Super Gridrunner


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gridrunner additional information: firstly, thanks for buying this copy of gridrunner. that is, assuming you did buy it... if you ripped it off, I have the following message for you: may the fleas of 1000 camels infest all your hairy bits forever; may your swonnicles become painfully enlarged, your system be infested with particularly virulent viruses, your teeth and hair drop out and all your interfacing be unsuccessful, for as long as you continue your verminous and destructive existence, you slimebag, you pool of festering scum, you talentless nerd. anyway, i`m glad you have the game. i hope you enjoy the blasting.  if you enjoy this game (totally crass and naff advertising) try our other st release andes attack. if you`re into the `defender` style of game, andes attack will be right up your street.  the graphics are ok, but where the game really shines is in the gameplay department.  if you enjoyed this you`ll love it. yak reviews the reviewers i have been interested to see the various reviews for `andes attack` which have appeared just recently. i expected mixed reviews, and that`s what i got.  i hoped that reviews would fall into two distinct categories - written by those who value gameplay on the one hand, and those who are impressed only by flashy graphics on the other.  i was not disappointed..... the review to which i attached the most significance was that by julian rignall in c&vg.  i`m not being sycophantic or anything like that; in fact as anyone who had a commodore a few years ago and read `zzap` will realise, me and j.r. haven`t always seen eye-to-eye.  nonetheless, i know that j.r. is a fan of williams arcade games, and in fact used to own a stargate machine.  as such, he would know whether andes attack, itself based on stargate, captured the essence of the classic williams game.  i am releived to say that he loved it... atari user also liked the game, interestingly enough they also raved about the graphics as well as the gameplay.  now i`m obsessed with getting good gameplay into every game i write.  i`m not a graphic artist, and the rates they charge, i can`t afford to employ one.  nonetheless, i believe that the term `graphics` covers not only the individual pixels which define the game elements, but also the way they move.  the dynamics of andes attack graphics (the explosions especially) like the dynamics of the williams original, are especially pleasing. of course, not all the reviews were good... i expected (correctly) that there would be a number of reviewers who judge a game purely on the strength of perceived graphics and totally ignore gameplay.  ace, for example, relegated the game to a small slot passed over in a distainful way (i guess because the game graphics, viewed statically in screenshots, aren`t spectacular enough) with hardly a mention of the gameplay. another, atari-specific magazine, proclaimed loudly that the gameplay was dated, and that even ten pounds was too much to pay for a `blast from the past`.  in one of those glorious examples of consistency unique to the fantasy world of the game reviewer, the very same reviewer a few pages later is seen extolling the virtues of a recent arcade conversion, based on an even more ancient idea than defender (involving large rocks and a spaceship). in this case, the reviewer has no qualms recommending that the reader pay twenty quid for the conversion. `but what about ten quid being too much for a blast from the past???` you ask....  well, if truth be told, it comes down to the fact that defender is hard, and asteroids is not so hard. our reviewer obviously never got to terms with defender, and so any defender-variant presented to him was bound to come out of the encounter badly.  mind you, in the same magazine, this reviewer was claiming that the control-method of `virus` was too difficult, and that `virus` itself had no lasting appeal.... i never heard so much tosh in my life. `virus` is the best shoot-em-up on the st, bar none, and recurs regularly like a bad case of glandular fever.  the thing which sets virus (and defender, and a lot of the williams games) apart is the fact that the enemies have autonomous intelligence. in modern games, like r-type and such, you have no freedom.  the scroll proceeds at a constant rate; the aliens appear from the same places at the same time.  you cannot choose to reverse your ship and fly wherever you want to; learning such a game is just a question of learning to be in a certain place at the right time and pumping the fire button.  the player has no choice.  in defender and virus, the player is given complete freedom to fly around a world occupied by enemies who have autonomous intelligence, discrete tasks to accomplish.  the response of the enemies is never identical on any two encounters, and the player must rely on wits, rather than rote learning of position, to succeed. quite frankly, the art of good game design has been largely lost in these days of mega-graphics and pattern-oriented games.  r-type, nemesis, all these modern graphically-oriented games, are all just pattern-oriented scrollers with zero degrees of freedom and stupid opponents who fly the same flightpaths every time you play.  for all the graphics, such games are no more advanced in terms of game design than space invaders.  the defender design, when introduced, represented massive advances on gameplay- the first horizontally-scrolling playfield, the first scanner, the first intelligent opposition, the first smartbombs.... modern designs tend to give you power-up weapons and nothing else.  just scroll from one end of the game to the other, no degrees of freedom.... show me a reviewer who can score 100,000+ on defender and i will accept their criticism as valid. a lot of the guys working the review circuit these days weren`t around in the times when you couldn`t sell a game on the strength of pretty graphics because you just didn`t have the memory to implement them.  you relied on good game design to do the job.  i tell you, some of the guys around at the moment wouldn`t know a good game design from a twenty-quid graphics demo with zero gameplay and fifty thousand poundsworth of hype behind it..... suffice to say, if you like defender, if you like virus, you will like andes attack, and should get it! after all it is only a tenner (it amused me to see that, months after we released `andes` at a tenner, a certain large software hypecorporation was blowing its own trumpet over the fact that they finally reduced the price of their arcade conversions from twenty quid to fifteen... still 50 percent more than they should be).... anyway, enough from me. i have some loud rock to listen to and an important pub to go to later, so get on with your blasting! yak greets you and wishes you good luck with the conflict!