Gunfighter - Moonship Battle - RCA Studio II

1977

Entry posted by Guest September 7, 2005

1,471 views

Hey! Where are Dick and Jane? Ah, I understand. They are -in- the moonships.

I have included an "as requested" screenshot with a special subliminal bonus of ME in my UNDERWEAR! (caught by my reflection on the TV) I'll expect a lot more female comments after this entry. *nudge-nudge**wink-wink*.

Moonship Battle uses the graphics you see above, in a special advanced shot of the screen. (who coined the phrase "screenshot" and when?) Players battle each other using "moonships" that look like a loose interpretation of a pixel face and an inverted version of the same. (Easy to see why they are enemies.) Your resource? A limited "energy" supply, represented by pong-score looking digits at the top of the screen on either side. You lose energy when you move your moonship, you lose it when you fire your moonship's cannon and you lose even more of it when you get hit by enemy fire. First ship to run out of energy - loses. So far, not too bad . . . in theory. The player whose ship survives - "wins", but, really, there are no winners among those playing this game. To play, you have to use the keypad constantly, and this, quite simply, is not a comfortable thing to do. There are RCA Studio II compatible consoles in the world with Joystick attachment/alternatives. Maybe, they are fun to play. For an "action" game, the keypad is just awkward.

Gunfighter was also disappointing. Yet another example of how difficult it is for this system to handle any arcade oriented action. There is an indestructible cactus between the two non-animated vaguely humanoid-shaped gunfighters. You can only move them up and down the screen and fire straight across, up to two shots at a time. You use the cactus as cover. Most of the time I shot the cactus. The built-in keypad controllers are also absolutely painful for the "try to keep moving and not get shot" gameplay. "2" and "8" move you up and down while "5" fires your gun. The only thing this game has going for it, is that it has a one-player game mode. This is a Good Thing because it lowers the number of people forced to endure the game itself. The fact that it's a pretty rare cartridge is a Good Thing, too, for the same reason.

Other Things about this cart, while not necessarily "Good Things" were interesting either as design choices or tech workarounds.

*Shots fired during Moonship Battle are canceled out if they collide with other incoming shots. So, if your reflexes aren't good enough to actually hit your opponent, maybe they're good enough to great a "bullet shield". I'm not saying this is good or bad, I'm just saying this was part of the mix. For Gunfighter, however, it seems that when shots collide, the shot most recently generated continues while the earlier shot does not and a "riccochet" sound seems to be generated.

*Another interesting interface decision was with "aiming" for the Moonships. You simply fired in whatever was the last direction you moved. I don't have a problem with this, it's just how they dealt with the limitations of the interface.

*The RCA Studio II seems unable/unwilling to detect a collision if part of an object is only one pixel wide, either in Baseball (where the ball would pass through the pixel-thin center of your glove) or here in Gunfighter, where a shot passes through a thin cactus branch. I don't know if this is a limitation, a programming choice or a game design choice. (the "feature" was actually described in the Baseball manual.) It seems to be able to "detect" when two missiles (each only one pixel wide) collide head on, so it might be something the programmers were able to decide for themselves.

All in all, this cartridge was the proverbial camelback-breaking piece of straw that made me fed up with the console as a whole. I can't imagine that this system was designed to do anything other than to look good sitting in the same room as your television. I cannot adequately convey how uncomfortable it is to use the keypads to control any of the games which require constant real time input, (Tag, Moonship Battle, Gunfighter, Freeway, Tennis/Squash) nor how little actual fun results from your painful efforts.

The basic sentiment that I derive for the entire system is: Why did they even frackin' bother? I'm not a programmer, I have no clue how hard it may have been to make the COSMAC do this stuff, but as a gamer I'm thinking "bummer".

Okay, wait let me try to be fair. Yes, this system was obsolete when it was released. Yes, the games are painful to play . . . (um, looking for a bright side) . . . Okay, how about this: Gunfighter was the first home port clone of the arcade game, Gunfight, beating the Bally Professional Arcade's *cough*superior*cough* version by a calendar year! Whoo-wee! Yay for them.

Next entry, I'll mutter nonsense about Speedway/Tag. Another R8 game that, by now, you should expect to handle as badly as it does.

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