Quote:
Originally Posted by drewprops
My favorite game on iPhone is currently Tower Madness, which has a great "feel" to it. One of the neatest bits is that it's fairly two dimensional until you zoom in to the field, where you begin to realize the three dimensionality of all the elements... very nice art direction there.
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That is very nice. Gives me an idea. I think what might be fun to do on this is to try and set a field of view from the side so that it looks almost exactly like it's the original, and then zoom in, and allow you to look around etc...
Should be quite a neat effect.
Quote:
Originally Posted by alcimedes
Yeah, I think there were also buttons for accel, so you could increase/decrease your normal speed. The only way to outrun the smart bombs was to go top speed and make them try to catch you from the front, at which point if you did it right you could shoot them.
So yeah, 4 directions, shoot, bomb, hyperspace, speed up, slow down, I'm not sure there was a reverse?, but that could just be that I didn't do it very often so I don't recall.  |
Defender had Thrust and Fire next to each other. What you tended to do was feather thrust and firing at the same time. Thrust was either on or off, but holding it down was what made you accelerate. So feathering it as you hammered the fire button was an art. I bet it is probably the first real cause of RSI in a subset of our generation! Those buttons had hardcore springs in them.
The joystick only went up and down, which was what a lot of people found hard, and to reverse you hit the reverse button with your thumb on the hand that was holding the joystick.
Other than that you had hyperspace, which warped you randomly somewhere on the map, but also killed you 50% of the time. And the Smart Bomb button, of which you only got three. But like lives you could replenish them.
Stargate made hyperspace a bit less dangerous, but not much. And added inviso. Which was about 5 seconds of time you could use up by holding down yet another button. When you were holding it down you were invisible and could collide with things and kill them.
The things you are talking about chasing you are called Baiters (not SmartBombs
). The best way to deal with them is to run, let them build up speed and then change direction quickly, let them slide past, and then change direction again to face them. All the time using the joystick to slip under them, and then back up onto the same level.
Once you are turned around and facing them. Nail them with lasers.
The reason you see Baiters is because you are taking too damn long to finish the level.
The two big problems with Defender or Stargate (and Robotron for that matter) are that they are kind of specialist arcade games. The whole thing
is seems to be designed to be a pig to play. But once you master it it's like playing an instrument. When you consider that it was made by Pinball designers that kind of makes some sense. A lot of work went into the control layout, feel, and also the quality of the mechanical bits.
I probably sound like a nut here, but the skill required for Defender and Stargate is the closest I think you can get to a martial art in video games. It seems like it's very fast and frenetic, and incredibly unforgiving to the casual player. But once you get into it it's an awful lot about inertia and elegance. Once you are hooked it kind of changes your life. Like Marmite, or Vegemite, you either love it or hate it. You are either a Defender dude or a n00b. There is no half way house.
Also the control board on the originals had to be strengthened several times in the machines life as they get hammered!
A later mod on them was for an ashtray just above where the Thrust and Fire buttons were as they all used to get a horrible melted divot in the perspex just above there because so many players chain smoked while playing, holding the cigarette in their Thrust / Fire hand. Good times.... Of course at home I had that mod because I smoked something else while playing!
Another scary / weird thing is if I rest my hands on a flat service and think about Defender my hands contort into the positions ready for the controls, almost the same way that your hands get ready to type as you hovver over a keyboard! And I have not played on my actual Defender machine (which is in storage in the UK) in about 10 years!
The reason it's never been a success anywhere but the arcade is that it is the one game you need that very specific layout of controls for. Otherwise it just isn't Defender.
I hope that we can do something which does it justice in a small way now that we have accelerometers, because we might just be able to pull off a good control system on the iPhone because of that.