Atari 2600
1982
Like Asteroids, Atari’s Berzerk is a port of a popular arcade game. Unlike Asteroids, actually, unlike most Atari games, this is a prety close port of the original. Unfortunately, what’s being ported is a fairly crap game.
I guess you’d say that Berzerk is an overhead run ‘n gun game. You are a dude in a maze shooting robots that are trying to shoot you, which is the sort of scenario I like to encourage. This game was probably mindblowingly cool in 1982.
But this is 2008, and I can’t help but notice that there is only one kind of robot. And the maze is generated randomly. And if you touch anything, you die. And the random generation means you will die cheaply sometimes. And by “sometimes” I mean “often.” And if you die the game makes an unusually annoying electrocution sound. Seriously, that annoying sound effect is the most memorable part of this game.
Y’know, this is a game that is simple enough to feel boringly easy, while also being cheap enough to feel unfairly difficult. That’s a good trick.
Despite being a pretty crappy game, Berzerk does have some charm. For one thing, the robots are extraordinarily stupid, constantly shooting each other and walking into the death walls. I choose to view that bloody-minded robot behavior as a feature not a bug. The really crazy thing about the game is that if you dally too long in one room, you will be chased by an unkillable bouncing smiley face. The smiley face is named Evil Otto. I dare you not to love that.
In recent years we’ve made gains in technical capabilities and in game design allowing for much better robots-in-a-maze-scenarios. However, we’ve lost something along the way, and that something is evil unkillable smiley faces. Designers, take note.
5 comments:
Berzerk was my favorite as a kid. I was looking forward to doing this one in order to talk about that wicked cover art. That guy is blasting the crap out of that robot! His robo-guts are going everywhere! That, my friend, was the most memorable part of this game for me. I also like the sounds the robots made when they fired for some reason.
So you didn't really like the game, just the noises and the cover art?
Yeah, the game is not good at all. But I'll have my full review up soon enough.
Yeah, Adam totally nailed it. Good art, memorable sfx, terrible game.
"The Astro Date is 3200 and you are the last survivor of a small group of earth people who came to explore the planet Mazeon. Soon after landing, you discovered the planet is a dark, apparently uninhabitable place. Buy by then it was too late to turn back because your space craft had been destroyed by AUTOMAZEONS.
Now you are a prisoner here. You are trapped in a maze where even the walls are death to touch. Grim robot thugs known as 'Automazeons' stalk you relentlessly and you must systematically pulverize them with your laser gun before they eliminate you with theirs.
You are never safe on the planet Mazeon. Even when you've destroyed the mechanical heavies, Evil Otto, the mad and merciless mind behind the robot gangs, leaps out from where he's been observing the battle. You flee in panic because you know that you cannot kill Evil Otto and that, once he catches you, you'll never escape. He will pound you to a lifeless pulp, grinning like a maniac all the while. Your only hope is to get out of the electrified maze before evil Otto catches you."
Berzerk was my flat out favorite Atari game as a child. But it certainly wasn't for the gameplay. The manual itself, with it's technical drawings of the "Automazeons" and the painting of Evil Otto and his army, was unlike anything I had seen in my short life. I used to think I first started drawing after seeing MegaMan characters, but I now distinctly remember trying to copy the artwork from this game to yellow legal paper. Berzerk had weaved a story my 5 year old imagination loved to explore.
The game itself is endlessly boring. There is no escape, and virtually everything in the game can, and will kill you. I've learned recently that the arcade version was one of the first games to feature digitized voice, but sadly you get none of that in the 2600 port. Just a man, robots, and the bouncing smiley face. It could be said to be a precursor to many of our 3rd person shooters today, such as Uncharted, or Gears of War, but as it stands now, it's simply a featureless game with suicidal robots.
But that cover art was wicked cool.
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