Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 (NDS) - Atari Arcade - Gravity Games

I only say that this is a strange collection of games because I was not fully able to grasp the micro-mechanics for either.  That sentence might already spoil my verdicts, but if you are just here to find out those, you could just scroll past all of these words and see for yourself.  These two games were similar in that their core mechanic revolved around gravity and fuel management.  Taking into account how you use your fuel fighting either against the gravitational forces or finding a way to use them to your advantage.

Gravitar

As an arcade game, I would hate Gravitar.  I get the concept of flying a spaceship armed with a gun fighting off hostile alien ships while trying to pick up cargo from various locations each with its own different gravitational pull and differing landscapes and locations for each place on the map.  For me, Gravitar felt like a mashup of Asteroids and Solar Jetman, where you pilot your ship by moving forward, you rotate your ship on a 360 wheel, and you have to worry about gravity pulling you into environmental obstacles.  Oh, and you also have a fuel gauge to worry about; although I never lived long enough to find out what happens when your fuel reaches 0.  Presumably, you crash and the whole point of the game is to score as many points as possible before your fuel reaches zero.  I am positive though that you are able to refuel by making risky maneuvers to pick up fuel in out-of-the-way places.  High risk, high rewards.

You start the game with your ship flying out of a wormhole (it's a shining circle) near what appears to be a sun.  If you fly into the sun, your ship explodes, which should go without saying.  Almost immediately, two aggro alien ships fly out towards you and if you come into close proximity to one, the game does an immediate zoom-in and you engage in dogfight-like combat until either ship is destroyed.  Destroying the alien ships never felt difficult though, so either my experience flying an Asteroids-like ship paid off, or they are not designed to be a significant threat this early in the game.  

With my first ship, I kid you not, I flew into the sun.  I was not prepared for the strength of the gravitational pull of the sun when I started, also not being too familiar with the controls.  That being said, even during my seventh play during my 10 minutes, determining how frequently to use the boosters or flutter-tapping the boost on which planet/asteroid while avoiding turret fire was something that eluded me.  I just found the controls too finicky and maybe that is a fault of being translated to the DS versus an arcade cabinet and I might be tempted to throw 25 cents at a cabinet if I see it the next time I am in an arcade just to see the differences.  But that will probably be it as I just did not have fun even though I really like a lot of what Atari was trying to do here with multiple settings and objectives to complete in each setting and with what felt like an actual end-game goal and not just a high score.

Don't be fooled by my high score in Game 6 though, that was primarily from shooting down several UFOs, one turret, and actually managing to successfully pick up the ground cargo seconds before I smashed my ship into the planet.  I did not actually complete anything, and the lowest high score to get on the in-game list is 5,000. 

Verdict: No

• Game 1: 300
• Game 2: 400
• Game 3: 250
• Game 4: 650
• Game 5: 450
• Game 6: 1,050
• Game 7: 800

Lunar Lander

I am actually pretty amused by Lunar Lander, if only because the game feels like it's saying, "We'll just hand the landing duties to you because that's the most you can handle.  Maybe.  But you'll likely crash anyway.  Good luck Bucky!"  In Lunar Lander, your only task is to monitor the fuel, the vertical and horizontal speed, and the altitude while your lunar lander is pulled towards a landing pad precariously built in the middle of a lunar mountain range.  The controls here are pretty simple with the directional pad controlling the rotation of the lander and the stylus controls the throttle to direct the lander to one of the landing pads and to slow your descent.

Simple controls however do not equate to an easy game.  Of the six games I played, I successfully landed the lander zero times, and the game is very eager to tell you of your failures with reports like, "You just destroyed a 100 Megabuck Lander," "Auxiliary fuel tanks destroyed, 21 fuel units lost," and "There were no survivors."  The other difficult aspect of this game is that you only have 750 fuel units, presumably for each landing and if you use up all 750 units of fuel either from burning your jets while landing or crashing or destroying fuel tanks, and once all of that fuel is used up, your game is over.  Yes, you could probably crash half a dozen times on a single credit using as little fuel as possible on your descents, but once that fuel is gone, it is gone.  I do not know if you are awarded additional fuel points upon successfully landing your lunar lander, and that would make the most sense, but I could also see the game just wanting to see how many times you can successfully land with only 750 units of fuel.  Some people are just like that.

What I did not like about "Lunar Lander" was how precise you apparently have to be in your landing.  On Game 4, I was able to get my speed down to 5 (or it was at five when I crashed) and that was after cutting the booster when I looked like I was only a pixel or two off of the ground, and I crashed, apparently creating "a two mile crater" in the process.  Now that is some precise landing requirements that kind of took away all fun out of the game because I felt that there was some potential.

Verdict: No

A note on the scoring in Lunar Lander.  The game awards you points even when you crash, likely depending on how close you were to successfully landing, but unless you make a successful landing, you end up with zero points at the end of the game.  So the zero indicates that I was never able to land the lander, and the second number is the points that I apparently earned from crashing.

• Game 1: 0/15
• Game 2: 0/20
• Game 3: 0/15
• Game 4: 0/5 (Speed 5: You Created a two mile crater)
• Game 5: 0/10
• Game 6: 0/25

So yeah, I am apparently not great at games where the primary mechanic is gravity.  I was already a little afraid going into these two games knowing how much grief Solar Jetman gave me the one time I played it over two days back in the early '90s, and yes I have carried that with me my entire life for some reason.  I do think that Lunar Lander could have been a "Yes" verdict if the landing had not been so finicky because boiling down the part of Gravitar that gave me the most trouble into its own game could have been fun (in its own contradictory way).  

Next Friday (November 11th), we will have the final collection of arcade games lumped into a single article because I did not know what else to do with them.  Not that they are bad games at all, but how else would you categorize games like Centipede and Tempest?  

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

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