The Stack

Badly in need of distraction yesterday, I turned to Robotron X in earnest. I seemed to hit a wall between levels 30 and 40, though. Things just get a whole lot tougher there. Which is a shame, because that’s also where it starts turning up the variety. Levels 30-39 are the “Electrode Forest”, where the electrodes (stationary deadly obstacles) are shaped like abstracted pine trees and take 30 shots to destroy instead of just one. Levels 30-49 are the “Beam Maze”, where post-shaped electrodes are placed at grid points and periodically fire deadly arcs at their neighbors — something that has less effect than it sounds, because the posts are easily destroyed, so that it all just turns into an empty space from stray fire before long. There are a few other variations along these lines as you progress.

But like I was saying, I was stuck. You can last indefinitely if you’re gaining lives faster than you’re losing them, and I wasn’t doing that. I turned to something like save-scumming — I don’t know if this really fits the definition of that term; I usually think of save-scumming as repeatedly reloading a save until the random number generator provides your preferred outcome, and that’s not what I was doing. Rather, I was reloading my last save every time I died, and saving if I completed a level without dying at all. In this way, I hoped to build up enough lives to survive. But playing this way is laborious, less fun, and, most importantly, violates the spirit of the game. So I finally, reluctantly, turned the difficulty down to Easy.

Easy mode is so much easier than Normal that it almost seems like a different game. No scumming was needed here — the only reason I ever needed to save was to shut down the game for a while and give my fingers a break. I don’t know how many lives I ended the game with, but it was more than the ten that it’s capable of displaying. I feel like I might someday decide that I haven’t really finished the game, that Easy mode doesn’t count because it isn’t the experience that the developers intended. But then, I’m not sure that the experience that the developers intended includes finishing the game. It’s not like the ending is particularly climactic, or wraps up the story or anything. You just play a level like any other, then there’s a rather tongue-in-cheek cutscene, and that’s that.

A few more stray observations and I’ll call it finished:

The last level is actually level 199. There are more than 200 levels, though, because just before every level divisible by 20, there’s a bonus level where you try to shoot at stuff for points but can’t be killed, just like the bonus levels in various spaceship shmups. I speculate that this pattern is the reason we don’t get a level 200. Also, the second hundred are kind of a repeat of the first hundred: just as levels 30-39 are Electrode Forest levels, so are levels 130-139, and so forth. If you get to the midpoint, you’ve basically seen everything. This again makes me think that the devs weren’t designing for completists.

There are no bosses, exactly, but level 3 Brain robotrons are fairly bosslike. They tower over the other robotrons, they take 50 hits to kill, and there are never more than two of them on a level. If that’s a level 3 Brain, what’s a level 4 Brain like? It’s nothing but a huge brain that crawls on the floor like a slug. I appreciate the sense of progression from “humanoid with oversized brain” to “oversized humanoid with even more oversized brain” to “we can’t support the humanoid part any more, here’s just a brain”, but it does make it the one case where a higher-level robotron is less powerful than its predecessor.

I mentioned before that the game spreads out the spawning of enemies, teleporting in new ones over the course of a level to draw things out. I’m fairly sure now that this is linked to progress in shooting stuff, rather than merely timed. There are sections in the Grunt waves where it really seems like it’s spawning new Grunts specifically to replace the ones I’ve killed. Perhaps it’s really a response to technical constraints, rather than being primarily a design decision? This is a game meant to run on 1996 hardware. If you want to throw hundreds of enemies at the player, but can’t render that many 3D robotron models all at once, spawning new ones as you go is the best you can do.

Robotron X is not a greatly redesigned adaptation, like Frogger (1997) or Combat (2001). It plays basically like the coin-op arcade game: you run around frantically on a rectangular playfield, shooting in eight directions, while robotrons of various sorts chase you. Your goal on each board is to clear it of all enemies other than the indestructible Hulk robotrons. Various members of the Last Human Family mosey around, oblivious to danger, and you can eat them for points.

The most obvious differences from the original are cosmetic ones: everything’s modeled in 3D, there’s a pulse-pounding techno soundtrack (in CD-audio format!), there’s a fourth Last Human Family member (an old man, presumably Mikey’s grandpa), and various of the robotrons look very different from their 2D counterparts. Hulks were, in the original game, rectangular slabs with legs and a tiny head; here, they’re less exaggerated and more humanoid, which kind of ruins them if you ask me. I guess the developers thought the original design was too silly, but that’s what made it awesome. Spheroids and Quarks, the carriers that emit Enforcers and Tanks respectively, always seemed sort of wispy and insubstantial in the original, like they were made of energy or just warped space rather than physical matter. Here, they’re definitely physical. Spheroids look like flying saucers, and Quarks are just cubes with a texture pasted on. Here, though, I’m more inclined to blame the graphics engine than the developers’ design sense. Everything’s made of textured polygons. You can only get so wispy with that stuff. A proper Spheroid or Quark would be made of particle effects or something. Similarly, the original appearance of the sinister Progs was kind of intrinsically pixel-based, and so Robotron X just makes up something completely new for them, a sort of glowing stick figure.

As for changes to gameplay, I’ve already mentioned that there are powerups and a finite set of levels with victory at the end. The powerups appear at random, and they’re pretty basic: shields, three-way fire, etc. You can get extra lives from powerups, which strikes me as a pretty significant change. In the original game, the only way to get extra lives was from scoring points, and the biggest source of points was the Last Human Family. As a result, going after the humans was generally your top priority. But when there are extra-life powerups, they take priority over that.

The original game had a pretty small roster of enemies: Grunts, Hulks, Brains that create Progs, Spheroids that create Enforcers, Quarks that produce Tanks. The manual for Robotron X tells me that there’s one completely new enemy, the Byte robotron, but I haven’t seen it yet. How does it create 200 levels of variety and increasing difficulty, then? By giving you increasingly powerful variations of the basic ones. Every one of the original robotrons comes in four varieties, with later versions being faster or taking more hits to kill or having special abilities. For example, level 2 Enforcers can lay mines. Level 2 Grunts have jetpacks, which seems wrong to me: according to the attract screen of the original game, “GRUNT” stands for “Ground Roving Unit Network Terminator”, and any unit with a jetpack is not ground roving. Level 2 Hulks are red, which, coupled with their more-humanoid design, makes them way too easy to mistake for Grunts. It’s an unending problem for game design: there just aren’t enough easily-distinguishable colors. Also, it’s a little weird how the system is based on the idea that the original robotrons are basic elementary types. I mean, really the original game already had a harder variant of the Enforcer. It was called the Tank. But X has to pretend that Enforcer and Tank are two completely different species.

But if you ask me, the most significant change is this: The robotrons don’t all appear at once. They come in waves, more teleporting in periodically as you clear the level. It’s not clear to me if waves are timed or of they’re triggered by progress, but either way, the effect is to keep you on your toes. You can no longer rely on the Grunts to all cluster together in a big pack that you can run circles around, because there will be more spawning in front of you. I think this is probably to the game’s benefit on the whole, but it can get a little exasperating when you think you’re on the verge of winning a level and all of the sudden another wave of robotrons appears and stretches things out.

Yesterday, I briefly mentioned the difficulty faced by Robotron adaptations in the days before dual-stick controllers. This put me in mind of the one licensed Robotron game currently on the Stack, so I went and installed it. This in itself proved something of an adventure, so this is mostly going to be a tech post.

Robotron X, released in 1996 on Windows and Playstation, is one of the earliest examples of the circa-2000 Classic Arcade Game Remake genre, and fits the basic expectations of the genre perfectly — that is, it adds 3D graphics and powerups. It also adds winnability, with a final level of some sort, but looking at the files, it appears to be some 200 levels in. That’s the reason I didn’t beat the game back in the day, and also my main memory of the experience: that it’s as much a test of endurance as of skill. It does support saving progress, but you have to take your fingers off the gameplay keys to do it, and it’s difficult to convince yourself that’s a good idea in the heat of battle — particularly if you’re unsatisfied with your life count. Robotron is famously a game where lives are cheap, quickly gained and quickly lost, but how many will I need stockpiled for the final battle? I won’t know for a while. I had a notion that this would be a quick game to get through if I just devoted a day to it, but that day is over, and I’ve only survived through about 15% of the levels.

Mind you, it should get easier now that I’ve corrected the worst of the bugs. Without limiting the framerate, the game has a number of problems, including the camera shaking violently every once in a while, Enforcer robotrons being unreasonably deadly, and a few things, such as the bullets fired by Brain robotrons, simply not getting rendered at all. Some of this stuff, I wasn’t sure if it was intentional or not until I watched some gameplay footage of the Playstation version on Youtube, confirming that yes, the Brains do actually shoot at you and the Enforcers don’t shoot that often. If for some reason you’re thinking of playing this game and don’t have a copy already, I strongly advise getting the Playstation version instead of the PC version. Play it under emulation if you have to. It’s identical, but must be easier to get working properly.

In fact, just getting it to run at all on a modern PC took some doing. Running it directly off the CD, as it was designed to do, throws an error and exits immediately after the opening logo movie. Copying it to local storage and running it in Windows 95 compatibility mode gets it a little farther, but it still hangs before displaying anything 3D. Remembering my recent discovery of DxWnd, I tried running it there, and it managed to display some 3D intro animations, but got stuck immediately before showing the main menu. Now, DxWnd has a UI of commercial-airline-console-like complexity, with oodles of settings to tweak, and I tried randomly tweaking the ones with promising-sounding names, but ultimately had to seek help online. And for the most part, the internet doesn’t even know that a PC version of this game exists. Not even PC Gaming Wiki, my old standby for help running old games on modern systems, didn’t have so much as a stub of an entry for it. The one place that was of help? A four-year-old thread on the DxWnd forums, which told me that the magic setting for this game is “Palette update don’t Blit”. I’m starting to think that DxWnd is going to be my first and last resort on these matters for the foreseeable future.

Oh, and as for the twin-stick problem: Robotron X‘s controls are idiosyncratic. On PC, it lets you move and shoot from the keyboard, with two sets of keys, which default to ESDF and IJKL, plus optionally some weirdly asymmetric keys for diagonal movement that you can ignore if you’re accustomed to pressing two keys at a time for that like any modern gamer. Well, after all, this game predates the ascension of the WASD standard. It doesn’t support arbitrary key rebinding, but it does support a handful of alternate key combinations, all of which are worse. The closest it comes to WASD is WADX, combined with 2468 on the numeric keypad, which is just painful to contemplate. I’ve considered avoiding all the control layouts by running some software to make my trusty Logitech F710 emulate keypresses, but I’ve been getting used to the default keys, and they’re not so bad once you’ve had some practice.

(Added 7 Nov) Actually, it turns out that I wouldn’t have needed to install anything else to produce keypresses from my gamepad. DxWnd can take care of that too.