Well, here it is finally! The HD Walkthrough tour of ACAM during the 14th Annual FunSpot Tournament! As a special bonus to all of you that are here reading this on the site I wrote up my thoughts on the main games that were featured in this year's tournament. If you'd like to check it out hit the jump below and read along!
Space Fury
I guess this is Sega’s answer to Asteroids. Just with Vector Graphics and three different ships. The game is pretty much clear the screen with your ship of choice. You start out with a standard one way shot, but you can upgrade to a three front shot, a three shot that goes forward and to the sides and finally a one in the front and two in the back. Even though I tried to clear the ships as fast as I could they’d keep coming back so I’d hardly ever get the bonus.
Depthcharge
The slowest game of the tournament. Pretty much you’re a giant boat on the top dropping depth chargers onto enemy subs below who are trying to blow you out of the water with torpedoes. The thing is since your charges take so long to drop to the bottom you’re pretty much throwing them in blind. You can try to set some up but they like to throw in quicker moving subs along the top that are worth less points. Still, it’s a fun game and it’s cool to try to improve your scores.
Mr. Do’s Wild Ride!
I was one of the first people to play this game when they finished working on it a few years ago. Unfortunately it seems like the joystick was getting hammered. Sometimes it felt like it wasn’t going all the way in the direction I was holding. The game pretty much is Universal’s answer to Donkey Kong. You guide Mr. Do though an amusement park trying to avoid a runaway rollercoaster, giant swinging balls of death and one of those swinging pirate ships. I’m horrible at this game. I’ve only cleared the second part twice. You get to the very end where you need to rush under the pirate ship all while trying to avoid an oncoming rollercoaster that’s out for your blood.
Rally-X
This game surprised me. It’s funny that back in the day people thought this was going to be the big time money maker and people passed on Pac-Man thinking it was too generic with only one maze. In the game you play as a rally car and your goal is to collect the flags throughout the course all while trying to avoid pits and the other enemy cars that want to slam into you. At first I got some really bad games and ended up crashing. I ended up putting in the second to lowest score till Saturday when I said, the hell with this I’m gonna try it again. Somehow I lucked out. I had heard if you try to rush up into the top corners of the screen the cars will try to gang up on you and you can just make a mad dash while their in the corner. I ended up lucking out finding the special S Flags that give you double points. So for two or three tracks I was able to get the S-Flags and not crash so I got a ton of points, as well as finishing the two bonus courses. At the end of the tournament I was in the top 10 with over 80,000 points. The local record is 101,000 with the world record being over 160,000. I think I might take the local one day with some practice.
Jump Bug
Now here’s a weird game. It looks like a driving game, but it’s more of an action platformer. You play as a little red car that can shoot and it can jump and hover in the air. You go around town collecting money and treasure all while trying to avoid “Jokers” that are trying to kill you. It’s a really odd game and I never played it till the tournament. I liked it. It’s not what you expect going up to it. I ended up doing alright, but some of the higher scores were nuts.
Life Force
Holy shit! Yes!! Finally! A classic Konami shooter is in the museum where it belongs! If only the old boards of Gradius/Nemesis wasn’t so hard to find! For me it was odd seeing how much some of the older fans HATED the game. Hell, I’d love to put in Gradius 3 and watch them rage, Life Force is actually a lot easier then it’s Japanese counterpart, Salamander. Not only is the game’s story different the computer voice will actually help you out more to avoid obstacles while the Japanese version just calls out the power ups. I found myself getting too greedy and ended up bumping into walls when I was trying to collect items for bonus points. The biggest problem is trying to figure out the patterns for the 3rd stage. You don’t really score points, it’s just to see how well you can fly through all the damn fire. So naturally, I never made it to the 3rd stage boss….
Buggy Challenge
Now we move onto the mini cabs. Buggy Challenge is another one I passed on but never played. It’s an odd driver from Taito. You ride around the desert trying to avoid obstacles like other cars, trees, water and rocks. You’re not really on a set path in this game. What you do is you follow a blinking light that I jokingly called “The North Star” in order to get to the checkpoint for more time. You can go over hills and do jumps that will let you earn bonus points. The biggest problem is the way the game controls, you need to baby the controls because if you spin the wheel too much your car goes nuts. Plus you’ve got to avoid a lot of rocks that will do nothing but slow you down and even bump you into other cars.
Space Encounters
The LOUDEST game of the tournament. This was a really cool game I never played. Picture the trench run at the end of Star Wars, but your in a TIE Fighter. You fly though a never ending trench while shooting up all the space invaders you can. If you can shoot down a UFO that will fly by it’ll open up a wall where if you speed towards it and shoot in the middle (Just like beggar’s canyon back home) you’ll score a nice bonus. The game played like a mix of Space Invaders crossed with the scoring features of Spy Hunter. The faster you fly your ship the more “Speed Points” you gain. That number will continue to rise as you play. The game worked like Spy Hunter where the faster you go the more points you got, but also in the timer. You’ve got a timer and as long as their’s time in the clock you can get hit and fly back in, but if you continue to do good and not get shot you’ll gain extra lives, just like in Spy Hunter. So you not only have to try to run through the trench as you can, but also not hit anything. A lot of fun.
Astro Blaster
Yet another Space Invaders like game from Sega, with a couple of twists. First you’ve got a limited amount of fuel your ship can carry. So even if you’re doing well at shooting down all the ships you can still run out of fuel leading to an automatic game over. You’ve also got to time your shots because your gun can overheat causing you to not be able to shoot at all and wasting all your fuel. This game was a pain. The way the ships move were really annoying. It’s like they wanted to make it really hard to get you off the game by running out of fuel before you ran out of lives.
Space Dungeon
Another odd Taito game. It was pretty much a mix of Robotron 2084 and Adventure. You pilot a little ship, thing around a giant “dungeon” in search of treasures all while trying not to get blasted by other baddies. This game I really needed to sit and read the instruction card. It was hard trying to figure out was loot and what was trying to kill me. Most people just rushed to the “Collect Bonus” zone so they could quickly end the level. I tried doing that with not that much luck. I’d like to play more of it next time I visit to figure out what the heck I should be doing.
Armored Car
Kinda like Pac-Man meets Keystone Cops. (Not counting Lock n’ Chase) You play as, what else an armored car. You’re trying to go around the city collecting money to deliver to the bank on the other side of town. But of course, you’re being chased down by other cars that want your loot so you can drop sawhorses to cause the cars to slam into them and crash. You can also collect a key and if your lucky you can find a lock that will get you bonus points. You also have to contend with running out of gas. You can refill at a gas station but then you’ve also got to look out for arrows on the map as well. All over the map you’ll see arrows and they constantly change direction. You’ll be well on your way and you can get stuck because it’ll change to only up and down and not left or right.
Minefield
Another game from Stern along with Armored Car. In Minefield you play as a little tank that gets dropped off in the desert. You need to guide the tank to the end while trying to avoid planes dropping bombs on you, other enemy tanks and of course, what’s in the name? You’ve got to go through the minefield. It was a lot of fun, even though the game looked really simple. It got like Moon Patrol where you had to keep looking up to make sure you weren’t getting bombed by a plane but also looking at where you are going because you’ll smack right into a mine ending your game real fast.
Carnaval
Sega's classic shooting gallery was in the tournament and I'm not that good at it. I like when my shooting games give me unlimited ammo. I totally forgot about that on my first play though of it and lost REAL quick. I kept hearing other people say how to shoot certain things and leave others for last but I pretty much parked my gun in the middle so I could shoot the flags on the top if I missed anything going in the rows. A super simple game, but you really need to be acurate with your shots.
Mad Planets
One of the best new games of the tournament. This game is a lot like Asteroids, but with the insane challange of Sinistar. Pretty much you fly around in a space ship shooting planets. You want to try to shoot them as fast as you can because the longer their on the screen they'll become huge blood thirsty planets with orbeting moons out for your life. It gets really hectic because the larger sized planets come at you really fast and in order to destroy the larger plaents you need to shoot down the little moons oberting them or they just turn red and come at you faster. You can also collect stranded spacemen, kinda like Blaster for extra points, all while trying to avoid being shot at and slammed into. I had a little bit of trouble with the joystick on the game. It felt really stiff going in diagonal directions, not sure if it was an 8 way or 4 way game.
Gaplus
Gaplus or Galaga 3 was the final game of the main tournament. I didn't get to play it as much in the Galaga Championships last year but it's really odd compared to Galaga and Galaga 88/90. You still need to shoot one of the top aliens with two hits to collect a power up, but in Gaplus it's different. Rather then increasing your shot power you get a tractor beem like the enemy ships that suck you up like in Galaga. You need to suck up as many other enemy bugs and they'll come down and join you so you'll get a line of ships all firing at once. The bonus stages are also a lot different to other games in the series. Rather then a wave of bugs coming towards you, only two or three come down and you need to shoot and juggle them back and forth in order to collect bonus points. It's really hard to do this with only one ship. I was watching one of the players with the FunSpot record destory the bonus stages while I was trying to play Mad Planets. He hit the fire button like he was playing a music game, "Tap, tap tap! Tap, tap, tap!" So needless to say he had the highest score of the weekend.
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