Day 21: Zone Ranger

I suppose I could be grateful. I could say "Thank you , Activision. Thank you for making the closest thing to Sinistar I'll ever play on a classic system." But I'd much rather dog on them.

As the first generation of video games was winding to a close, Activision, a company which had made a name for itself with original games like Kaboom and Pitfall, ran out of ideas and resorted to producing carbon copies of other games.


You see those equal signs? That's math, brother. Math don't lie.

Zone Ranger isn't an exact clone of Sinistar, but it looks and feels like it until the signature cry of "I live" doesn't happen and Sinistar doesn't chase down my ship and eat it.


I'll take Zone Ranger over any of the dozens of ill-conceived rip-off games that flooded the video game market of the early 1980's. It looks good and plays good, though it does at time suffer from a bad case of "what the fuck just killed me" syndrome and lacks that sense of shit your pants urgency that comes with knowing that at any second a nearly indestructible space juggernaut could be bearing down on me.