Of all the current crop of Game.Com titles available, this was to be my first purchasing choice. Two reasons: I'm a fan of most of the 5 subgames on the cartridge, and.... it was the first cartridge the local toystore carried :) That fact did not weaken my enthusiasm for this section, tho. Below I'll review the 5 individual games seperately.

JOUST

My personal favorite of the William's 5-pack, Joust came marginally close to becoming a true arcade classic (in the spirit of Space Invaders, Missile Command, and Pac-Man) but never quite achieved the name recognition required to be truly memorable. It is, however, a front-runner among the 2nd tier games, as just about every gamer has played or heard of this classic.

In case you haven't heard of Joust, I'll fill in the important details. As its name suggests, the game is a jousting contest - but unlike anything ever witnessed in medieval Europe. Your beast of burden is not a horse, but a large bird/ostrich/buzzard-like creature, with your computerized foes riding like mounts. These flying beasts add the 3rd dimension to regular jousting, making for an unique experience. The object of the game is to dismount the other riders, which is accomplished by ramming into them from a higher altitude than they. Being a "classic" game, there never really is an end to the gameplay - just more and more enemy jousters to duel against. The game's controls are the heart of simplicity. LEFT moves the bird to the left, RIGHT moves the bird to the right, and any of the 4 buttons A-D serve to flap the bird's wings. Born out of this simplicity is an elegant physics model - the bird truly acts like a falling body, with variable amounts of uplift generated by the number and speed of wingflaps. There is no true up or down controls - flap furiously to ascend, or flap not at all to plummet earthward.

The Game.Com translation of Joust holds up nicely compared to the original arcade version as well as the other consoles and PC renditions. Graphics are, obviously, the weakest point, but not impoverished enuf to detract from the great game that it is. I found the sprites to be slightly smaller than expected, but not problematic. Unsurprisingly, the sound effects are dead-on, being as close to accurate with the arcade as my aural memory serves. One of the bragging points of the Game.Com system has been the skillful use of sound, and Joust supports this boast. The physics engine is likewise nicely done, altho I did find a few instances of unusual movement and behavior. Notably, the birds tend to move rather strangely when contacting the edge of the platforms - for example, I've seen my mount careem off a platform edge, rocketing across the screen, from a near dead-stop. Its an uncommon occurrance, so few points are lost to this minor quirk. The boundry boxes of the sprites are relatively large, as you'll notice that near-misses often result in a kill (one side or the other). The difficulty setting of the game seemed to be set slightly higher than normal, with the pterodactyl and the troll arm arriving quickly.

Of special note, the designers took the time to make Joust a linkable game, requiring a second Game.Com console and Arcade Classics cartridge. I was initially worried that this feature would be left out of the game in haste, but was pleasently surprised to see its inclusion. Overall, this is a solid translation of a classic game, and easily the best of the five games offered on the Classics cart.

DEFENDER

Back in the Stone Age of the video gaming era, a little game called Defender quietly came onto the scene, immediately taking control of gamer's minds and loose change. Proving that uneventful sequels are more than a modern-day ailment, Stargate (Defender II) was released not long afterwards, only to take in more of folk's free time/change. Given the extreme similarities between these two titles, both in the arcades as well as the Com translations, I've decided to handle their reviews concurrently.

Defender isn't just a side-scrolling space shoot-em-up, but is the original side-scrolling space shoot-em-up. You control the Defender starship in an attempt to repel an alien invasion, as well as prevent or rescue the taking of human hostages. The playing field is a side-scrolling world which "warps" left-right, with the aliens flying around semi-randomly, trying to destroy you or pick up their human captives. Control of the spaceship is accomplished with the direction pad for movement, A button firing your standard laser, B button triggering a smart bomb, and the D button shifting you into hyperspace. Note that Stargate has one additional accessory, an Inviso defense activated by the C button.

Gameplay seems realistic to the original arcade machines, altho Defender presents some inherent problems for Com translation. First and foremost, Defender is a fast-paced game, with much rapid movement occurring (you, the aliens, and shots zipping about). Such rapid movement often is difficult to present on systems such as the Game.Com, as well as handhelds like the Gameboy, due to the blurring effect of fast movement on their tiny screens. I found it necessary to turn the contrast to maximum just to be able to play the games effectively - otherwise, I'd have problems tracking not only the enemy ships and their incoming barrage, but my own craft as well! This blurring problem is going to be present with all quick-paced games, which is arguably one of the better reasons that small handheld consoles are best suited more along the puzzle-game line.

The other gameplay-related problem is with the slight amount of lag present in both Defenders when the number of sprites on the screen starts to get a little too high for its processor to handle. Finding such bogging in a handheld actually surprised me, given that the problem is usually either tweaked out of the game before release, or the game is simply not released due to unsuitability to the platform. Thankfully the amount of bogging in the Defender series is small (compared to the noticable, if not unbearable, lag in SiniStar and Robotron), not seriously hindering gameplay.

Graphics-wise, I don't think a better job could have been accomplished with the Defender conversions to the Com. These games weren't too complex visually in the first place, so an acurate translation probably wasn't too difficult to engineer. On the sound frontier, the games are once again right on the money. The Game.Com versions of Defender sound exactly like the originals, at least to my ears. Again, this presents a hint of great promise to the Game.Com system - graphics are going to be innately limited, but that doesn't stop a 100% accurate aural translation.

ROBOTRON

Robotron: 2084, another classic game from the folks at Williams, albeit somewhat lower on the "classic totem pole" than the rest. Personally, I found the original arcade version to be rather repetitive, so how will the Com translation fare?

To conceive of a game more simplistic than Robotron would be quite a feat of the imagination. You control a player sprite than can move and shoot in 8 directions, with the goal of the game to destroy every enemy robot on the screen. As I said, simple. The game area is even restricted to the size of the screen - no "left/right warping" as is common with many other games of its era. To spice things up, the game has several variants of robots to match wits against, as well as the presence of humans that need to be picked up and rescued from the menacing 'bots. The most ingenious aspect of the original arcade standup was the controls. Unlike the familiar joystick & buttons combo, Robotron presented the player with 2 joysticks - one to control the movements of your onscreen avatar, the other to aim your shots by pressing in the appropriate direction. Double hand-eye coordination took some getting used to :)

Robotron: 2084 loses the most in translation of any of the five Williams' titles, if for nothing else but the loss of the second controller for firing. It just isn't the same feel to use the Com's 4 buttons for cardinal firing, and combinations of 2 buttons for the diagonals. Taken upon its own merits, it works; the translation is fun to play, but it ends up feeling like a different game and not a true Robotron conversion. This is, of course, true of every Robotron conversion since the original - no other console translation has given the player the second joystick, so this is at best a nitpick of the reviewer.

A more objective problem with the cartridge, however, is the relative ease of the game. As I recall, the arcade Robotron quickly became impossible to keep up with - after only a handful of "waves", there were so many 'bots on the screen that death was inevitable. On the Com conversion, however, I was finding it fairly easy to stay alive on even the later levels, and that was with me fighting to recall the diagonal combos :) I suppose this relates to potential lagging of the game, with the Com not being able to move the 'bots towards you quick enuf to present a serious threat. Whatever the cause, I found myself racking up scores of 500,000+ points on my first few tries at the game. Fun, but just... different.

The graphics are what to be expected from the game.com system and the initially limited graphics of the arcade Robotron. As with Joust, the sprites seemed a little small comparative to the board size, but the rather large bounding boxes of the enemy sprites seem to make up the difference. Again, what truly shines is the auditory conversion of the title. Does anyone who has ever played Robotron not remember the "dah dah DAH DAH" sound between waves? Well, if you don't remember it, its recreated here to perfection.

SINISTAR

IMO, SiniStar is the pre-eminent golden age arcade game. For what reason, might you ask? Well, I can accredit it all to our chap to the right of my words here. For an example of what made this a truly great game, wander your mouse over his nose and give it a tweak :)

SiniStar starts you off in a small starhip, flying about a starfield which scrolls off in all directions (and which, as I recall, eventually warps back around like the surface of a balloon). There are but three objectives - stay alive, mine asteroids for gems which make "SiniBombs", and use these bombs to destroy the monstrous SiniStar. Staying alive can be a difficult enuf proposition, with the various enemy starships zipping about, taking shots at you and stealing gems as you mine them. This "mining" is accomplished by bombarding nearby asteroids with your ship's guns, knocking the valuable gems loose and eventually fragmenting the asteroid into bits. Mining is your primary function until you've collected enuf SiniBombs to destroy SiniStar, who is slowing building his form up somewhere on the board. The quicker you can gather the bombs, the fewer you'll need to finish off the uncompleted SiniStar.

Gameplay is a fair translation from the arcade, but it has its problems. While accurate in relation to the original, the small size of your ship, enemy ships, and the asteroids make for painful viewing at times. As with the Defender series, there is also the problem of swift motion producing blurry images, as well as a regretable lag in gameplay anytime more than 3 or so artifacts are on the screen. Beyond these problems, a game like SiniStar is just begging for a true 360 degree controller, but the Com's 8 directional control pad just doesn't live up to the challenge.

The only real notable comment about SiniStar's graphics is the smallish size of everything zipping about the screen. With the size and blurring factor added together, the ships might as well have been small circles of squares for all the detail that is apparent. The large sprite of SiniStar itself is a treat, however, made even moreso by the excellent sounds put into the game. One of the first arcade games with true speech, SiniStar managed to frighten with such phrases as "Run, coward!", "Run, run, run!", and the classic "Beware, I live!" These sounds are present in the Com translation, and go a long way in making a mediocre conversion a worthwhile investment.

Ultimately, I cannot fault the designers fully for the flaws present in SiniStar. Without a doubt, this was a title difficult to convert, and easily failed in the process. In all honesty, I probably wouldn't be happy with anything less than a 100% accurate translation - something the Com was destined not to reach. For you SiniStar fans, all I can say is that the audible factor makes this worth checking out.

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