Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bu.edu!snorkelwacker!usc!srhqla!nrcvax!kosman!kevin From: kevin@kosman.UUCP (Kevin O'Gorman) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: (long) Sky Shadow review (Crystal Quest it ain't) and a story. Message-ID: <1204@kosman.UUCP> Date: 26 Jul 90 19:03:09 GMT Organization: K.O.'s Manor - Vital Computer Systems, Oxnard, CA 93035 Lines: 148 I've played this a bit, and I want to respond to the few articles that have asked if it's any good. It is, but it has some flaws, too. It's a standard shoot-em-up arcade game in most ways. You have a ship that travels mainly in one direction (to the right). It can move around in the playing window, but the playing window is moving to the right against the background, so the overall effect is always movement to the right. The ship shoots to the right, drops normal bombs towards the lower left, and fires smart bombs against all other airborne objects at once. You have shields which will sustain a certain amount of hits or collisions. You lose all the points earned by any ship that damages the good guys (the city around your base, a hospital tent, and some boat people). You get points for shooting things (in the air or on the ground), for dropping bombs accurately, for 'smarting' things, and for returning to base with shields intact after a bombing run (according to how accurately you bombed). At a certain score, your ship enters 'mega mode' and the action speeds up and the point awards go up by about 10x. At certain scores, you progress to more advanced scenery, but it still works the same way and you face the same nasties (just more of them). You are damaged by collision with enemy shots, enemy ships, mines, scenery and some weird lines that the enemy seems to put up as air defense. You can become immune to all of these except collision with scenery. You gain in various ways by collision with objects which come by in the air. There never seems to be more than one on screen at a time, so when you're invulnerable (see the list) an alert player should be able to pick up at least 90% of them, maybe all of them, even at the maximum playing speed. First aid: fixes your ship Smiley face: more points Smart bomb: gives you one more of these Ship: gives you an extra life. Auto-fire: shoots your guns for you at maximum rate. Bomb: Increases your score for bombs. Bulls-eye: helps you land at base accurately. Shield: Makes you invulnerable to enemy action for a time. You land at base to get a bonus for accurate bombing, and to get extra gun barrels according to your ship's score (up to 3 barrels). So much for the game description. Now the review. First a bit about me, as it affects how I see the game. At 46, I'm the oldest person I know that actually likes arcade games. I was never all that quick, so many of them are just too much for me, but I keep plugging away at them anyway. I get better as I learn the game. I'm not getting any quicker, unfortunately. The game was challenging and interesting at the early levels of play. It came with a list of high scores from a few thousand to over 60 million. I despaired for a while of getting to the high score. I always do that. The controls are good and smooth, the nasties are interesting and have distinct attack styles. There are tunnels to fly through (where the nasties can't get you) that have great scoring possibilities in exchange for great navigational challenge. As I started to learn effective strategies, and I started to get scores over a few million, however, it became clear that there was an imbalance in the game. Most arcade games get faster and harder as you play until even the best and quickest player is defeated. His score when this happens is some kind of a measure of how well he did. Some players learn a particular game so well that they can play effectively forever. I've seen that happen with robotron and some others. I had wondered how it would feel to achieve this state. I sort of know, now: it's pretty boring. Sky Shadow does indeed get more and more challenging up to a point, but then in a way it becomes very easy. As I write this, I'm letting my Mac continue my latest game without me, just so the several hundred lives will be used up and my score will go on the board. The score is more readable in scientific notation: more than 1 x 10^9. Boring. As the game gets faster, there is simply no way to survive without an invulnerable ship. Getting invulnerable depends mostly on your luck about when and whether this appears where you can get it, and not such a lot on your skill. At intermediate levels, you will run out of invulnerability sooner or later, because on average they don't appear fast enough to keep you invulnerable all the time. While you're invulnerable, if you're in mega-mode and have auto-firing (which are permanent for the ship that gets them), you can ignore the nasties and concentrate on getting that next invulnerability. The nasties obligingly run into your shots and suicide against your ship, so the score racks up pretty fast anyway. As the games gets even faster, if you survive that long, there's a point at which you can get invulnerability faster than it expires. I guess it's because the invulnerability is available based on ground covered rather than elapse of time, and the ground moves faster and faster up to a point. For my taste there's too much luck in whether you survive that long. The game should either be slower, so it doesn't require invulnerability to be playable, or invulnerability should be earned rather than random, or something else along these lines. Crystal Quest from the same company had this right: after about a year of play I got to where I could survive through all 40 screens, at which point I was losing lives faster than I was gaining them so my eventual score did always seem to represent how well I had done, but I got to see all of the levels of play. Anyway, at this point if you follow a strategy of just staying invulnerable, there doesn't seem to be any limit to your scoring potential. With ships scoring over 50 million, I have never lost one to enemy action, only to crashes or deliberate inattention. As an experiment earlier in this game, on my way to a thousand million score, I placed my ship in mid-screen at the left edge and just left it there. It was high enough not to collide with scenery, so it was fairly safe. Then I just watched the screen. The ship score started at 106 million, with 232 lives left and 356 smart bombs. In the next 15 minutes 20 seconds, 26 invulnerabilities came by, of which 2 were placed so the ship got them. When the ship finally got vulnerable and was lost, it's score was 145 million, and there were 256 lives and 383 smarts. Yes, on auto-pilot it was getting about 600000 score a minute. Having lost that ship, of course, I should have been in some trouble. The game was pretty fast by that point, and my ships would usually last only a second or so before themselves being lost. But I had a lot of ships. I got in a pattern. A moment after the ship started, when the first nasties were racing towards suicide, I would 'smart' them away. I would move the ship to the right edge, where bonuses would appear, and hope for another invulnerability. I was not having a good day, so I missed quite a few, and I got 3 of them that didn't last quite long enough to get to the next one. I was down to 133 ships and 22 smarts when I had a ship that had caught 5 of the invulnerabilities and racked up 2.2 million points. At that point I had another winner and went on to the thousand million mark. By that point I was back to 246 lives and 596 smart bombs. I just left it to play by itself, and while writing this article it got up to a score of 1,064,875,340. I wasn't there to type my name, so it credited Anonymous. Rats. My recommendation: go ahead, play it. But expect to get bored once you're any good at it. There's no way to 'get better' in any measureable way. -- Kevin O'Gorman ( kevin@kosman.UUCP, kevin%kosman.uucp@nrc.com ) voice: 805-984-8042 Vital Computer Systems, 5115 Beachcomber, Oxnard, CA 93035 Non-Disclaimer: my boss is me, and he stands behind everything I say.