenes of such a peculiar undertaking.
After reading through the entire thing, not only i can state that it greatly served its purpose of satiating my perennial interest over the beautiful art of game development and its intricacies, but it also enhanched by a lot my enjoyment for Arzette, because it pretty much confirmed to me that many of the aspects i so much liked about the game weren't either incidental or my own personal headcanon, but all by design.

There's just an aura of respect towards the CD-i Zeldas all throughout the Arzette, over what could have been easily just low hanging mockery and blind callbacks. If you had no idea of what Arzette was based off of, outside of the... vintage artstyle you wouldn't think you'd be missing much context from anything you might come across, and this is an important accomplishment as far as i'm concerned, that sets Arzette apart from other reimaginings of much more revered titles.

Getting the original voice actors for Link and Zelda back in the game as cameos was such a nice get too, it was fun to find out they were both theatre kids who never did any voice acting before, and seeing them in a role that most would better be able to take seriously kinda makes you realize that, in spite of the state of the original game's cutscenes, their performance was truly not any bad in a bubble.

Arzette at its core is a fun little adventure with tons of charm and personality, a well crafted level design from start to finish, and a fantastic music. While i'm glad specifically about this last aspect, with the CD-i classics having a lowkey fr fr banger of a soundtrack of their own to compare this one with, there's other elements of this game that i wish strayed a bit further away from the source material. Exhibit A: the bosses.

There comes a point after you obtain the item that allows you to bounce off bullets where some of the bosses straight up cannot hurt you and you can defeat them just by sitting there and waiting for them to kill themselves with their own attack, and even before that just walking into a boss fight with enough bullets is a mere matter of jumping in place when needed and pressing a button when they happen to spawn in your sight. They were in no way designed with all of the obtainable upgrades in mind and it's hard to look past that.

The lack of selectable checkpoints when you re-enter an area can be quite annoying. The levels, like i said, are nice and short on average so it's not a huge deal, but if you wanna be a completionist you'll have to do a lot of back and forth that loses its sense of challenge the more you obtain stuff, other than when the quest markers will randomly decide to not appear on the map. Checkpoints within levels do exist thankfully and they're all well placed as far as i'm concerned.

The last point i wanna address is the story, which for a lighthearted game like this may seem like a pointless endeavour, but hear me out. It's a story about SPOILER ALERT a princess learning to break long standing traditions for the sake of her own kingdom and its safety, something seen with how, instead of trapping the Ganon legally distinct replacement inside a book like told to, she just straight up murks him. I do like the concept but with how she meets pretty much no real pushback from any of the characters the message isn't as poignant as it should be. The intro to the game (beautifully draw, to its own credit) sets up way too much context that was better off scattered across the game itself rather than in that one singular scene, almost making me think there was a prequel to this game that i somehow knew nothing about, with how bit by bit everything was described. It's an approach that doesn't work all too well.

Still, Arzette is badass. Far from perfect, yes, but valuable as a work of art in a lot of ways that go past what you see in the game itself. I'm adamant that the developer diary is a mandatory read if the premise interests you in any way, they'll make you appreciate stuff you might not have given much thought to otherwise.