Lucky sevens! I figured it was time to mix things up a little with a Demo Derby feature. While I owned a decent number of ST games as a kid, more often than not I was playing whatever demos were on the most recent coverdisk of the monthly Atari ST magazines I was subscribed to. The two big UK ST "mags" back in the day were ST Format, which balanced its coverage between games and utility programs not unlike the more serious PC magazines of today, and ST Action, which was almost wholly dedicated to games.
Coverdisks, and their digital equivalents diskmags, tend to contain one or more of the following: demos for retail products, usually carefully regulated by publishers to be as brief as possible while still allowing for an informed purchasing decision; shareware games from Indie devs, which tended to be a lot more of a complete experience that included directions for sending a check or money order to the tiny developer studio (usually just one or two guys) for a full version with more features; and complete games where the developers would negotiate a price with the magazine owners to give away their game as an exclusive bonus for subs.
I plucked ST Action #9 out of the list as it is one of the few I still have lying around and because it has four fairly distinctive games to show off. (Issue 9, for the record, is the January 1989 issue.) I'll probably be hopping back and forth between different magazines released in different years for each successive ST-urday Demo Derby - which are now tentatively going to happen every seven updates - as an excuse to cover a number of minor games that I only knew from their demos.
Flip-It and Magnose: Water Carriers from Mars
Flip-It & Magnose is a game where I loved its cartoony style but could never figure out how it was supposed to work. It's a two-player competitive platformer in which the goal is to collect water from various locations across Earth and bring it back to the mothership for the H2O-deprived back on Mars. I forget if they worked for rival spacefaring corporations or what, but the titular Flip-It and Magnose were always trying to out-do the other and get the most water in the short time limit provided. They also had to contend with the irascible Earthling creatures, so it occasionally feels like a more combative ToeJam and Earl: a 1991 Genesis game which probably owes the 1990 Flip-It and Magnose a fair amount, if only for its central quirky alien twosome and Earth's general lack of hospitality to visitors.
It does have some ingenious ideas. The way to collect water is to convince the Earth creatures to give it up, and to do that you need to give them items they want. There are items strewn about the landscape that will respawn when used: this way, there's an opportunity for the other player to use the same item in the same run. However, these items must be given to one NPC, who then gives you another item which can be given to another NPC, and so on. So there's a certain amount of frantically chasing after these valuable items and then figuring out the chain that will lead to a precious drop of H2O: once the water is collected, it is brought back to the ship in its carrier container and purified. The game uses a vertical split-screen but smartly designs the stages to be purely vertical as well: the usual issue with the amount of reduced horizontal real-estate in split-screen mode is no longer a factor with these very thin and tall levels.
Flip-It & Magnose was developed by obscure UK studio Expanding Minds. I can't seem to find any other games they were responsible for developing, so maybe this game didn't do so well. It is a bit on the obtuse side, even today.
Helter Skelter
Helter Skelter is comparatively more straightforward than Flip-It and Magnose, but in many ways it's even tougher to play. It's so straightforward, in fact, that I could probably sum up the entire game in the following screenshots. It's a single-screen platformer with a twist regarding its bouncy protagonist, in a nutshell.
Helter Skelter was developed by UK devs The Assembly Line, who were better known for their dalliances into the burgeoning 3D polygonal sphere similar to the coding-prodigious UK developers Argonaut Games - they of Starglider fame who are best known for their eventual collaboration with Nintendo to produce Star Fox and the SNES Super FX Chip. The Assembly Line also created the Frequency-esque game Interphase: a cyberpunk-themed tunnel shooter/endless runner and one of the earliest of its kind to start using rendered models instead of Tempest's (and its llama-based derivatives) wireframe presentation. Helter Skelter actually seems kinda pedestrian in comparison.
Mad Professor Mariarti
Mad Professor Mariarti is more the standard run-of-the-mill exploratory platformer of the sort that you'd see on the C64 and Spectrum before they eventually evolved into games like the Dizzy series. The player explores a number of screens, looking for items that will open new areas when used elsewhere. It's not quite a SpaceWhipper, but it shares that sub-genre's distinctly non-linear exploration bent. In the Mad Professor's case, he has to shut down each of his chaotic laboratories to prove to the authorities that he hasn't gone completely cuckoo. There's something very humble about developing a game where you're explicitly stating that the level design was the result of a madman.
The developers of Mad Professor Mariarti (that's a not particularly subtle reference to a certain other platforming hero) are Krisalis Software: a UK developer and publisher who might be better known for their ports than for their original games. They created Soccer Kid and a number of Manchester United licensed games, but then that's what you do when you're based in the UK. Also notable is a designer credit to Matt Furniss: one of the better known VGM composers out there. According to Wikipedia he's currently working as a software engineer on David Perry's (he of Shiny Entertainment) Gaikai Sony streaming service.
Venus the Flytrap
Our last game for this Demo Derby is Gremlin Graphics' Venus the Flytrap. This game is pure badass, from its music to its presentation. Here's the intro crawl, which isn't included in the demo: skip to 2:47 for the main theme. As the intro explains, the player controls the only robotic insect - created to stem the tide of ecological disaster - to remain sane after some kind of bug (I get it) scrambled the AI of all the others. It's his job to eliminate the various cyborg creepy-crawlies that are causing more harm than good to an environment that is already on the way out. It plays like a cross between bug shmup Apidya and the gravity-defying Metal Storm, as will be evident when we bust out the screenshots.
Gremlin Graphics I've covered before with their 1992 adaptation of the Games Workshop WH40k-lite board game Space Crusade but the developers were a powerhouse in the UK game industry for a time, creating a hit racing series with Lotus Turbo Challenge, the varied Actua Sports label and a string of hits across various other genres. They eventually got ate by Infogrames/Atari at one point, like so many others, but its library was fortunately recovered from that quagmire by Gremlin's founder Ian Stewart and his new company Urbanscan. Sounds like he intends to rerelease a lot of it on iOS; here's hoping a compilation on Steam is in the works too.
That'll do it for today. I didn't plan on looking at any of these games individually - action games tend to be fairly self-explanatory visually and trickier to convey when it comes to describing the accessibility and fidelity of the controls - but this Demo Derby format affords me an opportunity to produce a smorgasbord like this.
We'll back to solo games again next week, though I'm eager to hear what you think about producing more ST Demo Derbies like this. Should I start looking at the ones that have weird little diskmag features too, with BBSes and the like? Or stick with those with a decent selection of games to show off like the above?
Log in to comment