Condor Attack (Ultravision/Taiwan Cooper)
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Entry posted by DoctorSpuds
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Hey, who remembers Ultravision? Those guys who announced a too-good-to-be-true console, scrapped it, then released a grand total of two games for the 2600 before vanishing entirely, the two games they released were Karate, and Condor Attack. Now, we've all seen Karate and we all know it's a piece of crap. Karate has been done to death, and that's probably why I'm never going to review it (unless I'm very desperate), but Condor Attack tends to 'fly' under the radar due to the fact there were very few easily attainable re-releases, there are the K-Tel and Funvision versions but they're also pretty pricey. So we must fall back on our old friend who I've affectionately named T. Cooper. Mr. Taiwan Cooper has released this game in his line of ultra cheap bootleg cartridges, I got my copy CIB from Venezuela for eight dollars, and that's including shipping. The T. Cooper version of this game is called UFO, and when I saw the listing on Ebay I was shocked to see that it was in fact Condor Attack, I scooped it up as fast as I could, and could you believe it? It arrived on my birthday... Happy Birthday to me. So without further ado lets review this thing!
This game is ugly... All of the attacking enemies are low-res and monochrome to boot, the background is black, the floor is a girder from Miner 2049'er, and your gun is the only thing that is discernibly multicolored. Enemies move around very choppily and in the cart I got, whenever an enemy moved down the screen or was killed or if I was killed, the screen jumped and in some cases rolled. I also get some of this jumpiness on an emulator (Stella 5.1 to be exact), but it seems playing on actual hardware exacerbates the problem, I don't know if this is a problem for anybody else, but this jumpiness doesn't really affect the gameplay, it's still perfectly playable, it just looks a bit weird. Apart from all that, the graphics are just the bare basics, the absolute minimum to pass off as a game, which really reflects well on Ultravision.
Sounds are incredibly simple, just like the graphics, the sounds provide the bare minimum to qualify. You shoot, they shoot (x2), you explode, they explode, new game, 1-UP, that is pretty much it. The sounds are pretty ear grating, since most of them are fairly high pitched, not allowing the chunkiness I so desire. But yeah there really is no way of sugarcoating this, so far this game is just ugly both in sight and in sound. I'm rather confused as to why people will pay over a grand for one of these things boxed, I know it's rare and I know it's unique, it sort of falls into the same realm as Men-a-Vision's Air Raid... The game's crap but people will pay over four-figures for one in the box. Hmmm I don't think I'll ever understand the collector's market, but then again I don't have to, (now back to the topic at hand). So everything so far has pointed to a grade-A stinker, but can the gameplay save this thing?
Yes it can, this game is fun... I like it. I can look past the exterior ugliness of a game, as long as it's fun to play, thankfully Condor Attack delivers. This game is a blatant rip off of Demon Attack/Phoenix/Communist Mutants From Space/Space Invaders/Galaxian etc. though I'd say it leans more toward Communist Mutants From Space than anything. How about a basic description... You move your little gun horizontally along the bottom of the screen, while shooting at two attacking enemies, as a group of waiting enemies fly around the top of the screen, when you kill one of the attacking enemies another takes it's place from the group at the top, slowly decreasing it's numbers until there are none left, when all the enemies in a group are destroyed another more aggressive group takes it's place. Yeah... this is a poor man's C.M.F.S., and even though it doesn't play nearly as well or as smoothly, one can still get enjoyment from this game. It exploits the one-more-time mentality, because I must say, weaving through enemy shots whilst firing off shots of your own is extremely rewarding. Scoring is a bit unique, after every wave the point value of an attacking enemy is raised by ten, which is nothing special in the grand scheme of things, but there is a built-in way of boosting your score so you can either get to the harder stages faster or score some easy lives. It's simple, shoot the enemies at the top of the screen, they only give you three points per, but you can breeze your way through stages until a single attacking enemy is worth two hundred points and killing five will net you a 1-UP, also around stage five or six the difficulty reset to the easy difficulty, allowing me to easily get an extra life or two. This game is all about the score. I won't say it's particularly well programmed but what's here is still fairly decent.
Obviously I won't tell you to go out there and buy this game, It's Collector's Zone for this bad boy, without a second thought. It is simply too expensive, apart from the bootleg versions, but it seems they might be almost as rare. Unless you can score the T. Cooper bootlegs which are on Ebay RIGHT NOW under the UFO name, you may not ever see this game so affordable ever again. Also my copy of the game came with the original "Instruction Manual" which is a standard size sheet of printer paper with very basic and very poorly translated instructions printed on it, I'll include it at the bottom of the review so you can get a good laugh out of it. On a different note, I've noticed that AtariAge's page on T. Cooper carts is rather sorely lacking, so I put out the call to help flesh out that page, since there is so much hilarious crap that we're missing out on.
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