No Mercy (Preview)

Published on Magic Disk 64 12/89

No Mercy is an Operation Wolf clone whose most defining trait is how much of an Operation Wolf clone it is. To its credit, it's a very competent clone, in some points even better than Operation Wolf's C64 port. I never saw the full version of the game (released on Golden Disk 64 07/90) at any kiosks, so I only ever got to play the preview version which consisted of one level.

Operation Wolf was an arcade game released by Taito in 1987. It's a side-scrolling shooting gallery that uses a mounted gun as an optical controller. You point and shoot at stuff on the screen and throw the occasional grenade. Getting shot or shooting friendly targets, such as civilians or nurses, increases your injury meter. If the meter is full, you're dead. Your ammunition is limited, but you can restock it (in classic video game logic) by shooting ammo containers and animals.

The game was ported to several consoles and home computer platforms by Ocean. The C64 conversion was quite decent and one of the few games that supported the use of a mouse.

Anyway, on to No Mercy (Preview). The game doesn't bother to hide its inspiration at all. Just compare Operation Wolf's cover art to No Mercy's intro screen:

Totally not Dolph Lundgren from Red Scorpion

Spot the non-difference!

The title logo is in a very similar style to that of Operation Wolf, and the guy looks almost identical to the soldier shooting to the left in the original artwork. I say almost, because the proportions in No Mercy's version are a bit all over the place. Nice dithering, though.

Note that the Operation Wolf artwork seen in the above advertisement was created specifically for Ocean's home ports. The original arcade has different art, both on the arcade machine and the flyers. I think it's safe to say that No Mercy's creators were more familiar with the C64 conversion and used it as the main inspiration.

Here's the title screen with a nifty effect in the main logo. From the technical prowess shown throughout the game, you can kind of tell that the game was created largely by (demo/cracker) scene members.

Allow me to geek out a bit over how this scrolling effect was achieved: The gray landscape is done with a stripe of sprites. Although it looks like they are moving, I think they are actually static. Instead, their bitmap information is constantly cycled. The entire stripe repeats after 192 pixels which is exactly the length of 8 sprites (8 * 24). Unobstructed by the logo, the stripe looks like this: Notice how the entire front part of the logo uses four colors (cyan, light blue, blue, black). Now take a look at the parts where the scrolling landscape is obscured by the blue foreground graphics. Notice how these areas only use two colors (cyan and dark blue)? There is a reason for that, and it's got to do with how the priority of sprites and bitmap graphics works. It's possible to give text/bitmap graphics priority so they always appear in front of sprites. However, text/bitmap graphics consist of background and foreground colors. Background colors always appear behind sprites, regardless of priority. In multicolor mode (which the blue logo is using), the first two colors ("00" & "01") count as background and the other two ("10" & "11") as foreground. That is why the NO MERCY logo has no light blue in the areas where sprites are moving behind, because light blue is defined as a background color ("01"), along with black ("00"). Actually, if you look closely at the animated GIF, you can see some stray light blue pixels in the logo that occasionally get obstructed by the sprites. For example, there's two in the letter R. This is also how you can tell that the sprites themselves aren't moving. If they were, you'd see them poking out of the bitmap graphics on the left and right side, because light blue is used almost immediately. But to say the sprites don't move at all isn't true either. If you take another look at the animation, you can maybe see that the sprites actually move one pixel per frame, meaning their elongated multicolor pixels are positioned "between" the bitmap graphic pixels every second frame. The sprites are moved one pixel to the left every frame, and then back one pixel to the right every other frame, and then their bitmap data is scrolled instead (by two pixels, which equals one elongated multicolor pixel). Many recent demos created for the C64 feature amazing effects that leave me with no idea how they are done. It's a very rare occasion when I can reconstruct an effect just from looking at it, so please excuse my nerdy excitement.

As much as I like that scrolling background, its gray landscape raises some questions. Does the game take place on the moon? Is that why Saturn is so clearly visible? Let's find out!

Well, he's not wearing a space suit. In fact, he looks quite different to the person seen in the intro earlier. Judging by his squished hand, he at least shares some similar anatomical disproportions. Speaking of similarities, both No Mercy and Operation Wolf use the same Uzi submachine gun as their main weapon.

Pressing fire puts you right into this not very moon-like jungle environment. This is the second level from the full version. As is common with shooting gallery games, the screen scrolls horizontally at a slow but steady pace. All you can do is move the crosshair around and shoot anything down before it can shoot you.

As far as I can tell, there is no mouse support in No Mercy, so you have to make do with controlling the crosshair with the joystick. This isn't much of a problem, though, because the difficulty is low enough that you don't need the added flexibility of a mouse. Besides, the percentage of C64 owners who also had a mouse in 1989 was probably negligible.

It doesn't take long for the first enemies to appear, promptly delivered by this military river craft. The soldiers are nice enough to arrange themselves in a neat row, so you can just move your crosshair horizontally to mow them down. Firing the gun makes a satisfying "ratatat!" sound and causes the Uzi at the bottom to light up, which is a nice touch.

Another nice touch is the Uzi's location on the screen, namely in the lower border area. The C64 has a screen resolution of 320x200 pixels, but around that area is a border which is just a single color and can't be used for anything else. There are tricks to fool the graphics chip into thinking that it has already started drawing the border when in fact it isn't drawing the border at all. In No Mercy's case, the vertical border was disabled this way, allowing for the sky color to go right to the top of the screen. The Uzi consists of several sprites that were moved "off screen", but thanks to the disabled border, they're still visible.

If you're not fast enough, the enemies soon start piling up on the screen and deplete your energy at a rapid pace. The No Mercy logo below the energy bar flashes red when you are getting shot, which can be helpful in situations where you haven't spotted the enemies yet.

The guy standing in the foreground hurts quite a bit, so it's a good idea to get rid of him sooner rather than later. I usually shoot him in the crotch, because that just happens to be the same height where the dude in the river is located. I remember my younger cousin being highly amused by this when I showed him the game in 1990.

That helicopter can take a lot of hits before it blows up, thus it's advisable to launch a rocket grenade at it which destroys the chopper instantly. Rockets are fired by pressing space. This is a bit awkward if you're holding the joystick in both hands, but it's a necessary evil, as the C64 only supports one-button controllers.

Ammo and rocket grenades are limited, but you can get additional supplies by shooting the icons that sometimes appear at the bottom of the playfield. Occasionally, you also get to scoop up a medipack that refills part of your energy.

No Mercy's gameplay is a bit simplified in comparison to Operation Wolf. There are no friendly targets that you're not supposed to shoot. There are also no animals or objects in the scenery that give extra ammo or points when hit, at least not in the preview version.

You quickly learn to hate these speedboat-riding, gun-toting show-offs. Not only because they shoot at you in this egregiously nonchalant drive-by style, but because they eat away at your energy faster than almost anything else. Getting rid of them should be the top priority.

Actually, once this ship creeps into view, destroying its turret becomes even topper priority. If you take too long, the turret turns into your direction and then starts firing at you at regular intervals, each shot taking off a considerable chunk of your energy meter.

Survive long enough, and you eventually reach the end of the level. At that point, the screen stops scrolling and the final enemy glides into view. The big level end boss is a tiny guy on a physics-defying speedboat. Even though it slows down and soon comes to a standstill, the vessel remains tilted like this. I guess the boss, in typical villain fashion, loaded the boat's rear with bars of gold.

There isn't much of a strategy for defeating the final boss. Just aim and press fire until the speedboat explodes. If you have a spare rocket grenade, you can simply launch one and destroy the boss in an instant:

And that's the end of the preview. While the full version would load the next stage at that point, the preview just restarts the same level. Interestingly enough, your score carries over and your energy meter and ammo reserves get refilled to some extent. If you feel so inclined, you can replay the level over and over. Eventually, you'd reach more than 99,999 points and then would get to see how the score display handles numbers with more than five digits. I leave this as an exercise for you, the reader, as I can't really be bothered to play through the same level 15 times in a row.

Actually, I just tried it, and this is the result:

Oh.

Why does 100100 appear as :0100? For that you need to look at PETSCII, the C64's version of the ASCII table. This table lists all characters the C64 can display in order, so that each character gets a unique byte value. The character 'A', for example, has the byte value 65. '8' is 56, while '9' is 57. See where this is going? Guess what character lurks behind 58! It's everyone's favorite, the colon. The way the score is displayed assumes that each of the five digits will be a value from 0 to 9 (displayed as PETSCII characters 48-57). Once the score reaches 100000, the leftmost "digit" becomes 10, which throws the routine for a loop and makes it go for the next PETSCII code in line after '9' which is ':'. I played a bit further to reach a score of 110000, and ':' turned into ';'. The semicolon's PETSCII code is 59 and comes right after the colon.

;0100? Eh, good enough. I'll enter my initials anyway.

Um... okay, then. Apparently, in a last bout of confusion, the game awarded me with one additional point after I had entered my name and got to the high score table screen. At least it still recognizes ;0101 as a higher number than 01940.

CONCLUSION

No Mercy (Preview) is quite entertaining for a couple of minutes. It's a good preview for the full version, where the other seven stages are variations of the same principle. To me, the game makes a smoother, more polished impression than Operation Wolf's C64 port. The art is well done overall, despite the occasional anatomical mishap.

Replay value is a bit limited, as the enemy placement is exactly the same each time, and there are no difficulty settings. That didn't stop me from playing the preview over and over until I had memorized the entire level, though.

The music, done by Markus Schneider, is great. I'm especially fond of the ending tune, which isn't used in the preview. Instead, it plays in the diskmag part of Magic Disk 64 12/89 on which this preview was published. If you want to have a listen, I made a video on YouTube:

What surprises me the most about this game is that it was published in Germany first and foremost. The one country that was (and still is, to some extent) notoriously known for regularly taking violent games virtually off the market.

The BPjM (or BPjS, as it was called in 1989), is a German federal agency whose function is to examine media and, if deemed harmful to young people, put them on the so-called index. Any media on the index are to be made unavailable to minors. For a game this means it cannot be sold to minors, nor can it be openly shown in a shop. What's more, it is not allowed to advertise any indexed games. This caused numerous problems with the games press, where the BPjM argued that reviewing or even mentioning such games could be interpreted as advertising. Some magazines started to give indexed games slightly altered names whenever they mentioned them (e.g. "Operation Sowieso"). In one instance, this led to an entire issue of a games magazine to be confiscated because it featured a review of Quake II. To give you an idea what was regarded as being too brutal in the past, here's a brief, non-exhaustive list of C64 titles that were put on the index: Blue Max, River Raid, Battlezone, Commando, Green Beret, Operation Wolf, Gryzor, Golden Axe, Shadow Dancer. It is possible for games to eventually get removed from the index, if their violence level isn't seen as harmful anymore. This happened with the original Doom back in 2011 when Bethesda appealed for its removal.

Nowadays, No Mercy looks rather tame. There is no blood, and shot enemies either explode or simply lie down and disappear. But back then, it was very close to Operation Wolf's level of violence.

While Operation Wolf was already on the German index in 1989, No Mercy never shared the same fate, as far as I know. My guess is that it just went under the radar of the BPjS for the limited time it was available at kiosks.