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From: karl@sugar.UUCP (Karl Lehenbauer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Review of Fire Power, a shoot-'em-up game
Message-ID: <947@sugar.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 30-Oct-87 08:16:07 EST
Article-I.D.: sugar.947
Posted: Fri Oct 30 08:16:07 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 4-Nov-87 04:42:07 EST
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 87
Keywords: game, fun, buggy, poorly behaved

(After reading the praise for Fire Power on the usenet, I bought the game,
as did Peter.  This review is based on my experiences with it.)

Review of Fire Power, a game for the Amiga by Microillusions

Fire Power is a shoot-'em-up game on the Amiga.  You drive a tank
and blast either the computer's fortress, the other guy's tank and fortress
in a two-player split-screen mode or the other guy's fortress in a two-
player mode using two Amigas connected via MODEM.  The price is $25.  
I am not affiliated with Microillusions.

The game has good graphics.  In the single and split-screen modes, the
screen pans vertically and horizontally as you drive around.  If you
stay in one place too long, enemy helicopters attack your tank.  Enemy
guns will shoot at you when you drive near them.  When you blast an
enemy building or gun, enemy soldiers usually run away from the wreckage.
You get extra points for shooting them or running them over.  Sometimes
you'll blast a building and your own soldiers will come out.  If you
let them, they'll run and get into your tank.  If you return them to the 
First Aid station, you get extra points.  Some people may be offended by 
the squish sound and red splat that results from running over a soldier.
I didn't mind.

The playfield is much larger than what one can see on the screen.  There
is a radar screen, but again, this doesn't cover anywhere near the area
that you can drive around.  It is easy to not see or battle with your 
opponet for long periods of time.  Also, the radar screen only shows
your tank, your opponents tank, your garage, his garage, your home
base and helicopters.  I would like for it to also show enemy gun
emplacements and maybe mines.

...which brings me to mines.  Mines are so tough and you are on them so fast 
when driving that you are guaranteed to die before you can stop or turn.
Maybe that is as it should be.  I don't think so, particularly in single user 
mode where the computer (apparently randomly) seeds them all over and you only 
get five lives.  I'd either like for the radar to show them (as mentioned
above) or to ditch them entirely, at least in single user mode.

The game will not run from the workbench.  It does have a disk icon and
if you click it open it has a run icon, but clicking the run icon causes
a message to come up saying something like "You can't run this from the
workbench.  You have to control-Amiga-Amiga."  So, I have to dump my
RAM disk and setup.  I can't take advantage of Facc (Perry - I bought it
of course, might not have sent in the registration, though...) and 
reloads are slow.  This is unacceptable.

Peter and I both bought copies of the game, with the intent of playing by 
MODEM.  The first time we tried it, we couldn't get it to work.  After some 
very weird behaviour on the program's part we determined that it was looking 
for Carrier Detect on Peter's side and that his cable wasn't sending it 
through.  The manifestation of this problem is that I can type to him in the 
conversation window but he can't type to me, we can't play, and if I hit the
start gadget, I have to control-Amiga-Amiga to get out.  For a company that
has done other play-by-MODEM games (Chess, Checkers) this is a suprisingly 
crummy interface.

We played solo then got together and played one-machine-two-player.  The game 
is pretty much fun.  There are some sucky aspects:  It slows down.  I mean it 
gets really slow...slower than choplifter when choplifter gets really busy.

You can get stuck to where you can't move and just have to wait to die.
At first this seemed worse than later, as we got better at figuring out how
it is stuck and discovered that if you just lean on the joystick in a certain 
direction the tank will usually eventually move, but there are still times 
when I get hopelessly stuck.  It shouldn't do that.

There are some really deterministic aspects to the game.  I was running low
on fuel and the choppers were after me so I just stopped and started shooting.
All the choppers drove into my missiles.  As one died, another would come
on and die in exactly the same way.  I put a book on the fire button and
left it.  I just looked over after a couple of hours and my score is max'ed
out at 9999.

It Guru'ed on us once in about two hours of play.

There is no way out of play-by-MODEM.  After a game, you have to control-
Amiga-Amiga to get out.

Peter captured my flag and won.  my side went into an "Error Detected" loop
then said "aborting the game due to errors" - it didn't say Peter had won.

In conclusion, the game is pretty fun to play.  It would be a lot more fun if
they'd spent more time improving the playability and fixing the aforementioned 
problems before releasing the game.  

-karl
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