Today's "Monday Leaderboard" challenge on GameTap is the Arcade version of 1982's Gravitar. Gravitar is a sort of shmup, in space, with Asteroids-style movement and shooting in the area just (and sometimes inside) planets. You start off in the map section of the game above, where you just have to fly to the planet you want for specific levels. The numbers correspond to the difficulty and bonus points possible from those levels. All of those levels except for "9000" have two or more ground turrets protecting the fuel in the ground (blue squares) that you have to destroy, while watching out for Space Invaders-y looking enemies that just kamikaze into you. The "9000" level requires that you navigate a difficult course to shoot a reactor then fly back out. Which is impossible, with these Asteroids controls.
So, the controls are sort of their own thing. Yeah, I may not like them, but with a better control system this might be a much easier game, as most of your learning curve is just focused on trying to get your ship to float just long enough above a turret so that you can shoot it without it shooting you or you falling into the ground. But, you have to be pointing in the direction you want to thrust, and pointing your ship around isn't extremely easy or quick, so it is very difficult to get into a quick hover, turn around, shoot four or five bullets (more on that later), then turn around and boost away from the ground in time. This process is also always being interrupted by the flying enemies, which you can't actually devote any time to destroying. If you shoot them, they come back faster than if you had just let them miss you and go around the planet surface, which is stupid.
Shooting is very erratic, like in a lot of old Atari arcade titles. You just keep pressing the button to shoot, most likely, and you'll shoot only four at a time, which is a real problem when you have to destroy both flying enemies, which are converging on you, or you have to shoot that turret quickly so you can turn back around and boost away. Having four bullets at a time wouldn't be so bad if there weren't already so much difficulty in just navigating to enemies.
There's just no point in going through the easy levels, score-wise. You'll get most of 2000 points for beating the easy "2000" level with only two turrets, but that's not a lot considering that the actually rather easy "6000" level gave me 12000 once I got past it. On the "6000" level, you must navigate a cave-like area, but half of your enemies are above you, not below you, which makes things infinitely easier. Plus, the flying enemies can't get to you down there. So, my biggest tip for the unskilled who want to win something at today's GameTap tournament, play that level first. If you beat it, you'll immediately have a better score than the vast majority of players.
I've been pretty pleased with the GameTap users' rating so far, as they actually use all ten numbers, and tend to aggregate to have good taste (though they hate some of my flight simulators and really old strategy games, it would seem). The GameTap users' rating of the game is a 6.2 currently. I gave the game a 7, because it is plenty fun once you have gotten some idea of how to control your craft and still shoot things. Yeah, difficult, but that's how it was in the 80's, when businesses weren't afraid to publish hard games. I'm sure I'll find plenty more of them in my next Critiquing Classics pieces.
