The Stack

Not much progress to report today. I’m still trying to become sufficiently proficient with the flightstick to tackle the highest level I’ve reached without it. I still maintain that it will be a benefit to me once I’ve mastered it, but right now, it’s a learning curve. It strikes me that the game’s ideal player is one who’s already over this hurdle, just as, say, Animal Well is built on the assumption that you’ve already mastered basic platforming skills. It’s a game for people who have graduated from the likes of Wing Commander and are seeking something more involving, more complex.

I’ve been replaying from the beginning, on Easy, and in the process I’ve seen some Sinistars that I had previously passed over by destroying the gate. For what it’s worth, I don’t consider replaying from the beginning to be all that much of a setback; this is a game that’s positively designed to be replayed from the beginning. But being worse at the controls means that I kill fewer worker drones, which makes it less likely that I’ll destroy the gate before the Sinistar shows up. And some of them are real toughies, ones that I have no idea how to even begin to approach. There’s one that’s surrounded by a flickering green spherical force field, and sometimes it projects force fields at you, sending you hurtling away as speeds sufficient to destroy you if you collide with anything. Even in Easy mode, I don’t know how to survive that encounter long enough to do the kind of experimentation needed to figure out how to so much as scratch its paint.

I’d gladly read a walkthrough for some of these guys, but there doesn’t seem to be one online, even at old mainstays like GameFAQs that host hits going back to the dawn age. It just never had a sufficiently large fanbase to produce one. I guess that’s what happens when your target audience is the intersection of “nostalgic for 80s coin-op games” and “proficient with a flightstick”.

How long has it been? More than a week? It’s been a busy time, largely due to the latest Puzzle Boat, my first. Maybe I should post about that. But I’m not going to do that today, because I’ve just resumed playing Sinistar Unleashed.

The main bit of news here is that I went and did what I said I might, taking advantage of the holiday sales to get myself an actual flight stick — specifically, a Thrustmaster T. Flight HOTAS X. My understanding is that this is exactly the same as the Thrustmaster T. Flight HOTAS One, except that the One can be plugged into an Xbox and the X can be plugged into a Playstation. Since I have no intention of using it with anything other than a PC, I don’t much care about the difference. It’s a cheap-end-of-midrange device, and comes with a detachable throttle lever, which seems important for this game.

Having now experienced it in Sinistar Unleashed, I am absolutely sure that this is the intended experience. All those extra options like perpendicular movement and rolling left and right, which I had evicted from my gamepad to free up button space, are available trivially. At the same time, it’s going to take a while to get used to this, because it’s way more responsive to small movements than I’m used to, including involuntary small movements. I keep rolling without meaning to, just because I’ve never used a controller that actually cared about torsion on the stick before. I’m reminded of a bit in Wing Commander where you’re given an experimental prototype fighter to try out. In the debriefing, the player character says “It handled like a dream”, while I wanted to say “It turns way too fast. I had basically no control over what I was doing and kept overshooting my targets.”

The other big downside is that I pretty much have to use it while sitting at a desk. My home computer setup is like this: I live in a four-room apartment. Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living room. The living room is the only reasonable place to put a computer, so my office space is a desk on one side of it. My PC is connected both to a pair of normal PC monitors on that desk, and to a projector positioned opposite a couch. It is from this couch that I watch movies and play those games that benefit from being projected onto a large screen.

(Some years back, Valve started selling devices with the sole purpose of enabling “couch gaming” while keeping your PC in a different room than your TV. This always bemused me: why would people be willing to pay money for this when they could just put their PC and TV in the same room? But then, I just bought a fancy joystick for the specific purpose of playing a 25-year-old game that cost me less than the joystick, so who am I to talk?)

Sinistar Unleashed is definitely in the category of “games that benefit from being projected onto a large screen”. You want to fill as much of your vision as possible with that starscape, helping the illusion that you’re physically there, gliding and swooping around. And as long as I was playing it from a wireless dual-stick controller, entirely designed around couch gaming, that is how I played it. But I can’t have that and the proper controls at the same time. I gladly choose the controls, but I know I’m losing something as a result.

As in the original arcade game, most levels in Sinistar Unleashed start off with a number of stationary turrets scattered about. When you’re in range, they turn slowly to face you and then fire in barrages, a long cone of fire randomly packed with bullets every few seconds. Seeing that many bullets at once is scary, but I’ve found that the best way to deal with it is to face the turret head on. You present a smaller profile that way, thus getting hit by fewer bullets, and although you’ll still get hit multiple times, you can easily kill the turret before it kills you. If, that is, you actually want to kill it — enemies can be damaged by friendly fire, and sometimes the easiest way to get attackers off your tail is to head into a turret and let it shoot it them down for you.

(Can you be damaged by friendly fire too? I assume so, but it’s hard to be sure, because of the lack of friendlies. There’s a Special Item that you can use to place turrets of your own, but their bullets are fewer and more precise than the enemy’s. You’d have to try pretty hard to get hit by them.)

Past level 16, however, there’s a new sort of turret that I haven’t figured out how to best deal with yet: the laser turret. Instead of a barrage of bullets, it fires a continuous beam. It can take a few seconds to home in on your position, but once it’s locked on, it follows you unerringly until it pauses to recharge. Facing into this gets you killed. You have to move perpendicular to the beam to avoid it, and that means you’re not facing the beam and can’t shoot at it with your primary weapon. Some of the secondary weapons, such as homing missiles, don’t need to be aimed, and could be useful here, but as I’ve said before, I’m inclined to save those for emergencies.

I may need to finally master the clutch. This is something that’s occasionally mentioned in the helpful hints that appear at the end of the game: “Take advantage of the clutch, it’s a very powerful tool” or words to that effect. But I hadn’t used it and frankly didn’t even know what it did. I think there was a button assigned to it on the controller by default, but it was one of the less easily-discoverable ones, like pressing the right joystick or something. Again, this game wasn’t really designed for a gamepad. The manual is written under the assumption that you’re using some kind of flight-simulator stick — in describing how to roll left and right, it says to twist your joystick — and what’s more, that you’re using it in conjunction with a keyboard — in describing the clutch, it says to use the space bar. I’ve rebound it to the left shoulder button, which was previously shields, a special item that I only occasionally have.

What the clutch does is this: it allows you to pivot without changing the direction you’re moving, like in Space War and Asteroids. This would clearly be useful against laser turrets: you could take off laterally, then clutch and turn and fire at the turret while still moving laterally. It also seems like it would be useful against ordinary warrior ships: they like to chase you and fire at you from behind, and with the clutch, I could just fire back at my pursuers.

But this is all predicated on actually getting good at using the clutch, which will take some practice. And it occurs to me as I write this that strafing could also be an affective approach to laser turrets. But I’ve unbound strafing from my gamepad. I just don’t have enough buttons for this game!

Maybe I should actually get myself a flight stick. I’m not a big flight sim fan, but this isn’t the only game on the Stack designed around them.

I’ve been backtracking a bit. Whether it’s through improved flying skills, or greater knowledge of effective tactics, or just having access to all the Special Items now, I’ve managed to pass level 4 on Normal difficulty, with the result that I can start Normal games at level 5 from now on. I’ve also tried restarting from the very beginning on Easy. There are advantages to this: by the time you reach the later levels, you’ve got an inventory full of weapons and items that you wouldn’t have if you started there. Also, you gain an extra life every time you clear a level, but this is only a net advantage if you’re not dying more than once per level. There’s definitely a pivot point around level 10 where my lives stop going up and start going down.

In both Easy and Norma, though, I still wonder: Am I missing out? It really seems like the most effective way to beat a level is to not face the Sinistar at all, but rather, keep the gate from ever being completed. This means spending enough time on each level to run out the clock, and devoting a substantial portion of that time to hunting worker drones instead of fighting the things hunting you. Surviving this is nontrivial. But at least it’s a skill that transfers easily from one level to the next. In contrast, each Sinistar is different, and not just in appearance. There are definitely Sinistars that are only hurt by bombs that hit them in specific vulnerable spots — the resemblance to shellfish of various sorts is kind of a hint about this. I think I’ve even seen one whose shell only opens to reveal the vulnerable spot some of the time, possibly in response to player actions. And you have to figure this stuff out while in extreme danger — especially difficult because most of the time, if there’s a Sinistar around, I’m running away from it, which means it’s behind me where I can’t see it. It’s markedly different from the original arcade game, where you could just spam the bomb button while fleeing and the bombs would home in on where they needed to go.

The point is, battling all these various Sinistars is a significant part of the design of the game, and it’s one that I’ve been avoiding where possible. There are Sinistars that I’ve passed by without ever seeing them, and others that I’ve seen but have no idea how to defeat. Maybe I should do a pass where I just leave the worker drones alone, let them complete the gates and figure out how to fight the Sinistars from the easiest onwards. Maybe I’ll be better trained to defeat the Sinistars past level 12, when they show up because I couldn’t delay gate completion enough, if I know how to defeat all the other ones up to that point.

I’ve been talking a lot about this game’s features and mechanics, but I haven’t said much yet about the experience of playing it. It’s quite enjoyable! Easily my favorite of the three classic arcade game remakes I’ve played this month. As I once said about another game, the pleasure of a game such as this has a lot to do with the pleasure of just moving around in the environment, of the game’s responsiveness in putting your intentions into action, and it does that part well. Even with a modern dual-joystick controller, designing a good, intuitive system for moving around freely in 3D space is not trivial. Space flight here is fairly streamlined, with very little cognitive friction, letting you devote more of your attention to higher-level goals.

One touch that I really like: Forward movement is the default. You can stop dead if you want, just hold your position and swivel. This is useful in some situations, such as mining space rocks: you want to aim right at the rock for long enough to blast it apart, but you don’t want to ram into it. But such situations are the exception, not the norm, and are treated as such by the controls. Holding down the left trigger button stops you, like it’s a brake pedal, just as holding down the right trigger makes you go faster. (Holding down both makes them cancel out. That’s not part of the game design; it’s an inescapable result of how Xbox-compatible controllers treat the trigger buttons as a single analog axis.) Holding still requires continuously applied intent. That feels good here. It feels right. I kind of wonder how such a scheme would feel in a less appropriate context. Imagine if you had to hold a button down to keep Mario from running forward all the time.

One thing I just discovered while looking at the the control configuration: By default, the D-pad lets you strafe! (That is, move perpendicular to the direction you’re facing.) I had poked at the D-pad a little while trying to figure out how to activate Special Items, but I must not have held it long enough to see any effect. I don’t think I’ll be using that. Strafing just feels weird in this context. It really shouldn’t feel weird, if this is supposed to be space, but it does. My expectation is that my spaceship, despite looking like a veiny butterfly, is basically an airplane. Airplanes don’t strafe.

And anyway, I need to free up the D-pad so I can remap Special Items to it. It turns out that the default controller configuration just kind of falls down there. There isn’t a notion of selecting a Special Item the way you can select a Secondary Weapon; every Special Item needs its own button, and there are only so many buttons available. Playing from mouse and keyboard has no such problem, of course. Were the developers assuming that players would be playing from mouse and keyboard? Well, the game was only released on Windows, so they knew that players would have keyboards available. Looking that up, I also learned that the developers were former employees of LookingGlass Studios, the makers of games such as System Shock and Ultima Underworld¹It’s a shame there aren’t any combination locks in the game., which were absolutely designed around using the keyboard for more complex 3D positioning than we’re used to these days. It just seems kind of backwards when the rest of the game plays from a controller so well.

I’ve passed level 12 — the halfway point! Enemies here are bigger and more trilobite-like. I suspect that by the end, ordinary warrior ships will rival the level 1 Sinistar in size.

Even though I’ve been playing for a while and seen half the game, there are still mechanics that I haven’t really mastered — specifically, the Special Items. These are among powerups contained inside special courier ships or blue-veined asteroids (how did they get in there?), and they mostly seem to be very powerful, but temporary — just the sort of thing you need in a clutch. Shields that block all damage. An instant return to full health. Automated drop-and-forget defense turrets. That sort of thing. I’ve deployed these from time to time, but I haven’t figured out how to choose specific Special Items from your inventory when playing from a controller. (The manual documents how to select them from the keyboard, but controller is clearly the best way to play this game.) I’ll probably have to figure that out soon to continue making progress. I’ll probably have to look at the input settings.

The Secondary Weapons, on the other hand, I’ve pretty much figured out, and they’ve been essential to getting this far. These are obtained from the same sources as the Special Items, and both selected and used via the controller’s face buttons. There are enemy-seeking missiles, a lightning gun that arcs in chains from ship to ship, a concussion weapon that sends out a spherical shockwave that damages everything in its radius — it’s not clear what medium is propagating this shockwave in the vacuum of space, but presumably it’s the same thing that allows me to hear explosions. Anyway, there’s a good variety of distinct effects that have advantages in specific situations, but in practice, they all come down to this: they let you kill stuff more quickly. This is important. There are things you need to get gone as quickly as possible.

But at the same time, you really want to use the secondary weapons sparingly, because they all consume resources. Each is found with a limited number of charges, but more importantly, they consume crystals — the same crystals that you use in Sinibombs. Indeed, Sinibombs are really a kind of secondary weapon, selected and deployed using the same controls as all the others, but they’re a special one, in that they’re available from the start and you never run out of charges for it. Crystals are also consumed when you heal damage, so that if you run out of crystals, you stop healing. Ideally, you want to minimize the number of crystals you spend on anything other than Sinibombs, because the more crystals you spend, the more crystals you have to mine to replace them, and time spend mining is time not spent on larger concerns, like bombing the warp gate or destroying the worker drones.

There’s a sort of Maslow-like hierarchy of needs at work here. In place of self-actualization, there’s destroying the Sinistar. Before you can concern yourself with that, you need crystals. But the first need, at the bottom of the pyramid, is the same as it always is: safety. When a particularly tough enemy spawns, taking it down becomes your first priority, crystals be damned. Secondary weapons exist for that moment.

After several more attempts at Sinistar Unleashed failed to get me past level 3 (and most of them didn’t even get that far), I finally decided to dial the difficulty down to Easy. This is always a difficult decision, hurtful as it is to one’s pride, and potentially ruinous to the experience of the game, letting the player coast through it without coming to important realizations about effective tactics. I’ve seen more games where Hard difficulty is clearly the right way to play it than ones where Easy is. But now that I’ve experienced Easy in SU, I think it was the right choice. Even if Easy isn’t the right way to play this game, it’s the right way to start out.

The most obvious thing that the difficulty level affects is the number of lives you start with: 5 in Normal, 3 in Hard, and a whopping 10 in Easy. Other than that, Easy mode just makes it really obvious that the game is helping you along. There’s a noticeable auto-aim effect, such that the tracer fire from your main guns abruptly jumps to a visibly different angle when your aim gets close to an enemy. In Normal, collecting the crystals that you blast out of the space rocks is a delicate and time-consuming business; in Easy, they’re magnetically attracted to your ship, and will sometimes follow you halfway across the map if your hold is already full. The thing is, these are both fairly standard features for 3D games. Indeed, without a little aim assist, first-person shooters would be basically impossible. But most games apply it subtly enough to fool the player into thinking it isn’t there, and SU in Easy mode is anything but subtle about it. I suspect that both effects are also present in Normal, just to a much lesser degree.

But even Easy isn’t trivial. I still die sometimes. I’ve gotten as far as level 9, but not in a single game. Mostly death seems to come suddenly — there’s a female computer voice that says “Danger: Low Heath” when you’re low on health, and usually I’m dead by the time I hear it. This may be the same sort of thing that I saw people on the emulation forums complaining about in the original game; the haters were adamant that the game wasn’t difficult, it was bullshit. But I suspect that most of my deaths could be avoided, once I get better at directing my attention. The game throws a lot of information at you, with HUDs in three corners of the screen, any of which could be showing something vitally important. And once I’ve mastered using them in Easy mode, maybe I’ll be ready for Normal.

Having reached level 9, I can start games there (in Easy mode only), with 10 lives but no powerups. The jury is out on whether this is an advantageous tradeoff or not. As promised, every 4th level is a Bonus Level, with no Sinistar and some other goal to pursue. The first one asks you defend four colonies from attackers, the second one to destroy a space station’s shield generators. I have completed neither task successfully, and was rather surprised when the game let me start at the next level anyway.

Frustrated by my lack of progress in Galaga: Destination Earth, I try another, similar game from the Stack: Sinistar Unleashed, a 3D reimagining of an arcade game famous for being frustratingly difficult. This might seem like a strange choice under the circumstances, but (A) Sinistar Unleashed is significantly different from the original Sinistar and (B) I never really understood why Sinistar had that reputation in the first place. I’ve mentioned this before. It’s not that I found Sinistar easy, mind you. It’s just that I didn’t find it significantly harder than most other arcade games. For a quarter, I could get a solid few minutes of gameplay, in which I would finish the first level and sometimes the second. Looking around at retrogaming forums while trying to shore up my knowledge of the mechanics, it seems like the people who complain about it simply have a different perspective than me. They expect that, with enough practice, they should be able to completely master a game, to the point where they can play it indefinitely. And Sinistar simply never let them do that.

But, as I say, Sinistar Unleashed is a different game. Completely mastering this game doesn’t mean playing indefinitely. It means beating level 24. And it doesn’t even expect you to do it in a single go, like G:DE does: it’s possible to make permanent progress. According to the manual, “If you’ve successfully completed the bonus level of a zone in a previous game, you can skip that zone when starting a new game”. What’s a “zone”? Apparently it’s four levels, matching the cycles of the original game. But I haven’t yet gotten beyond level 3, so I’m still in the position of starting each game from the very beginning.

Where the other remakes I’ve been playing hew pretty close to the visual style of the originals, SU heads off in its own direction, more Psygnosis-y in its sense of cool. Enemies are sort of biomechanical and crustacean-like, including the Sinistars themselves. In the original, the Sinistar was a big metal demon head, and kind of goofy in a way that doesn’t fit here — although something similar does show up on the Game Over screen, suggesting that it might be the final boss. Here, there seems to be a different Sinistar on every level, and every one that I’ve seen looks like some horrible mutated sea creature. Even the player’s ship, although less crablike, is kind of organic-looking, with a veiny texture that changes color as you take damage.

I suppose it can get away with altering the visual style because so much because the Sinistar identity has so much more to do with the gameplay. There really wasn’t anything else like it at the arcades. It was a space shooter, sure, but it was one that gave the player an unusual amount of freedom to prioritize. An enemy fleet is building the Sinistar, a big scary battlestation which is only vulnerable to bombs made from crystals that you can shoot-mine from space rocks. But the same crystals are exactly what the enemies need to build the Sinistar. So you’re competing with them for resources, and can slow them down by destroying the workers, but this distracts you from your own crystal-collection efforts — as do the warrior ships hunting you down. It’s the sort of thing you more often see in RTS games than shooters, and it survives mostly intact in SU.

The biggest changes at that level of abstraction are these: In SU, the Sinistar is a lot more dangerous, and you can’t carry enough crystals at a time to destroy it completely, but you can damage it in advance by throwing bombs at it while it’s still under construction. The in-fiction justification for this is that the thing the workers are building isn’t actually the Sinistar itself, but the dimensional gate that allows it to enter your sector of space. Damaging the gate delays its completion and forces the Sinistar to spend longer in hyperspace, which is inherently damaging to it. If you do enough damage, you can even destroy the gate before the Sinistar appears. I myself have managed this exactly once so far.

Wizardry III is a difficult game — easily the most difficult Wizardry I’ve played, and I’ve played Wizardry IV, the one that has a reputation for extreme difficulty. But that’s a whole different thing. Wizardry IV‘s difficulty is mainly in its puzzles, some of which require specialized knowledge, like the Kabbalah or Monty Python references. And while that sort of riddlery might stop someone cold, I found the game had been written from the same sort of geek culture that I myself was immersed in.

I’ve encountered this mismatch of difficulty assessment elsewhere. Spellbreaker is supposed to be Infocom’s hardest adventure, but I’ve never understood why — all it really takes is an “I wonder what happens if I do this?” mindset and some slight knowledge of classic math puzzles. The coin-op game Sinistar has a reputation for being unusually hard, but I always could last about as long in it as in other games of its type — although in this case I suspect it more signifies that I’m not very good at space shooters in general, so it’s not so much “For me, Sinistar is as easy as these other games” as “For me, these other games are as hard as Sinistar“.

Anyway, the thing that makes Wizardry III particularly difficult isn’t the puzzles, but that it demands patience. Wizardry I let you power-level at the Murphy’s Ghost room, and Wizardry II let you import your overpowered characters from Wizardry I, but if there’s any option like that in Wizardry III, I haven’t found it. You have to level up the slow and risky way. Sure, you get some ability to trade that off, choosing where to grind to make it less slow but more risky, or vice versa. But that means that when things get too slow for your liking, there’s a temptation to take on more risk than you can handle.