Day 125: Meteoric Shower

The only even remotely interesting thing about Meteoric Shower has nothing to do with playing the game. It has to do with how it was released. Meteoric Shower was built in to a Colecovision clone called the Dina, released in the United States as the Telegames Personal Arcade. For many years there was debate amongst the retro gaming crowd as to whether or not it existed in cartridge form until it was revealed that nearly every European collector had about three boxed copies of the game, although no North American cartridges have surfaced so far.


The game is a pretty standard Galaga wannabe, with one exception. The aliens can attack from both the top and the bottom of the screen, requiring the player to turn around and shoot down.


Rather than make Meteoric Shower more exciting, this feature just makes it more annoying. Since the ship doesn't rotate and can only face straight up or straight down, you have to be above or below the aliens to shoot them. But since moving the controller up or down also reverses the direction of the ship, you can't shoot while backing away like in other four directional shooters like Galaga 3 or Centipede.

Meteoric Shower doesn't deserve to be on a cartridge of its own. It barely deserves to be added to the Action 52 cartridge. The graphics are ugly (why does the earth have rings?) and the sound effects are dull, but at least the collision detection works. As soon as someone unearths a North American cartridge, it will even lose its historical footnote status, making it just another bad game.

Day 116: Cosmo Fighter 2

This game really made an impression on me. Hours after turning it off I still have vivid memories of playing something on the Colecovsion.


If Cosmo Fighter 2 looks just like every other early 80's shooter game out there, that's because it is just like every other early 80's shooter game out there. Except that Cosmo Fighter 2 was made in 1997. As scary as it is to think that 1997 was more than ten years ago, it's even scarier to think that fifteen years after the heyday of games like Galaga there were still people out there not only making these games but using the word "spectacular" to describe them.

Day 65: The Heist

It takes a special talent to make a game about stealing priceless art from a museum full of high tech security devices painfully boring. Mike Livesay has that talent and he has it in spades. His creation's dullness is so complete and overwhelming that it is almost impressive. I fought off sleep in order to get to the next screen and see how Mr. Livesay could top himself and he rarely disappointed.


How many copies of the same painting does a museum really need? Why are there holes in the floor? And are those toasters in the middle of the screen supposed to be a threat? An yeah, I know it's 1983 and all, but who wears white pants and a lime green muscle shirt when they're robbing a museum? Is he going to use the security video as an audition tape for a role on Miami Vice?

See? Look at this. This game is so bland I have to resort to making fun of the protagonist's outfit to have anything at all to write. I'd better stop now, before I sink into puns.

Day 37: Evolution

Evolution is a touchy subject. Some refuse to accept it. Some refuse to accept anything else. The only debate the game Evolution ever sparked was likely one between those who thought it was awful and those who thought it was terrible.

Evolution is made up of six mini games following the progression from amoeba to laser-wielding human with stops at frog and beaver along the way. All of the games are predictably simple and borrow heavily from previously established games.


Stage one is the amoeba, which must eat all of the DNA on the screen, avoiding the spores and microbes, to evolve into stage two's frog. If the frog can eat five flies without being eaten by a fish, he evolves into stage three's rat. The rat has to tunnel through the earth Dig Dug style to avoid snakes and eat five pieces of cheese to evolve into a beaver.


The beaver must collect twigs from across the lake to build a dam while avoiding a family of hungry alligators who all look like they've already been made into boots. Success means evolution into an ape, who must defend his oranges from monkeys by chucking coconuts. KO enough monkeys to make the final evolutionary leap to human, who must defend the earth from alien invaders.


I won't spoil the ending by telling you what happens, but I will tell you it involves a certain blue planet and an explosion, then the whole game starts again.

All six mini games are a chore to play. The collision detection is abhorrent. The amoeba can pass completely over DNA without eating it. Meanwhile, spores can kill the amoeba from an entire spore's width away. The sprites are all monochromatic and have at best two frames of animation. The sound effects are all generic 1980's video game beeps. Why does only the amoeba stage have a time limit? And why the hell are flies flying underwater?


Evolution managed to pretend to inventiveness by linking six very uninventive games together with the shakiest evolutionary chain concocted by a human mind until Remoraid -> Octillery. I thank the Intelligent Designer that my beaver ancestors didn't live to see this abomination.

Day 20: Sammy Lightfoot

Originality is for suckers. Why go through all the time and effort of coming up with a new idea when it's so much easier to repackage someone else's and sell it as your own? If everyone tried to be original all the time, we'd be living in a world without Captain Marvel, the Monkees or Mr. Pibb and I, for one, find that positively unthinkable.

Sammy Lightfoot, the rooster-haired hero of the game Sammy Lightfoot, needs to reach the top of a series of platforms. If that doesn't sound familiar to you, what I need you to do is stop playing Halo 3 for a second and enter the words "donkey" and "kong," in that order, into your search engine of choice. Go ahead and do it now. I can wait.


There are three screens for Sammy to conquer, each one filled with dangers like bouncing balls, waving streamers and the 7-Up spot. Not the most intimidating collection of baddies, but the video game world was still a couple of years away from the introduction of that most terrifying creature: the walking mushroom.


Once Sammy reaches the end of the third screen, he dutifully returns to the first to repeat the cycle ad infinitum. Sure, that gets tedious after a while, but wouldn't you much rather play a video game forever than have it stop after just a few hours and force you to read the names of the Japanese guys that made it?

Sammy Lightfoot makes up for its lack of originality with its overwhelming badness. The levels are sparse and unimaginative. Gameplay is slow and forced. And the hero looks like a chicken, with his big hair, beak nose and flipper arms. It's no wonder someone made a game called "Kill Sammy."