Brian Jacks' Uchi Mata (C64)

 First, I'm going to credit Epsilon Eagle on Twitter for posting about this game and making me aware of it. It is another combat sports game, a genre I'm becoming more interested in as I discover more of them (on that subject, have you seen the trailer for the upcoming PC game Dojo Masters? It looks so cool!), and though it's a game that's been forgotten in the decades since, it also happens to be historically significant.

 

Before I get onto that, I'll give you some basic description. The sport in question is specifically judo, which means that there's no punching or kicking in this game, only throws, which is already pretty unusual. There is a move whereby you rudely shove your opponent to the floor, but performing it means you immediately lose the match via disqualification. Which makes you wonder why the developers even bothered to include it, it's obviously not something you'd ever do in a real tournament, is it? It's not like wrestling, where the referee might look away or be temporarily incapacitated to give you the opportunity for illegal moves. Also, Brian Jacks was a British olympic judo practitioner, and this game carries his endorsement. Which is nice.

 

Anyway, the thing that makes Uchi Mata noteworthy, interesting, and historically significant is its main mechanical gimmick: it was seemingly the first game to use command inputs for special moves, beating Street Fighter by a year! You approach your opponent, press the fire button to lock up, and when the time's right, hold the fire button, input a special motion (a quarter or half circle, for example), andthen release the button to do your move! The timing system also brings to mind the Fire Pro Wrestling games, though it's quite different, and a lot more mysterious and inscrutible.

 

When the two fighters are locked up, there will sometimes flash up a rectangle in one of the fighters' colours (red or white) at the top of the screen, near the clock. When your colour's up there, that's when you have the opportunity to land a move. The problem is that it's not really clear what causes the rectangles to appear or disappear. It seems vaguely related to who initiates the lock up, but if it continues past that point, its whims seem to be kind of random. It really puts a damper on how enjoyable the game can be, since it feels like your wins and losses are subject to the whims of this mysterious rectangle entity, and not so much on your own skills. Furthermore, going back to that disqualification thing, every match I've played has ended that way, either through my performing the move by accident, or through what I assume was a fit of rage on behalf of the CPU player.

 

All in all, Uchi Mata is a game that was clearly ahead of its time, and the developers really put some thought into how they could replicate a complicated fighting style on such primitive hardware with such limited control options. Unfortunately, they also saw fit to add in what is either a random element, or an element so mysterious that it might as well be random, and that really does ruin the game, to be honest. Give it a try out of historical curiosity, but don't expect it to be a game you'll come back to once that's been satisfied.

Championship Wrestling (C64)

A few weeks ago, me and a friend wondered if there was a World of Sport Wrestling game on C64. There wasn't, but in looking for one, a screenshot of this game caught my eye, with its isometric view and diamond-shaped ring being reminiscent of the Fire Pro games, the best series of wrestling games there's ever likely to be. Does "reminiscent" still apply, when this game predates Fire Pro by a couple of years? Anyway, I obviously wasn't expecting anything anywhere near as good as any entry in that series, but I still had to satisfy my curiosity by playing it.

The out-of-game presentation is pretty bad, even for a game from 1986. That picture at the top of this review with the plain text on a blank blue background is the actual title screen, and all the menus look like that. Also, there's no nice artwork on the loading screens, either: they're just black. Luckily, this is more than made up for by the in-game graphics since, as you can see in the rest of the screenshots, it looks pretty good. Even more impressive is that the animation isn't bad, either!

As for how it plays: it's not terrible. I've definitely played significantly worse wrestling games. As was a standard workaround on these old microcomputers with one-button controllers, you can do different moves by holding the button and pressing different directions. There seems to be maybe eight moves per wrestler, too (though obviously, there's a lot of move-sharing): while the wrestlers are roaming free, you do punches, kicks, and so on, but you can also get your opponent into a headlock, from which you perform a couple of throws. There doesn't seem to be any mat wrestling, though, as pressing the button next to a downed opponent goes for a pin, instead.

The main problem the game has is a lack of variety: though there's eight wrestlers that all look different to each other, they all feel the same when you play as them. Plus, there's only one match type, and there's actually only seven wrestlers, since if you select Zeke Weasel as your own wrestler or your opponent, the game will crash while loading. After ten minutes of play, I was already bored, and after half an hour, I was ready to never play it again.

It's pretty obvious that I can't really recommend this game, but I do feel a bit guilty about it. It wouldn't be a surprise to learn that this was the best wrestling game available in the UK in 1986. It's not 1986 now, though, and you can get literally hundreds of much, much better wrestling games instead of it.

Death Wish 3 (C64)

In case you aren't aware, this isn't the third in a series of games entitled Death Wish, but is a licensed game based on the third in a series of movies by that name, in which Charles Bronson plays a kind of vengeful war diety named Paul Kersey. The third movie sees him descend upon a version of New York that looks more like Rossington, where he falls in love with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter, then kill like a hundred people with a variety of guns and the assistance of other local pensioners.

Anyway, it's interesting because it's an incredibly early example of a popular 2010s genre: the open-world tidying game. That is, games in which you can freely roam about a huge map, and there are dots on the map representing things like bosses, minigames and so on that you're expected to tidy up. Obviously, the map isn't particularly big, and the dots only represent bosses (or rather, tactically significant enemies, since they're not any more difficult to kill than the regular enemies), but in principle it's the same. You play as Kersey, and you walk around New York, killing bad guys and avoiding the temptation to kill cops and old women (because doing so reduces your score significantly).

In the interests of simple, readable game design, there are actually only five kinds of people in Death Wish 3's portrayal of New York: cops, old women, criminals, large breasted women who occasionally stop to scratch their bums, and the mysterious guys who run in to clean all the corpses away. The last two types can't be killed, either. So you get points for killing criminals and lose them for killing old people and cops. There's also blinking dots on the map, usually inside buildings. These are the riot leaders, and you've got to get to them and kill them, which stops the current riot and gives you a couple of minutes of peace, quiet and boredom until the next one starts. You just do this until you either get killed by the criminals or you stop playing from boredom.

As already mentioned, it's an interesting concept to see in not only a game from over thirty years ago, but one that's also a throwaway movie license too. However, there's really only a few minutes of fun to be had, as once you've put down one riot, they don't get any harder or add new types of enemy or anything. Plus the way you navigate around the streets is really odd and took me a while to figure out: pressing up or down rotates your view by ninety degrees, and you really need to keep an eye on the map to be able to have a clue as to where you're going. I'd say give it a try, just for curiosity's sake, but don't expect to be glued to it, or to ever have the desire to return.

The Muncher (C64)

The Muncher is a C64 game that was also a tie-in with Chewits. Except that the version I played for this review didn't appear to have any kind of Chewits branding in it, and the title screen says "Monster". But other than that, it's the same game.

You play as a big green t-rex looking dinosaur (that, even in the version with the chewits branding, doesn't look anything like the dinosair from the Chewits ads), and you go from left to right, destroying as much as you can along the way. It looks a lot like Rampage, though there are differences. Like rather than having to destroy everything, most of the destruction in The Muncher is optional, and just for points, and the aim of each stage is to keep going right until you reach the end and go on to the next stage. You're constantly being attacked by tanks, helicopters and army men, though destroying any of the enemies (as well as passers-by) regains a small amount of health. You have a lot of attacks to kill them with, too, considering you only have the directions and one button: you can reach down and smash/eat enemies on the ground, jump up and smash helicopters in your mouth, and you also have a limited-use fireball attack  Plus, by moving from side to side, you can destroy the buildings behind you with tail whips..
Once your health runs out, your game is over, though there is a trick to come back from the dead by picking up an egg and later dropping it in a radioactive barrel. Either way, once you get to stage 3 (the army base), you'll probably die within a few seconds anyway.
The Muncher is okay. It has a nice big player sprite, and it's less boring than Rampage, but it's not really worth going out of your way to play.

Jammin' (C64)

It's been a long time since the last post, hasn't it? The usual excuse applies: I was spending a lot of time playing games that do not fit this blog's remit. I still am spending a lot of time playing those games, in fact! So, in the hopes that it will stop you forgetting about me, I will write about a game I already knew about.
In Jammin', you go about the place collecting musical instruments and taking them to triangles. The world i made up of four colours, and you can only walk on either the colour you're standing on, or the multicoloured diamonds that are on the conveyor belts. If you're stood on one of those diamonds, you can step off onto any colour you like. So, each stage has four musical instruments and for triangle things. You have to go about, using the conveyor belts as transport, and fetch each instrument back to the triangle that's on the same coloured ground as you found the instrument. (What a terribly written sentence!) While you're doing this, musical notes and strange, bow-legged men wander about trying to take the instrument off you. If the musical notes touch you while you're carrying an instrument, it goes back to where you got it. If the bow-legged men touch you while you're carrying an instrument, they run off with it and you have to chase them. If either of them touch you while you're not holding an instrument, they disappear and you get points.
The game is fairly fun to play, but the real reason I like it is that it just has a really nice, friendly atmosphere. While mechanically it's a bit fiddly (though not enough that playing ever feels like a chore), it's best quality is that kind of intangible feeling. I can't say whether that's just me, or if anyone else will have similar feelings while playing it, or even if that's what the designers intended.
Try it, I guess. If you do, tell me how it went. I'm interested.