The Clockwork Bard

I want to kick start things with a review of a game near and dear to me.  I don’t play it a lot anymore, but when I do, I can’t put it down until my eyes are blurry with sleep deprivation.  That game is RoadBlasters.

Background

RoadBlasters  was a car combat arcade cabinet by Atari, released in 1987 (not to be confused with Road Blaster by Data East from 1985).  It fared well, considering it was the twilight of the arcade’s golden age, and popular driving games like Out Run, Hang-On and Spy Hunter were already out on the market.  It earned enough success to see the game ported to over half a dozen home consoles and computers.  Even the ill-fated Atari Lynx got in on the action.  For this review, I will be using the NES port as my point of reference.

Beam Software (you will hear me bring them up more than once in the future, as I have very polarized opinions about them) handled the port for the NES version for publisher Mindscape, who released it in early 1990.  This was during a significant turning point for NES games.  Nintendo’s MMC3 chipset had been out for just over a year, and was finding its way into more and more games.  The MMC3 made it easier to produce larger, more complex games.  Games that mimicked the simplistic style of 80s arcade games were on their way out.  RoadBlasters‘s recognition suffered as a result.

The gameplay premise is simple, but effective.  You drive a car with mounted artillery across up to 50 tracks, destroying enemies in your path and trying to reach the end before your fuel runs out.  You’ll have to split your attention between collecting fuel, driving fast and vehicular homicide if you are to survive.

Presentation

I don’t want to linger here too long.  Bashing on one of my favorite games is not my preferred hobby.  But some things do need to be said.  If RoadBlasters has a weakness, it is in its presentation.

The visuals are, at very least, somewhat detailed.  Driving games, even today, tend to put a little extra effort into making your car look good.  It’s the same here, with a little added shading and highlights.  The little details show, and it’s appreciated.  Objects on and around the road show similar details, and are easily differentiated from each other, which matters when you only have a split second to decide whether to shoot or dodge.  The quality isn’t anywhere near the original arcade cabinet or the Sega Genesis port, but this sort of thing is to be expected with limited resources.

Where the visual presentation really suffers is in repetitive terrain and bland backgrounds.  These weren’t highlights of the arcade game either, but they suffer just that much more here.  The only visual change between the 50 levels in the game are different backdrops on the horizon and a change of color for the flat terrain on either side of the road.  Visit such lush locals as grassy plains outside futuristic city with roadside boulders, desert plains near mountain range with roadside boulders, and inexplicably blue plains near mountain range… with roadside boulders.  The whole aesthetic is yawn-inducingly monochromatic.

The audio is weak as well.  There is no music what so ever during gameplay.  Instead, you only have the dull hum of the engine to fill the silence between bullets and explosions (which serve their purpose well enough).  It has some play to it, with changes in pitch as if it were revving and shifting gears, but it isn’t quite as good as the peppy, sporty sounds of Rad Racer.  I wouldn’t normally pick on something so insignificant, but without music, something has to step in to fill the mood, and this doesn’t do it.

But while this nag gives a D grade performance at the pony show, she walks tall where it counts in the action.  You get a firm sense of speed here.  Things whip by when you’re redlining it, and it doesn’t take long at all to accelerate to an appreciable speed after a crash.  Explosions are animated and exciting (something the arcade version did very well).  Though not the game that did it best, there’s a sense of destruction and carnage in what you’re doing.  It’s a poor overall presentation package, but the effort spent is at least in the most meaningful places.

Interaction

If you were to play RoadBlasters under ideal conditions, it would be on the sit-down, cockpit-style, arcade cabinet where the graphics are better and you man your death dealing dragster with a full steering wheel and set of petals.  If I had unlimited money, power and influence; I would ensure just such a thing was installed in ever home living room, whether you liked it or not.

The NES gamepad is a poor substitute for the original, but it gets the job done.  If you’ve played a driving game at all in the last 15 years, your analog stick conditioning may find itself swerving you about drunkenly for a time.  But once you found your directional pad thumbs again, you’d discover that RoadBlasters handles as well as can be demanded.  The car is responsive to your inputs and the turns in the track are navigated much like Rad Racer, in which you can typically power through them at a respectable speed, adjusting it to ease yourself left and right within the turn.  This is opposed to Rad Racer II, which demanded write love letters to your break petal.  This works really well in this game, since you’ll find yourself constantly adjusting your position on the track for dodging, firing and collecting.  It allows you to focus on where you are in a turn, as opposed to whether you can clear it at all.

One hang-up worth mentioning is the mapping of the gas and break.  Since the A and B fire buttons are busy handling weapons, the directional pad gets to handle both steering and speed.  This has been the birth of many thumb blisters.  It’s an unavoidable evil, given that the NES gamepad only had so many buttons, but it’s still worth noting.

I want to call special attention to the display panel at the bottom of the screen.  This is an example of well designed feedback, and what I mean when I say, “nothing is placed without purpose”.  The fuel meter is the most important feedback to the player.  It fluctuates constantly through out play, and if it is empty, the game is over.  It is placed top-center, directly below the player’s vehicle.  The eye does not need to wander to retrieve this information.  The less vital a piece of information is, the further towards the edge of the screen it is placed.  Score, which has little baring on a decision in the heat of the moment, is far to the side.  The current stage number, which doesn’t change at all during the level, is off to the top-right, completely off of the panel and away from anything of interest.  This is the kind of thing we want to look for in other games.

Player Narrative

RoadBlasters plays like a late ’80s arcade game.  This shouldn’t be a surprise, since it is a port of a late ’80s arcade game.  Mission accomplished, good night everybody!

Right, not a famous Internet star yet.  Can’t phone it in like that until my first shoe deal.

RoadBlasters has a repetitive, minimalist style in keeping with early arcade games.  The presentation suffers from it, but the mechanics flourish.  These narrow-scoped mechanics give the developers the time and big picture view to polish it down to a brilliant shine.  At face value, RoadBlasters is a game where you drive a car and shoot other cars, while trying to make it to the end without running out of fuel.  Simplistic, yes.  But it’s under the hood that the fun is teased out.

First and foremost, this is a game about fuel conservation, though in a more delightfully violent way than real life would have you believe.  You have two fuel gauges, your main fuel and your reserve fuel.  Main fuel is the supply given to you at the beginning of a track.  You’ll have to collect fuel orbs to keep this from running dry between checkpoints and the finish line. Fuel orbs can be found lying on the track, or sometimes pop out of destroyed enemies.  The latter will require you to chase them down at high speed or they will get away.

Reserve fuel follows you from track to track and serves as backup in case the main fuel runs dry.  The only way to restore reserve fuel is between tracks, when the game totals up the amount of destruction you caused.  More points equals more reserve fuel.  This will greatly be influenced by your score multiplier at the end of the stage, which can be between 1x and 10x.  Each time you destroy an enemy with your primary gun, it goes up by 1.  Should you miss an enemy with your main gun, it will decrease by 1.  Accuracy is therefore key to survival in the long run.  That isn’t the case with special weapons, however, which will periodically be dropped on you and have a limited use.  They do not influence the multiplier up or down, but they can make racking up points much easier.  You lose them if you get hit, so no hording.  Go nuts.

Speaking of getting hit, enemies can destroy you with a single hit or collision.  This does little to hinder your continued existence, since a new car will simply rise from the ashes.  But fuel works more like a timer in this game, rather than following any normal fuel-usage conventions (like blowing up in a fiery ball of death with your car).  So, death does cost you precious seconds.

What this amounts to is a chalkboard worthy example of a risk/reward mechanic.  Everything you do in the game is in the name of fuel.  You cannot succeed without fuel.  But fuel does not come without risk.  Risks resulting in failure cost fuel.  You’ll drive fast to shave off seconds on your time or chase down an enemy fuel orb.  You’ll swerve dangerously close to deadly obstacles in order to gather fuel.  You may find yourself waiting until you’re right up on an enemy’s bumper to shoot, to ensure your accuracy and preserve your score multiplier, which will get you fuel.  It is human nature to risk on an impulse.  It’s why a child will steal a cookie from the cookie jar.  The allure of getting a cookie and not getting caught can sometimes outweigh the threat of getting caught.  Any game mechanic that can exploit that element of human psychology well is very powerful.  It’s danger, it’s rewards, and it’s fun.

You could argue that almost every game is based on this idea, and you would not only be correct, you would have also stumbled onto why I want to emphasize it so much.  You’d be hard pressed to find a game that didn’t challenge you with a danger and reward you when you succeed.  So, the question then becomes, “How do the game’s mechanics support this goal?”  Are you simply completing an objective, to then be rewarded with progress?  Are their smaller moments within gameplay that entice you to flirt with danger, and are you immediately rewarded?  Are they legitimate risks, or are they just traps (which discourage risk taking over time).  Think about the risks in a game of Tetris, like trying to swing a piece across the screen that may not make it in time.  Or there’s the larger scoped risk of trying to set up a four-line Tetris clear, knowing that long piece may not come in time.  These moment to moment risks are what we want to encourage in our design.

Summary

RoadBlasters has a rusty, unimpressive exterior that has only further lost appeal with time.  But underneath the crust is an absolutely fun and addicting arcade experience that has earned its place as one of my favorite games of all time.  It possesses a risk/reward design that defines the whole experience and is executed well.  I commend the NES version for keeping the gameplay intact, but you should really keep a few quarters on yourself at all times, just in case you cross the original arcade version.  If you’re looking for a halfway point, Midway Arcade Treasures for the XBox, GameCube and PlayStation 2 has the original arcade version, reformatted for your modern gamepad, along with several other titles worth your time.  Some will no doubt show up on a future Clockwork Bard review.

Discussion and Thoughts (and Mini Rant)

There are not a great many reviews out for this game, but of those that are out there, many make me cringe.  For each video I see of someone firing their gun wildly, or each comment of “the UZ CANNON is worthless, because it’s the same as your regular gun”, a small part of me dies inside.  It shows that they really don’t understand how the game works, and a reviewer really should do their research on something like that.  I believe a game experience always suffers if you don’t know the rules of the game.

That doesn’t mean this isn’t a learning experience, however.  This is an arcade game.  ”Pick up and play” is important.  Though the game explains about multipliers, points and reserve fuel in little hints between levels, this obviously wasn’t enough to catch the eyes of our players of journalistic integrity.  They didn’t make that connection.  They also didn’t notice that while using the UZ CANNON, your multiplier doesn’t change.  It is located on the edge of the panel, away from the action, so it would be less noticeable.  Whatever the cause, this is an interaction problem.  The game is not giving useful enough feedback to make the more foreign game rules obvious to the player.

What makes these rules foreign?  Well, RoadBlasters diverts from a few major conventions.  There are paradigms with which we come pre-loaded when approaching a known genre.  If we aren’t given reason to believe these are broken, we have no reason to approach the game as if they are.  These are the ones I notice:

• Score is always secondary to survival.  Prior to Achievements offering us both immediate and lasting acknowledgement of our deeds, score had little meaning.  Even in the earliest arcade games, where reaching the top of the high score board was your ultimate goal, this came second to survival.  If your character takes damage, your game comes closer to ending.  If your game ends, you can’t collect more points.  Some incentives were often added, such as periodic extra lives for certain point thresholds, but this isn’t enough to reinforce a risky play style.  In RoadBlasters, this isn’t the case.  Score equates very strongly to continued life, and taking damage results in a fairly minor setback.  The traditional, defensive gameplay style is sub-optimal here.
• There is no reason to let off of the fire button.  This is a very common trope among arcade shooters.  The main gun is unlimited and every wayward bullet could be the death of a target.  If the option is available to you, why not bulldoze the competition at full speed while remaining sheltered inside your flying bunker of  hot lead?  RoadBlasters mechanics reinforce accuracy, however, by means of the score multiplier.  While some may become aware of the score multiplier, if they were following “score is always secondary to survival,” then they still wouldn’t let go of this tactic.  There’s also a fun-factor to wanton bullet hell, in keeping with that short burst of intense action arcade games are designed to instill in their players.
• If I can run out of it, I should horde it.  People like to feel prepared for what lies ahead.  So, we have a tendency to collect and conserve finite resources.  This isn’t specific to RoadBlasters, by a long shot.  Think of the average RPG.  How many healing potions do you find?  How often do you use your more easily restored magic to cast healing spells instead?  In this game, special weapons are lost if you get hit or if you find a new one to replace it.  Yet, until the player incorporates that shift from the norm into their play style, it’s hard to willingly let loose with that ammo bar glaring at you.

There, one irate rant turned into a productive game analysis.