Japanese Box Art

 

Snippets of Indie Horror

With the month of October just fast approaching, I thought go over some recent spine chillers.  Mid to big budget games are at a drip feed right now, but indie titles (as always) continue to flood the market.  Quite a few of these micro-budget, oftentimes one-man, projects are designed to be short and scary.  Most are also extremely cheap or even free.  That said, plowing through all the dross to find the good stuff can be a tedious process.  Thankfully, there are some Youtubers out there that eat up these kinds of titles like popcorn.  Two of my personal favorites are Gab Smolders and CJUGames.  While not affiliated in any way, they both have a love of horror games.  So much so, the pair almost feel like they could be a sister/brother duo.  As a sampling of their extensive video libraries I'll offer up a few of links.  Ladies first...

SPOT H9 is one of those simple premise, could happen to anyone, nightmare scenarios.  It's short and filled with jump scares, but the ending has a funny little twist that makes it standout from similarly themed games:   

The Last Cosmonaut is a mix of sci-fi and horror all wrapped into a neat little retro package.  It has a lot in common with another game I recently mentioned on this blog - Stowaway.  So, if you liked that you might enjoy this as well.  

The Well is less of a video game and more a piece of interactive art.  Even so, it has an distinct visual style that captures the source material it is based on perfectly.  The writing is also sharp and appropriately disturbing.

Made for the "Summer of Shivers" game jam, The Salvation Project is perhaps more hilarious than terrifying.  Based on the theme of a satanic panic, the game is centered around a Kermit-the-Frog lookalike character who communicates to the player via TV broadcasts.

 

Munificently Assured Destruction

In 1981, Atari released a mass market arcade game by the name of Missile Command.  It was the brainchild of one Dave Theurer, a California resident and energetic game designer who had just finished work on a four player soccer game.  His boss at the time ask him to make a game similar to some magazine clippings of an article about satellites.  Rich Adam, Dave's junior and assistant on the project, recalls Theurer's pitch being a rather straightforward three sentence summery: 

"Here's the idea: you've got these missile trails coming in from the top and you've got these bases at the bottom. The trails are missiles coming in and you shoot missiles from your bases to intercept them. You try to save your bases."

Taken at face value it doesn't come across as a particularly standout concept for a video game, but Dave Theurer was fired up by his idea the moment he got the greenlight to proceed.  Development took six months and ultimately became a case of design by subtraction.  One of the first things decided on was the game being purely defensive.  There would be no way to counterattack because Dave "did not want to put the player in the position of being a genocidal maniac."  Giving players the job of saving lives also introduced one of the first instances of having to make tough moral choices in the context of a video game.  In modern titles this typically presents itself as a rather blatant good/evil, paragon/renegade, black/white dichotomy, but in the case of Missile Command, the decisions were a lot more subtle...so much so, the player might only register them on a subconscious level.  

The layout of the game is simple.  There's only one screen.  Threats come from the upper part, the stuff that needs protecting is down at the bottom.  There are three mountain-top bases located in the bottom-middle, as well as the bottom-right and bottom-left corners.  Each one of these bases is equipped with a defense system that holds ten shots (thirty in total).  The player aims via an on-screen cursor guided by a trackball.  Which of the three bases takes a shot is decided by pressing one of three corresponding buttons.  There are also six cities (three on either side of the central mountain base) that need to be defended.  Originally, these cities were supposed to be San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Eureka, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo.  In other words six major cities in California which also happened to have Atari offices residing in them.  Eventually, the city names were dropped to make the experience more universally relatable.  Still, I could have sworn that I played a port of Missile Command in my teens that reintroduced the city naming concept...  

Moving on, the missiles come down in waves and it's up to the player to use their limited resources to prevent these threats from reaching their targets.  It's usually possible to catch more than one incoming missile in the blasts caused by defensive fire.  This is especially true if the player is quick to target bombers and missiles armed with MIRV warheads, but if the player runs out of ammo they're basically stuck waiting until the wave ends.  Bases fully reload between waves.  In the original design document, this was going to be tied to a railroad supply system traveling from the cities to the bases, but it was dropped during development with the reason citied being "it was too complicated."  Regardless, the player has to be conservative with their thirty shots while still preventing the annihilation of their bases and cities (the former because they are needed for defense and the latter because the loss of all six results in a game over).  As the game progresses though, the waves consist of more and faster incoming missiles along with self-guiding bombs that can adjust their downward trajectory as they approach.  As the situation becomes increasingly hectic, the player has to make split-second decisions about what to prioritize.  A hit to one of the mountain bases will knock it (and any shots left) out for the remainder of the wave.  Obviously, a hit to a city will destroy it.  However, there are chances to gain bonus cities based on the player's performance.  Even so, there will inevitably be times when the player is overwhelmed and must sacrifice one thing to save another.  Abstract as it all is, in the form of a golden age arcade game, this is heavy stuff to think about.  It also led to Dave Theurer having bad dreams.

In Dave's own words, at the time "Missile Command embodied the Cold War nightmare the world lived in."  While putting in long hours in a state of gaming crunch that remains all too common today, Dave would suffer from reoccurring visions while he slept:

"I would dream that I was hiking in the mountains above the Bay Area, with the fabulous views of the San Francisco Bay. In the dream, I'd see the missile streaks coming in and know that the blast would hit me while hiking there on the mountain.  These nightmares were common occurrences during the development of Missile Command and continued after development was finished."

To make matters worse Dave lived near an Air Force base that would launch planes at all hours, sometimes causing the overworked and drowsy game developer to wake to a loud roaring noise "and for a moment wonder if it was an atomic blast."  Succinctly put, "It was a sobering experience."  

After removing the unworkable idea of a sweeping radar scan that would only reveal a portion of the screen at any given time, Missile Command was ready to be field tested.  In an interesting bit trivia, Atari would put together prototypes of their arcade machines and place them quietly in a bar or entertainment center.  This was an excellent deal for the owners since they were allowed to keep all the quarters that went into the machine.  In lieu of any kind of rental fee the establishment was only required to keep records of how many people played the game and their general reactions.  This was especially important for gauging the reception to tweaks and changes made to the game during field testing.  All this was conducted with an emphasis on maintaining a degree of secrecy out of a genuine fear that, if the game became too widely known and too publicized, a competitor would clone the mechanics and beat Atari to market. One change that was made to Missile Command at this time was an overhead display on the cabinet that indicated the status of the three mountain bases during play.  It was found to be too costly to make and needlessly distracting such that is was not included in the mass-produced arcade machines that followed.

In war there are no winners, only losers.  It's a saying that feels well suited to Missile Command.  There is no path to victory.  The missiles never stop coming.  Eventually every city gets destroyed...or perhaps another way to look at it would be, the only way to win is not to play.  Despite carrying this almost subliminal message about the futility of war, Missile Command went on to become one of the most famous arcade games ever made.  It has spawned countless ports, copycats and remakes over the years.  It even appeared briefly in "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" (perhaps as a subtle reminder of the approaching nuclear apocalypse that serves as a major plot point in that film).  Atari later field tested a two-player cooperative prototype of the game entitled Missile Command 2, but this was never made available to the public aside from a brief appearance in one arcade in Santa Clara, California.  Dave Theurer went on to make the highly regarded Tempest, a game that was partially inspired by another bad dream (this one from his youth) involving monsters climbing out of a pit in the ground.  As for the reoccurring nightmare about thermonuclear war, "It tapered off after the game, but still, [Dave] had them for a couple years afterward, maybe one every two or three months."  

While I have played the arcade game on several occasions, the version I spent the most time with was for the Atari 2600.   Oddly enough, the manual (that comes with the game cartridge) mentions the conflict is between the peace-loving Zardonians (represented by the player) and the warlike Krytolians.  It's unclear if this (previously non-existent) story background was added to to make the horrifying situation more palatable or simply an attempt to indirectly tie the game to hot science fiction properties at the time.  Either way it helps explain why the guy featured prominently on the box art is wearing a rather strange looking helmet, as well as the occasional in-game appearances of UFOs.  

Generally speaking, Missile Command on the Atari 2600 is inferior to the original...and yet, it has one little creative flourish that was not in the arcade game.  Once the last city is destroyed and the wave ends, the sky is rocked by one final cataclysmic explosion that darkens the heavens and turns the ground to a lifeless brown.  Where once there were shrieks and roars only an endless, empty silence persists (at least until someone pushes the reset button).  For a child that grew up in the final years of the Cold War, it's a haunting sight that I still haven't forgotten.  Hopefully, it's also something that will never be seen outside the realm of fictional media.   

Sources

Web Pages:

https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/15/4528228/missile-command-dave-theurer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Command

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Theurer

Videos:

https://youtu.be/JQJA5YjvHDU

https://youtu.be/6lWDbwmsz9E

Books:

"Missile Commander: A Journey to the Top of an Arcade Classic" by Tony Temple, 2021

"8-Bit Apocalypse: The Untold Story of Atari's Missile Command" by Alex Rubens, 2018

Kill Counts

One of the things I've always liked about the horror genre in general is the fact that the characters tend to be fragile.  Even individuals who are presented as being tough can easily be one bullet, blade or bomb blast away from injury and death.  It naturally creates an atmosphere of apprehension and suspense, especially whenever something physically dangerous is happening.  On the other hand a fair amount of action movies fall on the side of invincible heroes or at least a heavy layer of plot armor for the main cast.  After the release of the third-person shooter Aliens: Fireteam Elite, I decided to go back and re-watch the 1986 film "Aliens."  My reasons were two-fold.  First, I was interested in seeing where exactly the movie landed in terms of genre conventions.  In other words, was it more action than horror or vise versa?  The second motivating factor was wanting to confirm a suspicion I had since viewing the earliest gameplay footage of Fireteam Elite - namely, were the titular aliens dumber than I remembered?  Let's look at the first thing first, shall we?  

To answer the question, "is 'Aliens' an action movie or a horror movie?" we should check the rating..."R"...while fairly tame by modern standards "Aliens" does have some pretty gory bits, as well as more than a couple disturbing scenes and images.  It's certainly possible to make a good PG rated horror film, but the instances tend to be few, and the number of successes fewer still.  Conversely, action movies can be bloodless or extremely grewsome depending on who they're trying to market to.  Either way though the rating isn't a sure signifier.  So, how about the body count?  Horror movies tend to have a lot, but so do action movies.  For the film, it's easy; of the 11 marines sent in only one - corporal Hicks - survives (and even he is badly injured).  Those kind of losses are more in line with a horror film than an action movie.  However, that's really only half the picture.  What about the "bad guys"...in horror movies, it's pretty common for there to be only one antagonistic threat: Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger, Sadako, the creature from...wherever.  The original "Alien" certainly falls into this category but, as it says right in the title, "Aliens" - plural - does not.  So how many xenomorphs are there?  

In the script and the director's cut of the film it's revealed that there are 158 colonists on LV-426.  A medical report read by Bishop mentions one dying in surgery and, obviously, Newt escaped...therefore the maximum number of people that could have been used as hosts to breed more aliens is 156.  The conversion rate though is a tricky percentage to pin down.  Dark Horse made a comic about the fate of Hadley's Hope, and more recently a novel entitled "River of Pain" was released covering the same territory.  Unfortunately, these accounts offer conflicting information in many places, and as such I tend to prefer to skew toward the original sources.  Ripley claims in a conversion with Bishop that there are "...at least a hundred" while the novelization by Alan Dean Foster proposes a two-thirds conversion rate.  So, assuming there are around a hundred adult xenomorphs in total, how many are killed over the course of the film?

Based on what can be seen and heard in the footage itself at least 38 warrior/drone aliens are killed.  Amusingly, it is Pvt. Vasquez who hold the highest count at eleven (two with her smart gun, three by grenade launcher, five via pulse rifle and one point-blank using a pistol), while Ripley comes in second place with nine (one crushed under the wheels of the APC and eight more by pulse rifle fire).  Of course, the thirty-eight kill count assumes that the sentry gun sequence (absent from the original theatrical cut) is included in the final tally.  At least six xenomorphs are shredded by the second set of turrets, but the first set weren't placed near the CCTV camera system and as such blast away unobserved.  It's in no small part due to this scene that I've seen others suggest figures as high as twice the amount of my relatively conservative estimates.  Either way, we're talking less than one-hundred which I find kind of hilarious considering players of Fireteam Elite will rack up kill scores far in excess of that before finishing the first of the twelve missions found in the base game.  This brings me to the other reason I decided to watch "Aliens" again.

The three person Fireteam in the game is able to mow down hordes of xenomorphs due to tactics (or lack there of...).  In the game the aliens tend to perform head-on charges down corridors or open spaces at the Colonial Marines producing a shooting gallery effect which might be fun, but doesn't really jive with how I remembered the movie.  Sure enough, upon review I can confirm there are no instances of the xenomorphs employing these World War 1 style assaults in any of the mainline films.  In "Aliens," the aliens utilize ambushes and flanking attacks almost exclusively.  An interesting little detail that also surprised me was during the battle in Operations.  After having their infiltration attempt partially foiled by motion trackers, the xenomorphs begin dropping into the room from the celling near to where the marines are located.  Initially, they attempt to vault over obstructions in order to get at their targets, but once everyone starts to open fire they take cover behind consoles and panels located in the room.  Hudson and, soon after, Hicks then take positions on top of a crate in an attempt to get better firing angles.  However, several of the aliens try to flank which forces the marines to withdraw toward the corridor leading to Medical.  Even so, a xenomorph that had gained access to the sub-flooring (probably from within the room) seizes and drags away Hudson.  Side note: the capture of Hudson, Dietrich, Sgt. Apone and Burke mean that the hive could have potentially recovered four of it's losses provided there had been sufficient time available. 

One more thing, I'd like to point out is the effect gunfire has on the xenos.  Pulse rifles definitely chew them up, but higher caliber smart guns and sentry turrets actually blow them to pieces.  Conversely, the lower caliber pistol shots (such as those made by Lt. Gorman in the airducts) can be seen ricocheting off the front part of an alien's domed head.  It's a nice bit of careful consideration that shows James Cameron and the film crew were paying attention to detail.  Sadly, it didn't carry over to the bullet-sponge xenomorphs in Fireteam Elite.  I guess it was decided to give them large amounts of health in order to compensate for their lack of brain power.  I get that good A.I. is hard to program, but proper xenomorph attack patterns have been done before for the most part with "stalker" enemy types in The Last of Us and Dead Space.

So, to conclude my findings, "Aliens" definitely falls into action horror territory with a helping of sci-fi to boot.  I feel calling it a pure action movie is unfair and probably has something to do with horror purists not wanting to share the label with any other genre.  Having stated that, Aliens: Fireteam Elite does feel like an action game with little to no emphasis on the scarier aspects of the IP.  In order to meet the requirements of a paint-by-the-numbers shooter the xenomorphs overall intelligence and competence took a major nosedive causing Colonial Marine kill counts to skyrocket.  Personally, I would have preferred something closer to the film it was based on which (ironically) might have lead to innovate game design reminiscent of GTFO.  Given the lack of quality in most officially licensed Aliens-themed video games though, I think the developers realized that competently done was all they needed to clear that low bar.  I also suspect that once the initial excitement dies down there will be some pushback, but...hey...if you happen to be someone who is enjoying the game, don't let me ruin your fun.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going over to corner to be an grumpy, old, curmudgeon. 

Move Over Cobra

"Thunderhawk" sounds like the name of a TV program kids watched on Saturday mornings in the 1980s, but it's actually a combat helicopter flight-sim released in 1991...or is it?  The game begins on a dark and stormy night.  A HMX-1 helicopter sets down on the White House lawn and immediately a rather cartoonish looking man, in brown overcoat, steps out.  He quickly rushes up some stairs through a door, and down a hall into an office as lightning flashes through the window outside.  Another man, seated at a desk, waits for him.  Their conversation is as follows: 

"Things are getting desperate."

"Yes, Mr. President."

"Is the equipment ready?"

"Final preparations are in progress, sir."

"Is the team assembled?"

(exchange of handshakes)

"Yes, sir.  Jack Marshall is the chief tactician."

"...and the pilot?"

"One of our finest, sir."

"Good.  You got twenty-four hours."

It's all very black ops and sounds more than a little bit like a parody of a Tom Clancy novel.  The "equipment" is none other than the titular "Thunderhawk" (model number AH-73M), an experimental (and entirely fictional) attack helicopter deployed to "promote" American interests overseas.  The game features six zones of conflict: South America, Central America, Europe, The Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Alaska.  Each location is treated as a campaign and broken down into a series of missions complete with briefings and debriefings conducted by the aforementioned Jack Marshall.  The missions also feature primary and secondary objectives which will adjust the outcome of each campaign in notable ways.  Generally speaking, these game design features feel heavily inspired by the original Wing Commander which released a year earlier.  

Gameplay is best described as an in-cockpit POV combat flight-sim with a rather elegant control scheme.  Moving the mouse in any direction will cause the helicopter to tilt and, consequently, move in that direction.  Holding the right mouse button while doing so though changes the effect of the inputs.  Forward and backward mouse movements cause the AH-73M to climb or drop in altitude respectively, while left and right inputs make the chopper swivel to port or starboard.  The right mouse button fires the currently selected weapon while a short list of keyboard commands handle all other aircraft systems.  The weapons themselves consist of a 1200 round rotary autocannon as well as six hardpoints that typically mount a mixture of missile clusters and rocket pods.  Occasionally, missions will call for special ordinance such as ASW devices or crater-making bombs.  There's also a default loadout that assigns an appropriate selection of armaments for a given mission.

The opposition is typically made up of tracked or wheeled vehicles with occasional gunboats appearing on water covered regions.  Enemy aircraft (particularly jets) can be a bit unnerving to tangle with in that they appear and vanish very quickly owing to their high transit speed.  Hostile helicopters become increasingly common as player takes on harder and harder locations.  In an early campaign though, the first encounter with an enemy rotary aircraft is hyped up almost like an boss battle.  However, for me, the engagement ended up being anticlimactic because I simply shot down the enemy helicopter with an air-to-air missile the moment it showed up on the radar.  By far, the most annoying enemy type in the game are lone individuals on foot who takes potshots at the player's AH-73M using a man-portable SAM launchers.  Oftentimes, I would have to make multiple low-altitude strafing runs just to nail one these tiny targets.  Hilariously, they would transform into massive smoldering craters when I finally got them.

Despite liking Thunderhawk quite a bit, I never actually finished the game.  The sixth and final campaign, that takes place in Alaska, proved to be a bit too difficult for me.  I can still remember Jack Marshall chewing me out for only completing the primary objectives on the first Alaska mission.  To this day, I don't know what to tell the guy.  I had to return to base because I used up every last bit of ordinance I had on enemy targets.  I guess one helicopter can only accomplish so much regardless if it is Choplifter or Thunderhawk.