Robbeary (Amiga)

I recently had a minor revelation regarding this game: for years, I'd assumed the title was pronounced like "Robb-ear-y", which is meaningless and makes no sense, but the player's character is a teddy bar, so obviously, it's meant to be "Rob-bear-y", which is still pretty stupid, but at least makes a little sense. Anyway, it's a single screen platformer about collecting stuff and scoring points.

Yeah, your bear goes around these pretty simply laid out stages and collects every giants fruit they contain before going on to the next stage. Obviously, there's also a bunch of enemies running around trying to stop you, and one touch from them kills you. Unusually, and more typical of "collect everything" maze games than platformers, you have no reliable means of defence against the enemies. Other than randomly appearing power ups that turn them into points items, all you can do is try your best to avoid them. To make this even harder, there's a timer, and when it runs out, all the enemies go into cocoons and hatch out twice as fast as they were before. If you take too long finishing a stage, this can even happen more than once!

Not only are the items that appear random, but so are the movements of the enemies: they just randomly walk back and forth, sometimes stopping for a second or walking off the edge of platforms. These things make the game not only hard, but dependent almost entirely on luck. You can't form  a strategy to make sure you get a power up in the nick of time, because you don't know when or where the power ups will appear, and you can't learn the enemy patterns to work out the best way around them because the enemies don't have any patterns. It's only when one of the random items (a green key, not to be confused with the gold key that appears at the end of the stage or the silver key which apparently does nothing at all) opened a door to a bonus stage that I realised that there's a chance that the developer had misinterpreted Bubble Bobble's elaborate system of secret items, room and stages as being random and tried to copy it.

Now I know that there have been a few games covered on this very blog where I've said that randomness has ruined them, but I should clarify that randomness isn't an inherently bad thing. Some of my favourite games use a lot of it: Shiren the Wanderer, One-Way Heroics and Minecraft being but three. But you'll notice that none of those games are arcade (or arcade-style) score-based action http://games.In games like this, scoring and progress should always be as close as possible to 100% about skill, knowledge and understanding of the game mechanics on the part of the player, and random elements totally ruin that.

Though it holds a little bit of nostalgia value for me (it was in a huge box of pirated games that came with the pre-owned Amiga I got for Christmas as a kid one year), I definitey can't recommend that you bother playing Robbeary.

Bullfight (Arcade)

The first thing I should mention here is that the title of this game isn't any kind of metaphor, it's literally about bulfighting, and it's pretty grisly, so if you that might upset you, you should probably skip this post. It's a top-down single screen game, it's pretty fun, atmospheric enough, but also quite flawed.

You play as a torero in the bullring, and the controls comprise a joystick and two buttons. Obviously, the joystick moves you around, while the buttons are for cape moving and stabbing, respectively. You score points for leading the bull with your cape, stabbing the bull, leading it into a wall, opening a wound on its back and killing it. Upon killing the bull, you go onto the next stage, with progressively fiercer bulls, and eventually, a second bull gets added to the mix.

The bull can trample you, which temporarily immobilises you, he can knock your sword out of your hand and even sometimes break it (if this happens a guy at ringside will throw another one into the ring after a couple of seconds) and he can gore you with his horns, resulting in a lost life. Since your torero wears a different-coloured outfit for each life, does that mean that they're literally being killed in the ring and it's a different guy each time? Who knows?

As for the flaws, there are two main ones. The first is that cape movement is kind of awkward and stiff. I think the direction in which the cape rotates is determined by the relative positions and movements of you and the bull, but I'm not entirely sure about that. The second is that the bull's movement can sometimes feels erratic and random, even when you're leading it with your cape. I guess this adds a little realism, since a bull is a huge, angry wild animal and should be a little unpredictable, but it can also make the game feel unfair.

If you can stomach it, though, I do think bullfight is a fun game, despite its flaws and the fact that it's pretty shallow in the long run. Interesting that other than this, the only other videogames based on real-life bloodsports that I can think of are those Cabela rifle animal hunting arcade games. I guess that's because of the unpleasant subject matter and the inherent unfairness in favour of the human participants that most of these sports hold. I'd also like to point out before I finish that I am totally against bloodsports of all kinds in real life.