17. A.P.B.
Another driving game with heavy
exploration influences, Dave Theurer's last effort for Atari Games
was like nothing seen before, and little seen since.
Developed by Atari Games
Designed by Dave Theurer
Platform: Arcade, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube
(last three: emulation through Midway Arcade Treasures 2),
assorted ports
Length: Arcade
Of Note:
The Game:
A.P.B. sometimes feels like an
extended exercise in rubbing your stomach and patting your head at
the same time, what with it having a gas pedal, a siren button, a gun
button and a steering wheel, but that could just come through
playing it through Midway Arcade Treasures 2.
The player drives a police car through
an overhead-view, scrolling world. Each level starts him off in a
different place, and asks him to arrest a quota of lawbreakers
without acquiring too many demerits. Earlier levels task him with
arresting litterbugs, while later levels feature harder-to-arrest perps like
honkers, drunks, and eventually murderers. The player has a
crosshair that floats in front of his car, and pressing the "siren"
button causes it to flash.
The unique properties of this button
are a big part of the game. While the siren is pressed, lawbreakers
pointed at by the crosshair get hit by what we'll call "arrest
damage"; when a certain amount of damage is inflicted, they pull
over. You don't have to brake or anything, if they get enough damage
you get credit for the arrest. Further, while colliding with other
vehicles will ordinarily give you a demerit, if you do so with the
siren button held down there is no penalty unless you actually hit
the car hard enough to destroy your own vehicle. But the player
can't just keep the button held because other cars will never break
the law while the siren is on.
Got all this so far? In addition to
this, there are shops around where the player can, once per level,
pick up an improvement for his vehicle by driving through and
pressing the siren button while the crosshair points at what he
wants. Starting with level 4, the player can get a gun this way, and
can use it to "arrest" people in addition to the siren...
but hitting innocent people with the gun is worth a demerit.
There are also doughnut shops and
stands scattered throughout the game. Shops are just driven through,
but stands must be driven past just as they reach out with a doughnut
to collect it. Doughnuts are worth extra time; if the player runs
out of time the day ends, and he gets demerits for every quota not
yet acquired.
The player's car also has limited gas.
If he runs out the day ends, he gets the usual demerits for not
making quota, and an extra demerit for getting stranded. Gas
can be refilled by stopping at gas stations or by docking with
special refueling cars while on the road.
Players also get demerits for running
people over, for crashing their vehicle, and for who-knows-what other
things. All kinds of things give out demerits in this game, and
doing well at it requires that players be incredibly attentive. But
there are also secret areas scattered around, off-road
sections containing all kinds of hidden bonuses. Of course, it's
counter-productive to grab bonuses when the player's behind on making
quota. I haven't even mentioned the A.P.B.s themselves yet, who if
brought in mean the player doesn't have to worry about quota.
So, with all this stuff to keep track
of, does A.P.B. make it work? They make it rather
unfriendly to new players, but buried beneath it all is a genuinely
interesting game. Once all the various aspects have been mastered it
is possible to get quite hooked on it, but it expects far more out of
the player than most arcade games.
Design Lessons:
The coolest thing about A.P.B.
is how it's a level-based game that also takes place in a huge
world. While early levels generally take place along a single
stretch of road, nothing prevents the player from ducking down a side
road and exploring areas he wouldn't ordinarily see until much later!
At first it seems like there's not much
reason to do this, but towards the end the purpose of allowing
players to jump the rails and look around becomes apparent. Each
level requires that the player collect an increasing number of perps
of various types. Most of these will be drivers, who appear
generally anywhere he might go, but some are Hitchers and some are
"Helps," people seeking roadside assistance.
While drivers appear on most roads,
Hitchers and Helps appear only in certain places. They get refreshed
every day, but to collect them requires the player knowing where to
look, and more and more as the player reaches higher levels he'll
have to stray off the main path to find them. Also, the locations of
the A.P.B.s is told to the player at the start of the levels, so to
find them the player must generally know his way around and where to
find landmarks.
Links:
Wikipedia
KLOV
18. Todd's Adventures in Slime World
The most unfortunate casualty of the
Lynx's failure in the marketplace, a vast game supporting many
players and possessing amazing game variety.
Developed by Epyx
Designed by M. Peter Engelbrite
Platform: Atari Lynx, Sega Genesis
Length: Long
Of Note:
The Arcade maze on the Lynx version
contains a secret exit! If found, the player is given an address at
Epyx to write to, presumably long gone by now.
The Game:
This is one of the greatest games
you've never heard of. It is absolutely awesome in every way. It's
clever, it's huge, it's strange, it's filled with secret areas, and
it comes with no less than seven different ways to play it. That
doesn't even get into its multiplayer, which on the Lynx supported up
to eight people!
The player is a guy in a jumpsuit with
a water gun who's just crashed on the appropriately-named planet of
Slime World. Somewhere within the many caverns of the planet is an
exit to an escape ship. All the player has to do is find it.
Between him and rescue lie one of the
most devious game challenges ever devised. The walls drip, slowly,
with slime, and whenever a drop of slime touches the player's guy he
gets a tiny bit greener. When he gets fully green he "pops,"
losing a life. Most modes give the player infinite lives, but he
gets sent back to the last checkpoint arrow found. This is almost
never a huge problem though, because arrows are all over the place.
Scattered around in great abundance are
a variety of useful items. Among the most useful of these is the
Slime Shield, which can be saved until needed. When activated it
provides a kind of limited invincibility: it cleans off all the
player's slime, and protects from anything else that might make him
greener until it wears off. Interestingly, there is rarely a
shortage of these items.
There are also gems that clean the
player off a little, red gems that are worth huge point awards and
give him an instant shield, jet packs that allow ascending long
vertical shafts, cleansers that let the player turn pools of slime
into water for cleaning himself off, bait that draws monsters towards
it to their deaths, and the awesome Mega Bomb that utterly destroys
the contents of a single room—including the player, if he's still
inside when it goes off.
These things help the player combat the
great variety of monsters scattered around the world. Of these there
are two general types: green ones and red ones. Both cause the
player to rapidly get much greener when touched. When green monsters
are shot with the water gun they explode into a spray of "boogers,"
which on contact stick to the player, making him steadily greener by
degrees. Shot red monsters spray out in red slime. Red slime is
instantly fatal, even if the player is invincible. Red gems,
if accidentally shot, also spray into red slime. Sometimes
this creates interesting situations like a room full of green
monsters hovering over a number of red gems, that force the player to
consider his options, and his aim, carefully.
If this were all there was to the game
then it'd already be fairly interesting, but the extra features push
the coolness clean off the charts. Slime World actually contains
seven different game variations within the cart. Three of them,
Easy, Exploration and Action, contain worlds of various sizes and
monsters of various viciousnesses. These are largely specialized
versions of the same game. But there's also Logic, which asks the
player to survive without his water gun, and all the game elements
are arranged in ways that turn Slime World into a puzzle game!
Then there's Suspense, where there's a
two-minute clock that forces the player to explore quickly. Finding
a mushroom in Suspense adds another minute onto the clock, but the
caverns contain a great many dead-ends, and while death is still a
minor problem, the game ends in failure if time runs out. Arcade
mode contains a small, but excessively devious maze even by Slime
World standards, where none of the checkpoint arrows work. The player
must return to start after every death!
The final variation, Combat, deserves
special mention. In it, two players in the Genesis version, and up
to eight on the Lynx (provided enough systems, copies of the game,
and ComLynx cables), roam around Slime World with five lives each,
all trying to kill each other. A special power-up here, the Slime
Gun, allows player guns to damage the others. All of the other items
and enemies can also be found here, and killing an opponent's last
life using a Mega Bomb, is an extra special experience. Alas, as we
all know by now the Lynx was one of the freshly-sprouted Game Boy
dynasty, and sold poorly. Because of this it's possible that,
outside the development offices of Epyx, no one has ever
gotten together systems, cartridges, cables and batteries enough to
play a full game of Combat Slime World.
Design Lessons:
Slime World's seven game
variations prove just how flexible the open world game paradigm can
be.
Central to the design of the game is
the modes of movement the player is allowed. In addition to walking,
he can jump up, jump forward, or long jump forward. Each takes the
player a predefined distance away; there is no way to control a jump
once the player is in the air. He can also grab onto walls and climb
up or down along them, or jump off.
Slime World prominently features
another aspect of the "significant void" idea I mentioned
earlier, but in reverse. The game contains an enemy colloquially
called the Snapjaw. It is nothing more than a giant set of teeth
laying on the ground. Any player that walks into the gaping mouth
dies instantly, regardless of invincibility. Those are easy enough
to avoid, but there are also hidden Snapjaws, lurking within
certain spots of ground. There is no explicit clue that a
Snapjaw lies there, and the only way to kill one is for another
player, if one's even in the game, to shoot it while it eats you.
But if the player is observant, there
are often other clues that Snapjaws lurk about. In the Easy maze,
there is a huge secret area containing dozens of red slime gems,
worth tremendous score bonuses. There are also, however, many hidden
Snapjaws in these chambers. The key to cleaning the treasure rooms
of their wealth is to realize that there are suspicious gaps in the
line of red gems laying on the platforms. Sure enough, each spot
where there's not a red gem contains a hidden snapper. The result,
however, is that the very process of looting the rooms removes the
only indication the player has that there's a fatal trap laying
there! I hope he has a good memory....
Links:
Wikipedia