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Afterburner Complete: the downside of digital controls

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It’s not just horizontal side-scrolling shooters that I’m hopeless at. Afterburner Complete is an excellent conversion of the arcade game, and one of the games that I’ve played many times on my actual 32X. It’s colourful, it’s fast and smooth, it has great music. I am rubbish at it.

Part of this is down to the digital controls, I’m sure. There’s no nuance on how you move, you have to throw the plane all over the screen to avoid missiles but this means that it’s really difficult to target any of the enemy planes. On Afterburner Climax the controls are much more precise, with the aiming reticule being more delicately balanced, and I feel so much more in control.

I set the number of lives to the maximum, and I managed to get as far as level 8, but I found the shift in focus to avoiding obstacles – the canyon walls and the radio masts – to be beyond me. No matter how quickly I reacted, even with the plane’s speed set to the minimum, I ended up crashing multiple times. I have no idea why I couldn’t just fly a little bit higher.

Hellfire: colour coding

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The box of Hellfire is etched in my mind, as it sat on the shelf of the Computer Leisure Centre in Orpington for many months, unobtainable due to the expense but tempting due to the artwork. I had played R-Type, of course, and any number of lesser scrolling shooters on the CPC, but this looked fantastic, and the reviews in Sega Power and Mega did nothing to quell my enthusiasm.

Then, I recall, Colin got it, and I played it at his house, and it was fantastic. But since I could possibly borrow it, I no longer needed to buy it. I borrowed it a couple of times, and never got very far. See, I’m rubbish at shooters.

That’s present tense too. I’m still hopeless. Hellfire’s gimmick is that your ship can fire four ways – forwards, backwards, up and down, or to the four diagonals. You cycle between these on the B button while A fires; your ship changes colour depending on the gun direction. To get through the stages, particularly when you get to the bosses, you need to have the right weapon selected. I find this tricky.

The stages are colourful but the backgrounds never intrude

I’m playing on easy, and have got to Round 1 Stage 4 before meeting a section I just can’t get past. It really is a great game, it’s just that I’m pants at it.

Starfox: the stars are colourful

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You press a button, and wait for a couple of minutes for the view to change. You hear something shooting at you, but there are no instruments telling you from which direction. You flail around panning up, down, left and right, until you finally see some weird distorted polygon on one of your screens. If it’s in your front screen, you hit the lasers and fail to do anything since it’s already disappeared. If it’s in your back or side screens, you can see it merrily firing at you while you try (and fail) to turn around to face it. You then accidentally press the T button and see your ship rocketing off into space, with no idea where you’re going.

I’m sure I’m missing something. There must be a way of seeing where you are supposed to fly to, and then to see where things are when you get there. I was told I was near a planet, and near a fuel ship, but didn’t see either of them. I was told I was near a convoy – and saw a single ship each time.

I think I’ll stick to Elite.

Robocop: initially like a dalek

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Robocop on the CPC is a great game. Responsive, colourful, fast, full of action. It’s also pretty difficult, and relies on you memorising every enemy pattern throughout its levels.

The majority of the game is a side-scrolling platformer. Enemies include standard gun holders (walking along or appearing at windows above), chainsaw users, and flying kick specialists. The latter are pretty easy; as soon as they appear at the side of the screen, you can duck down and they will jump over you when they reach you anyway. Others need to be hit in a certain pattern at certain times to avoid taking damage; there are limited health recharge powerups, and only three lives for the whole game, so preserving health is important. On the second scrolling level (the third overall) there are bikes that you need to crouch down and shoot as soon as they appear, and even then it’s a toss up as to whether they’ll be destroyed before they hit you. I can get to the end of the third level now without losing a life, but only just.

The second mission is a shootout, where you need to hit a kidnapper without hitting the hostage he’s hiding behind. The fourth mission is a photofit game where you need to match up parts of a face. The fifth mission is another side-on platformer, but now you can walk up stairs and the screen scrolls vertically as well as horizontally. I don’t yet know about levels past this, because the enemies keep killing me as I walk up stairs.

Robots are very slow at walking up stairs.

The game is similar to the spectrum version but 34,218% more colourful.

I must admit it took me a while to even know I could walk up the stairs. In the first couple of scrolling sections, you can’t, even though the stairs look exactly the same as they do in the factory level. To walk up stairs you need to be in the correct spot and then press diagonally up, meaning that you are pretty vulnerable to enemies who aren’t standing obligingly at the top.

So it has some foibles, but it’s also a really fun game. I think I have found an exploit on the first and third level, though. The game can only cope with five sprites at a time, meaning that if you can shepherd four enemies along with you, no others will appear. Most enemies will come in from one side, shoot at you or hit you with a chainsaw, and then walk back to the side; they’ll then come back in to get you again. If instead you just walk along behind them, they’ll carry on walking away from you all the way to the end of the level. If four of the flying kick people are clustering you, you can just keep on ducking their attacks and walking along when they’re off screen.

Chase HQ: completed!

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Everyone remembers the synthesised speech of “Let’s go, Mr Driver!”, but in fact there are other sayings in different levels; the one that I noticed as I played through today was “Giddy up, boy!”. I wonder how many people have heard the full set.

Chase HQ on the CPC is one of the best 8-bit computer arcade conversions of all time. Comparing it to the arcade machine there are obvious differences – smaller sprites, digital controls, less accurate handling and lower framerate – but given the constraints of the hardware the game plays amazingly well. I remember when we first bought the game, on disk, from the basement of Hamleys in London – I’d read the review in Amstrad Action and knew it was meant to be good, but when we got home and I played it for the first time it was better than I could imagine. So colourful, so fast, and speech as well. Amazing.

There’s not so much amazement nowadays, since we can, if we want, play the actual arcade game emulated on a computer, and driving games like Need for Speed Most Wanted have provide a more coherent ramming-the-baddies experience. Nostalgia is still a powerful thing, though.

Getting the game to run wasn’t easy. I had a CPC core in RetroArch, and Caprice32 as a standalone emulator. The latter crashed immediately on startup. The former worked fine, until I loaded the game in – and found that it was a pre-hacked disk file which offered me the option of infinite time and infinite turbos. I didn’t want these, so pressed “N” … and found that the keyboard didn’t work. To be exact, some of the keys didn’t work – they’re mapped to RetroArch shortcuts – and some did. I could get into the game by choosing “O” (for ‘oui’) and the “W” key seemed to be mapped to RETURN. Once in game I could use a joypad, or the cursor keys (with X changing gears and A operating the turbo). The joypad was OK apart from the fact that the accelerator was mapped to UP on the d-pad, which got a bit painful after a while.

I committed to only using three turbos per stage, and roughly timed 60 seconds to get to the criminal and then another 60 seconds to take them out. I think I just about managed it, but it’s hard to be sure.

Who puts massive columns at the side of the road anyway?

The game is still great, if a little samey after you’ve completed the first few levels. There are five in total, and the only thing that seems to change is traffic density and the length of the stage – meaning the last level is pretty tricky to complete. Well, complete in the right time limit anyway. I’ll try to find an unhacked ROM and try that one out next time.