ARCADE ACTION CLOSE-UP

ARCADE ACTION CLOSE-UP

CRAZY FOR Q*BERT'S CUBE

I admit it. I am a Q*Bert burnout. After two days on the suicidal pyramid of cubes, it became impossible to recognize the tops from the bottoms. Once one has flunked the ground/figure psychology test, unable to see the vase instead of the two faces kissing there's no going back. I've had to turn in my joystick, 'cause the world of Q*Bert turned crossed-eyed on me.

Even now as I type on my video screen, I jerk back, expecting little red, purple, and green gobs to fall down upon these words, crunching my cursor with a horrible fender-bending collision.

The name of Q*Bert itself sounds like swearing. From the electronic "clunk" the moment one puts in a quarter, the noises of Q*Bert form an entire linguistic fantasy in imaginative cursing. Even when the game is over, Q*Bert gets the last word, which sounds a little like "bye-bye," or "sci-fi," or "I buried Paul," I'm nof sure which. And the player's inevitable groan fits right into the advanced vocabulary. They finally made a game to match the emotions of video futility.

Q*Bert only has one control: a diagonal directional joystick which moves the strange little Q—a globular nerd with long nose and feet—over a pyramid of cubes. He begins at the top for each round, descends with little hops, and moves up and down over the triangle changing the colors of the cubes. If he attempts to jump off the side of the pyramid, he plummets to his death below. When this happens, he cries "OOooooooooooh."

So does the player.

As he jumps along, his eyes bouncing up and down in his head, a constant avalanche of colored gumboils drops from the top, too. (They always land on the second row of cubes, leaving the top spot "safe," a feature which becomes indispensible later on). Red ones clunk Q*Bert. Purple ones turn into Coily, a Brooklyn version of a snake named Curley. Green ones can be pounced upon by fhe Q, at which time the board freezes and he can spend some worry-free time changing the colors on the board to suit his liking.

From the bottom of the pyramid, Wrong-Way and Ugg defy gravity and bounce weightless toward the upper portion of the pyramid. They, like everything else, get in the way. Also like everything else, they tend to jump off the pyramid to oblivion when they reach the side.

Finally, Sam and Slick—a green beatnik mutant version of Q*Bert—descend down the staircase cubes, also changing colors as they go. Since they tend to appear just when the Q*Bert has already wiped up, their intrusion can be most irritating. Anything green, however, can be stopped in its tracks by Q*Bert. Anything not green, however, kills.

The purpose of Q*Bert is to match every cubetop on the pyramid with the key color noted on the upper right hand corner of the screen. There are nine levels of play, with four rounds in each level, and there are five different patterns on the pyramid.

The first pattern, for level one, can be comprehended even by those of us who wouldn't dream of touching a Rubik's Cube. Every time Q*Bert lands on a cubetop, the color changes to the key color and stays there. Sam and Slick don't even come out to bother us. All Q*Bert has to do is land on every top once, and the round ends.

The second pattern is slightly more complicated. Q*Bert must land on every top twice to achieve the required color.

For the third pattern, Q*Bert gets the correct color the first time he hits each top, but if he lands on it again it switches back to another color.

Fourth time around, each top must be landed on twice tor the correct color, but it will switch if hit a third, or fifth, or seventh, etc., time.

Fifth and each level subsequently (are you following this?— because if you think it's hard to explain you should try playing it!), a three-way color cycle operates on the top of every cube. If Q*Bert accidently changes a cube to a non-key color, he must land on it two more times to get the winning combination. This is when things get really frustrating.

The possibility of your eyes inverting the "ins" and the "outs" of the cubes grows as speed and intensity of play increases. On the second level, round four, and other times, a pyramid made up of only tops appears, creating a two-dimensional illusion that provides a temporary respite from the reversal illusion.

Points grow as Q*Bert makes the rounds. Twenty-five are awarded for turning a cubetop to the key color, even if it's for the umpteenth time, so theoretically one could jump around in "circles" on the upper levels and still get points. It is not always advisable to color the board as quickly as possible, however. By the side of every pyramid are a different number of swirling colored disks floating in space. Only Q*Bert can jump on them from the pyramid, causing Coily the Snake to leap to his death and earn 500 points. In the early rounds, the player will want to loiter (out of the way of the falling droplets) until all his disks have lured Coily to inevitable doom. Q*Bert can leap on a disk whenever Coily is within three leaping cubetops of him. If he hesitates, Coily crunches him with the awful smash-up sound, and the swearing begins.

Pick up the green blob whenever you can, even if you are just waiting around for Coily to come at you. (He's good for 100 points. But beware of his directions, since sometimes it seems that the heaven above releases this delicious green apple to tempt you to jump into the way of another deadly blob or to overlook the advances of the snake. (No religious symbolism intended. Q*Bert is a very earthy game.)

There are two ways to excel at capturing the green people, Sam and Slick (and the green ball, too). Wait on the top square (inaccessible to all enemies, except the snake). You are safe there. Time your jumps to follow immediately after a ball or character drops, since they seem to leap in fairly regular spacing. When Sam or Slick jump from above, you can catch them before they do too much damage. Same goes for the green ball. Or wait midway on the third layer of cubes (never the second, the most dangerous layer because ALL dropping balls land there), then gauge the jumps of the balls in order to hit green ones and avoid all others.

Don't worry in the early rounds too much about Sam and Slick, as long as you have flying disks to take you back to the top. They usually can be cleaned up afterwards. But try to catch them for the points (300 each).

No points are awarded for purple bottom-side-up creatures Ugg and Wrong-Way. They only get in the way. But sometimes you can jump them, ditto for the falling gravity balls. Usually it pays to look before you leap, and outstep the chaos around you.

One more word about Sam and Slick. In all levels above five, when the three-way color shifting is in effect, it sometimes becomes literally impossible to land on the final cubetop and make the board a winning uniform color. There is only one way to win, in that case. The one cube with a wrong color must be on the dangerous second level, and Q*Bert must wait on the top. With split-second timing, the shrewd Q pounces upon the descending green Guy just as he changes the cube to the intermediate color, thus changing to a winning color and ending the round. It's a trick, but it's the only way to break the circle.

Floating disks left outside the pyramid when the board is completed count for some points in upper levels, 50 or 100. In the first rounds, though, they count for nothing, so it's best to use them to trick Coily.

Finally, the best way to get the board to the color you want is impress the target color in your mind immediately. Don't pay too much attention to the patterns you are creating or try plotting di-

rectional strategies. Keep the color you want in mind, and watch an overall of the board to see how things are going. The ability to shift directions, make new pathways instantaneously, is your greatest asset in Q*Bert. Don't get in a directional rut. Watch the board colors alter and take a direct path, watching the entry of creatures with your peripheral vision. Plotting strategies more than two jumps ahead can be disastrous, unless you're one of those people who knows birthdays 50 years in advance. Me, I can hardly remember a seven digit phone number.

One more thing. The rhythm of Q*Bert's jumping sounds are highly mesmerizing, deceptive, generating a pulse that one instinctively wants to regulate, like a heartbeat. You might get further with a syncopation or counterpoint oink oink oink while pouncing over the pyramid. When, in the later rounds, balls are dropping like flies, you have a veritable percussion symphony of oink oink oink. Coily joins in with his squashy sound, and the best Steve Reich can't hold a candle to it. If two Q*Bert machines are set percolating beside one another side by side, players have been known to jump over the edge in confusion. Embarrassing.

Q*Bert is rather mono-paced, and with only one joystick, nothing can be done to speed it up, advance to higher levels faster, or alter the basic step-by-step (or hop-by-hop) motion. With that minor drawback in mind, Q*Bert may not be a game you'll want to play for the rest of your life, but then what is?

Gottlieb has introduced a pinball based on Q*Bert, called "Q*Bert's Quest." Is there an entire cosmology of this guy I've missed out on? Is he a comic book character or a Saturday morning cartoon that's somehow passed me by, like a Garfield or the Smurfs? What is this guy with only feet and nose?

Whatever, even the pinball is infuriating. It has four flippers, two of which operate backwards and with reverse hands (right hand operates left flipper, and v.v.).

What's more, with balls and no hopping video guy, a chunka chunka rhythm has been incorporated into the sounds of pinball Q*Bert, creating that adrenalin inducing rhythm that modes the video game as fun as it is. Who is this guy?