EYE HAND WHAT'S NEW FOR VIDIOTS

EYE HAND WHAT'S NEW FOR VIDIOTS

CARTS

THRESHOLD

Tigervision

_(Atari VCS)_

Here's a new game that's even more fun than luring E.T. into the Eat Candy Zone and then melting his crummy Reese's Pieces with rocket exhaust.

For starters, it's an EZ learn. There you sit in the usual partially-mobile spaceship, blasting waves of missile-spitting aliens that can attack from three directions. You get six baddies per attack and eleven waves altogether, which repeat with increasing difficulty as you plug along.

Only, these are not your ordinary space villains. In no particular order, you can expect to encounter barking earmuffs, rubber gulls, nuclear cooling towers, pulsating lamb hearts, dough ponies, razorblade box kites, tap dancing Chevy insignias, seededout grain dealer's lips, somewhat retiring carwash brushes, frozen smiles of Country/ Western entertainers and topographical maps of dry counties in Western Illinois.

A particularly winning point is that the actual surface area of fhe targets changes as they tumble towards you, the Chevy insignias being especially hard to nail. It's almost hypnotic at first, helped along by the multicolored, ever-changing bars that border the screen to the left and right.

The only apparent drawback is "expert” players might find too little change of difficulty between rounds. That can be remedied by switching over to skill B, where the aliens shoot guided missiles at your face instead of regular stoopid ones.

Now if only they could add a twelfth wave of plummeting Surgeon Generals for the player to—in Mr. S.G.'s words — police!

Rick Johnson

CARNIVAL

Coleco

(ColecoVision)

At last the big shots who make these things are wising up and realizing that no matter what mumbo-jumbo they hear from other jerks, it's great that videogames are violent! Trouble is, most of them aren't violent enough, or when they are, they wimp out and make it so you kill dopey things that don't really exist! Don't know about you, but / can't relate to shooting a big space-pod, and if you can that's your problem.

Carnival is great because you get to kill live ducksl That's right, it's the same setup as the old arcade game, you're at some sort of shooting gallery and you're shooting at owls, stupid-looking rabbits, numbers and letters. The numbers and letters are no big deal to kill—you get more bullets for the numbers and more points if you spell "bonus" by shooting out the letters, whoop-ti-doo—and anyway the rabbits and owls are stupid, too. But there's also ducks, OK? You have to get them before they get too close to the bottom row, and if you don't, they suddenly start taking off and flying right at you, which is something you're supposed to be scared of, right, because then they start eating your bullets (stupid!) and when you run out, that's it. So if you get them when they're in the top row, OK. You're the guy who has to make the choice, though, about when you want to get them.

Yeah, so that's about it. If you shoot out these whirling pipes real fast, you get less ducks coming at you, which you might want if you don't like killing them, it's up to you. Best thing about killing them, though, is when you get them all these bears come out, and not only do you get to shoot them, you actually just wound them! They start running away from you real fast like they're in pain or something, and it's up to you to wing them again! Then you get another round of the ducks,but with more points this time.

This game is actually pretty good. If you want, there's this thing on the side of the screen you can just keep shooting at to make the carnival music turn on and off, but after a while that gets pretty stupid.

Louis Sleagle

DEADLY DUCK FAST EDDIE 20th Century Fox

(Atari VCS)

It's no surprise that the entertainment giant responsible for movies ranging from Tom Mix silents to Star Wars has done a triple gainer into the pool of video game cartridges. What is surprising is the high quality of their early releases. The First Wave from "Games of the Century" includes these two, Beany Bopper and Worm War I. Fox is accelerating into a Second Wave of Alien, Mega Force and Porky's that's just as promising.

Deadly Duck is a scatological Space Invaders. Instead of hordes of aliens cannon-izing a lone defender, DD gives gamesters fleets of flying crabs armed with gold bricks. But these plummeting projectiles aren't bricks, regardless of Fox instructions. Check it out. They're baby-poop-yellow (and admittedly square) turds!

Our tough mallard protects his swamp environment, though. DD either blows the grouchy polluters out of the sky or catches the bungbombs to safely dispose of them elsewhere. The multiphase game increases its adversari with quicker movements and adds a Toxic Factor as lethal as Dioxin mouthwash: steadily growing

swarms of dragonflies (I prefer to think of fhem as EPA staffers) interfere with the Duck's mission of cleanliness. The fidgety flits even drop fheir own fart fog upon him when they're mistakenly disturbed.

To survive and keep the tidiest marsh this side of Venus, the player must contend with the misdirection of the falling turds, the flying polluters and the floating bureaucrats and their deadly gas attacks. By moving constantly and playing the edges of the screen, Deadly (Eco-) Duck can pile up points quicker than a state waste dump.

Donkey Kong kings will be right at home on Fast Eddie's turf. If you've seen the terrific TV commercials (tape 'em — they're as upbeat and catchy as summer Shasta's), you'll catch on quick. Ed's the cat sporting the Buddy Holly (or is it Ed Norton?) look, assigned the task of acquiring various prizes—hearts, teapots, fish, tanks, |ets, smiling faces, telephones?, skulls?—and dodging the pesky Sneakers (I peg 'em for Fire Escape Cops) all over his tenement. After nabbing ten, a key appears on the rooftop Sneaker that will open Eddie's way into the next housing complex. By lumping over and climbing his opponents, Fast Eddie can become as rich as a cat burglar.

"Hey! Hey, Ralphie-Boy!I"

Bill Knight

I'm thoroughly convinced Zaxxon is the best home videogame I've ever played—and, at this point, pretty well convinced Coleco's got the best home game system going. If you've got doubts, try Zaxxon and see for yourself.

Much like the arcade game, Zaxxon is noteworthy first for the unusual perspective it offers. The much-ballyhooed "three dimensional" effect might be a little overblown (at least until they start bringing holograms to the arcade), but foF perspective alone, Zaxxon is outclassed by no one for its sheer feel of being there.

The object of the game, of course, is fo fly your fighter plane through space and over various alien asteroids to ultimately encounter Zaxxon, the "mighty robot"—and to destroy the poor sucker. In between encounters, you've got to manipulate the plane through gaps in fortress walls, destroy enemy fighter planes, gun turrets and "mobots," Zaxxon's guards, robot missiles and much more. Simultaneously, as you pass over each asteroid, you've got to destroy fuel tanks in order to replenish your own supply. Depending on which of the four game options you play, this alone becomes increasingly more difficult.

One of the factors that makes Zaxxon a masterwork is that it's never either too difficult or too simple. You can enjoy the game from the start—as long as you maintain play on the first difficulty level, exploring everything you'll be running up against. As skill increases, you can shift into higher game options, but be careful—I've been playing for two months and can barely manage on level

ZAXXON

Coleco

(ColecoVision)

three. It's tough.

A word here also about Coleco's hand controllers: they're perfect. More than any other ColecoVision game, Zaxxon seems most suited to the Coleco control. A few plays bring you a precision in your leff and right diving and banking that'll be surprising. And with its high graphic quality, you'll be drawn into the game faster than you can say "What about Atari?"

And you probably won't want to say it.

Kevin Christopher

TRON DEADLY DISCS Mattel

(Infellivision)

This game is like the part of the movie where the guys are all throwing frisbees at each other. I like it a lot. What happens is, you're Tron the hero and these guys keep coming out of the walls, three at a time, thowing frisbees at you. What's neat is you got a frisbee you can throw, too, and all you gotta do is hit each guy and blammo, down he goes. If you just hit one and keep missing the others, though, pretty soon another guy comes outta the walls and starts throwing his frisbee, which stinks.

After a while, if you kill enough guys, this big thing comes out called the Recognizer. It looks like a big shoebox on stilts and you have to shoot if in the eye at just the right time or else you get paralyzed for a minute.

You can really rack up big points if you want, there isn't any limit or anything. Plus your frisbee also works like a shield, and what's weird is if you don't kill a guy but just block his frisbee with yours you get just as many points! It's more fun to kill 'em, though.

They got lots of different levels on this game so if you stink or something it'll still be easy and not a gyp. I think this game is really cool, though. You should buy it.

Louis Sleagle

GORF

CBS

_(Atari VCS)_

Arcade or home computer, Gorf sounds like Smurf throwing up. But a has-been in the amusement center can be a dark horse game cartridge. Not only has CBS wrested obnoxious operator John Madden from the football booth, Saturday Night Live, Lite Beer and TV Guide to star the tactless titan in a big-bucks bid for television commercial fame, but this game is fun too.

Like the original, the player's ''space cadet" mission is to repel waves of attacking invaders (stop me if you've heard fhis). Through four flights of intruders—a Space Invaders, a laser/fighter attack, a spiral diver emerging from a warp hole and the flagship—you get your chances to keep from losing your five lives.

The flag, or mother, ship is a mother, Oed. Although it's about as sleek and piercing as a stagecoach, its only two vulnerable points are pretty tiny, like aiming for Madden's belly button from ten paces. Well, not that big. But when you score, CBS pulls the graphic stops. 'Til now, the mainly black screen is only changed when you're snuffed, when it flashes ash-white. After zapping mother, though, the screen lights up like a Roy G. Biv spectrum class.

Two unique shooting "flaws" are 1) who can intercept the incoming shells-?, and 2) "shoot-us interruptus".

That's a quirk stemming from your self-stopp/ng cannon. Each shot stops any previously fired try, so that your last shot will disappear before hitting the target if you press the red button again.

Fortunately, the first few rounds are pretty slow; handy for those of us who imagine blasting away at light speed but leave the parking brake on. Slower, in fact, than an ex-NFL coach in a burp tourney.

Bill Knight

CADES

MILLIPEDE

(Atari)

In the movie biz, a sequel for some reason never quite measures up to the original. Putting the same old faces in a different setting to achieve a similar result rarely works on film—and seldom clicks af the box office (Rocky notwithstanding) .

But vid game creators apparently know something those cigar chomping cinemoguls haven't been able to figure out—how to turn last year's model into this year's quarter sucker. Millipede is little more than the same old

thing, but there's so much more that it leaves Centipede in its dust.

Millipede's graphics are quite similar to its predecessor's, but the game puts out a great deal more color. That's because instead of four types of insects to squash there are eight—including a devious beetle, lightning-quick mosquito, noisy bee, a personable

earwig and an inchworm which slows down the game's action when zapped. The combined effect of all these different bug-types flying around is both confusing and fun. Jusf when you think you've got the hottest swatter in town, you get stung.

Scattered across the screen are a number of DDT bombs, which when detonated will ace all of the millipedes in its immediate destroy zone. Best not to waste these precious pesticides until after the rhumba chain passes by—they're worth points by themselves, but lots more if the enemy is crowded around.

Another new feature of Millipede is the choice of advanced scoring. Before the

game begins, a player selects how many points he/she would like to start with—zero, 1 5,000 or 30,000. Of course, the degree of difficulty increases with each increase in points, and starting a game with 30,000 points on the screen is like knocking over a well-stocked beehive.

In all, Millipede is a vast improvement over Centipede in terms of both entertainment and levels of play. If you quit playing Centipede because you got too good at it, check this out. You'll probably get hooked all over again.

Peter Meyer

KANGAROO

(Atari)

Whenever a new game appears at the arcade, I'm never the first to play it. By choice. Usually somone else with a pocketful of tokens is more than willing to be the first on their block to master the new game. Which suits me just fine, thanks, as I'm an insufferable cheapskate, and would rather learn from someone else's mistakes.

I purchased a few bux worth of tokens and headed for Kangaroo. Naturally, due to my luck, nary a soul was twiddling upon it. The Ugly Voice Of The Inevitable then spoke: Yer on yer own, dimwit.

I dropped the coins right into the slot and placed my hands on the controls. The Kangaroo hopped onto the screen. I made the 'Roo hop. I made the 'Roo duck a flying apple. The 'Roo lumped up and afe some fruif. The 'Roo climbed many ladders. Then a vicious monkey leaped from the bushes and killed 'Roo. The 'Roo took much abuse. Me too.

After many vain attempts to get to the top, this kid sidled up and saved the rest of my net worth with this simple statement: Kangaroo is the same as Donkey Kong.

The kid was right. Aside from different characters, flying objects and settings, Kangaroo is the same as Donkey Kong. Ya gotta rescue the prisoner which, in Kangaroo's case, is a baby 'Roo. When I finally hopped, jumped and generally combatted my way to the top and made a daring rescue, was I a hero or what? Would I be rewarded with cheers, champagne or more importantly, my money back? Nope. The reward came in three letters from the mouth of the pint-sized marsupial— MOM!!

Don't know about you, but I'm not even ready to be someone's dad, let alone mom. Besides, I'd rather rescue a damsel in distress any day of the week over a kangaroo. Boo, Kangaroo.

Mark "Heinie" Norton

GRAVITAR

(Atari)

If Albert Einstein was still alive, he'd not only be loaded down with tokens to take on Gravitar, he'd probably be weighted with royalty checks. The challenging arcade action game features elements of Lunar Landing and Asteroids, and relies on something like Einstein's Unified Field Theory in a Lone Ranger plot.

As the coin drops on this science-terror trick, the player's treated to a visual yahoo. An entire solar system of five planets, a sun with too much gravity and a couple of nasty space cruisers with the player in their sights fills the screen. Three ships are provided for a series of planetary missions, and good luck is as necessary as a set of hyperactive eye/ hand muscles.

The control panel is a barebones futuristic Chevy dashboard: two rotators, a thrust, a fire and a specialty lunge plunger (instead of Asteroids' hyper-space, however, there's a tractor/shield). With these buttons, a player maneuvers to the planet of choice (hint: head for the lower value worlds first). After pulling within its atmosphere, the player's ship begins to fall toward that planet's surface instead of the sun's.

The screen then isolates on the battle at hand. Flying sentries threaten collisions, bunkers of varying accuracy and aggressiveness pepper the geometric terrain, and tanfalizing, vulnerable fuel dumps await fill 'er up instructions from the ship.

On each planet, the protected fuel is available if the player can manipulate the ship to hover above it while engaging the tractor beam. Gravitar sets the player up,though, by varying the intensities of the worlds' gravities. Topping off your tank on World One is a snap compared to trying to get a free pump on World Four.

Besides different gravities, other frills range from the nuclear world ("The Red Planet")—where the player must penetrate an angular maze to defuse a near-meltdown nuke at the planet's core—to the Cave World—where the fuel (and the sharp-shooting out-

posts) lie beneath the ground.

When all the dirty work is blown up and hosed down on each planet, Gravitar credits the player with a complete mission and a couple of thousand fuel units. Of course, getting off a "neutralized" world requires more fuel than swerving all over the geography, so the player's only ahead briefly. Controlling the entire system is rewarded by transferring the player to a parallel universe, where the nuclear/gravity/electro-magnetic hijinx and horrors start over.

Strategies will change with a player's pocket change, but Gravitar at least places its challenges in a flexible framework that allows players the freedom to choose different routes. Asteroids is the Dull

Galaxy after a bout with Gravitar, and Lunar Lander has the right tools but no excitement. With Atari's blending of the two sophisticated arcade games, the tactician and the dexterity-minded player can be satisfied.

As Big Al Einstein said, "It's all relative."

Bill Knight

SATAN’S HOLLOW

(Bally)

Motivation is the biggest problem we're talking about with Bally's Satan's Hollow. For the price of a token you find your hand wrapped around a Tron-like joystick connected to a rocket-firing ship — but where is this game going?

To Hell, of course.

At the second stage of this game, the player does actual battle with Satan and a host of fellow fire-breathing minions —Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Old Nick. The demons spit out long, animated spears of fire which add color and hostility to an otherwise sluggish contest (maybe they've got great pepperoni pizzas Down There), but the goal is merely a higher score—not salvation.

To get into the Land of Satan requires an M.A. in Architecture. Well, at least you have to be able to build a small bridge (although with the bridge graphics, this requires some imagination). Trying to prevent your ship from getting all its bricks in one span are flying Gargoyles, MX-armed Bridge Bombers and the dastardly Egg Thrower. Not one of them has very good aim, but then, they really don't have to. While you are concentrating on collecting bridge sections you might as well be the side of a barn, and even a kamikaze Gargoyle can run into one of those. The game's shield feature is effective—but only for very short periods of time.

What Satan's Hollow lacks in originality, it makes up for in degree of difficulty. If you can't be bothered to wade through the six screens worth of instructions which run while the game sits idle, it might take a good week's pay just to get the point. Evil, n'est-ce pas? Even once you master the program, it's still pretty tough to escape from 01' Torch Breath & Co.

Some type of journey or quest would've made Satan's Hollow an infinitely more interesting game. As it is, the only reward is points. And you sure as hell can't take them with you.

Bill Paige

SOLAR QUEST

_(Cinematronic)

In this exciting but disturbing arcade game, the player is essentially the villain of the video story, acquiring points for murdering the defenseless citizens of the solar system shown.

Solar Quest is a curious repackaging of Starcastle and Eliminator, with similar visuals and nearly identical effects. The finite globe screen (the ships can ''circle'' the screen, like Starcastle) has a sparkling sun in the center, fatal to nothing except the player's spaceship, which disintegrates upon contact with the sun. Since it doesn't move but attracts the rest of the objects

hurtling about it, the yellow sun can be overlooked until you slide into it like a millionmile pole at the intersection you missed.

Fleets of alien starships are the benign opposition. They don't shoot at your sleek, arrow-shaped ship, but just flit about, flirting with disaster until they provoke a collision. Your controls are six buttons: thruster, cannon, rotate-right, rotate-left and two desperation moves, an Asteroids-style hyper escape and a nuke, which needs to be pushed twice (once to be propelled and again to be ignited). The technology is easily mastered after a few plays, lowering the Frustration Quotient quickly. Then you realize the game's reality.

To score points, you shoot any other aircraft before you run into them or the sun. There are three phases/lives of increasing difficulty, with eight different types of craft travelling by. Some barely bother the area, others haphazardly stop-and-start at your bumper. If zapping innocent, albeit reckless, pilots wasn't strange enough, Cinematronic tempts you with the Solar Quest Decision: "Mercy or Progress?"

After each opposing ship is destroyed, a tiny asterisk floats away from the dead ship's last location: a life "boat." It'll drift lazily toward the sun until it's engulfed, until you rescue it (by accumulating 25 survivor shuttles, you can earn an extra life), or until you vaporize the little pests

(Points! More points!!).

Solar Quest rewards you for ruthlessness (but gives your conscience a brief breather by leaving the survivors issue somewhat open). An ornery allegory of Earth in the '80s, the game may offer new life for kindness, but more credits for killing—the hazardous and harmless alike. It sounds like Beirut or Boston, except when your ship's annihilated here (or the nuke is used), all distant survivors and floating debris fly into the sun.

Just like here—a no-win yuk.

Bill Knight

BURGER TIME

(Bally)

"It's exactly what you'd expect," I was explaining to a friend who wondered why I was late for a vegetarian dinner. "The game features a chef named Peter Pepper who scrambles up and down ladders and across beams in Donkey Kong fashion to a rhythm of rising and falling

Dieeps, trying to construct a row of monumental hamburgers. This he does by running over the various ingredients which then topple from their respective levels to the level below until they find themselves resting comfortably between two nice buns.

"Of course, Pepper's life is hardly a bed of romaine and Swiss, since he's pursued by Messrs. Hot Dog, Pickle, and Egg, all of whom have the power to fry his buns. Pepper's defense turns out to be a iimited arsenal of his namesake, which you control with two buttons on either side of the joystick. Additional pepper can be stockpiled by overtaking ice cream cones, french fries, or cups of tea that briefly appear at selected locations, which if you had the time, you should be able to predict. And if Peter Pepper completes three double deckers before he's blown away, a new screen emerges and the action resumes."

"So where's the kick? Where's the violence that'll lead to orgasm?" my friend asks, alfalfa sprouts and delicate shards of feta cheese dropping from his beard.

I admit that all the violence is G-rated. The only harm comes to Messrs. Pickly, Hot Dog, and Egg if they happen to be underneath a burger component as it topples down. The player scores points for such a maneuver. Parents magazine would approve. So would Disney. Or Pope John Paul. E.T. for sure.

"You gotta be kidding," he mutters.

The following day I tried an experiment. I offered an anonymous young arcadian eight tokens to play his favorite games, as long as he shoved the first two into Burger Time. Unfortunately, after fulfilling the requirements, said youngster wandered over to Donkey Kong and was immediately intimidated by a ruffian twice his size. And so on down the aisle until he found himself back at Burger Time, resigned to enjoy the bleeping solitude and free tokens.

At least Burger Time doesn't attract fools.

George Piner