Reaction

Published on Magic Disk 64 04/90

If we want to reduce C64 games to their basic essentials, a lot of them come down to a test of reflexes. Reaction is different. It does the reduction for us in advance and simply presents itself as a pure test of dexterity:

You can't accuse the game of false advertising; what it's about can be found right in its name. Admittedly, the iconography surrounding the title logo may be a bit bewildering. Without wanting to spoil too much, I can already confirm that Reaction does indeed contain stars, moons, balls, arrows, blue windy paths, and a disembodied hand doing thumb signals. Unfortunately, that probably makes the game appear more exciting than it ends up being.

The title screen features a ball hopping across the screen on a colorful, 3D-looking raster bar. I like that the makers put their signatures into the game. They kind of forgot to credit the author of the awesome music that's playing in the background, though: It's The Deadline by Sami "Rock" Seppä, a track that's been featured in a lot of intros, demos, and music collections. As far as I know, this is the only commercially available game that used this piece of music, and I'm not sure if it was done with permission.

In any case, there are no options to configure, so let's just press fire and start playing:

The self-promotion isn't exactly subtle, is it?

The game consists of a labyrinth through which a ball has to roll from start to finish... IN SPACE! You can't control the ball directly, though. Once the level begins, the ball starts rolling automatically at a constant speed. You have to get rid of letters that appear on the path. If the ball collides with one of them, you risk losing a life. The letters indicate how you have to move the joystick in order to make them disappear. U, D, L, R stand for the cardinal directions while B stands for the fire button.

In the above animation you can see me fail after only a couple of letters. The first time the ball gets obstructed, a row of hexagonal tiles appears at the bottom. If you manage to press the fire button when the center tile lights up, you get another chance to continue. I promptly failed that too and got a massive thumbs down in return, accompanied by a somewhat peculiar message: "BAD LUCK, GUY !! REACT MORE QUICKLY TO ENTER NEXT LEVEL !!" The game is sending conflicting signals here, implying that I had a bit of bad luck and that I need to get better at the same time. Also, it seems to think that my name is Guy.

Reaction is oddly picky about when you need to react to each appearing letter. Even if the ball is still quite a distance away from the alphabetical blockade, you have to move the joystick as soon as possible or the obstruction won't go away. Even without that, the game is already quite difficult on the first level. Some letters leave you with less than a second of reaction time, and if you accidentally push the joystick in the wrong direction, you can't correct your input. Which letters you get is randomized, but the obstacles always appear in the same spots at the same time. Thus it's possible to learn a stage with repeated play, at least to some extent.

I have to mention the music again because the track that's playing during this part is also not credited anywhere. It's an excerpt from Markus Schneider's The End. The music gives the simple gameplay a very dramatic feel as if the fate of the whole universe depended on the unobstructed path of this tiny ball.

If you manage to finish the level, you get a thumbs up and the tantalizing promise of a bonus. The bonus game is a simple memory test where you have to move the ball in a given order of directions. If you fail, you thankfully don't lose a life, you just don't get any additional points.

ONE HYPERACTIVE SPRITE There is quite a bit of technical wizardry on display to make the game look like it is taking place in space. The planets and stars whizzing by are exclusively done with sprites. To me, the starfield is the most interesting part, as it uses a trick that I last saw in the Ecstatic Code demo. All the stars you can see on the screen are created by one single sprite that looks like this: Here's a visualization of what's going on during one frame, with the raster illustrated in green and the sprite's position highlighted in blue: While the screen is being drawn (i.e. the raster moves down), the sprite's horizontal position and its color are changed in rapid intervals. This means that the sprite's pixel content gets "smeared" across the screen which makes it possible for a single sprite to occupy a much larger horizontal space. In combination with multiplexing (drawing the same sprite several times on the screen), it is possible to draw an entire starfield with just one sprite. The result can be a bit flickery, but it's still impressive, especially because there's also some consistent parallax scrolling going on.

At this point, I'm already further into the game than I ever got as a kid. Not because the first level was too hard for me, but for the same reason I couldn't play Space Ace. On my original C64, Reaction looks like this:

Since I couldn't see the joystick prompts, it was virtually impossible for me to make any progress. Now that I'm replaying the game via emulator, I actually get to see the stages for the first time.

That's basically all there is to the game, as there are no new gameplay elements introduced later on. The difficulty very quickly goes beyond my gaming capabilities, thus I soon had to rely on emulator features to reach the later stages. Instead of going through each level individually, I made a compilation of the first ten stages:

That's quite an interesting mix of levels, some of them representing real-life objects, like joysticks and booze.

WHAT THE HEX Level 10 features a bug that I've already encountered in at least two other games on this blog. Take a look at the level indicator in the bottom right: Yeah, that doesn't look right. This is a sprite whose bitmap data gets updated dynamically. The pixel information for the numbers is stored in memory like a normal font: Notice the characters that come right after the numbers... If we arrive at level 08, the bitmap data for '0' and '8' gets copied into the sprite before the stage starts. Something goes wrong when we reach level 10, though: In hexadecimal, 10 is 0A. The level indicator is apparently trying to display the number in hex, but instead of showing an 'A', the code instead chooses to take the character that follows after the '9' in the font data. That happens to be, you guessed it, the colon. And thus it'll continue displaying weird characters until it will go past 0F (decimal 15) where the number will finally wrap to hex 10 (dec 16).

Here are the next ten levels, confusingly numbered 0; to 14:

Looking at that brown, deformed boot from level 11 makes me feel deeply uncomfortable for reasons I can't fully express. However, I approve very much of the levels displaying (now) obsolete technology, like floppy disks and cassette tapes. It's like a time capsule of what was on the designer's mind.

Evidently, not only the level indicator got confused; the stage that grandly advertises itself as LEVEL 20 is actually level 21. Whoops.

On the other hand, level 30 not only gets its number right (if we ignore the indicator stuck in hex mode), it is also the final stage of the game. I tried to give it a go at normal speed and predictably failed after only a few joystick prompts. I was ready for another try, but at that moment the game decided my failed attempt was good enough and declared the level to be completed. Huh.

So, what do I get for finishing Reaction?

A message congratulating me for reaching the top spot in the high score list. Oh well. At least the game stopped calling me Guy.

Wait a minute, I have been deceived! I didn't make it to the top, I only got to fourth place! What is this postgame bamboozle?

Also, those scores seem unreasonably high to me. I finished the game and I only got about half as many points as the first place. Admittedly, I started failing the bonus game quite a few times in the later stages, but still.



CONCLUSION

Reaction does what it says right in the title and wraps the gameplay in a nicely presented package. Sadly, the difficulty curve is too steep for me. If I try to play the game legitimately, I can barely get beyond the second level. I don't know if I should fault the game for that, or if that's just me getting old and slow. I can't even tell if I had performed better as a kid, as I was unable to play the game on my original C64.

There is no password system, so if you run out of lives, you have to start from the beginning. The only way I could show off all the stages here was by playing through the game in an emulator running at half speed.

On the technical side, Reaction is quite impressive. Despite the simple gameplay that would've worked with an almost completely static screen, this game wants to show off its visual muscles by having an ultra-fast parallax-scrolling starfield in the background.

The music selection is fine. Two of the four tracks are by Clemens Langowski, one of the game's original authors, and the other two are by Sami "Rock" Seppä and Markus Schneider, neither of whom are credited anywhere in the game.

Probably my favorite part of Reaction is the sometimes refreshingly goofy design of the various levels. The author could've created abstract labyrinths for the entire game. Instead, he used the paths as a somewhat crude drawing tool. It's not often that I encounter a game featuring a stage that looks like an accordion.


It took me almost 30 years to finish this game. Sure, I could've played it earlier when C64 emulators had become a viable thing, but Reaction never struck me as a classic that I needed to revisit. I'm glad that I got to see the stages, but apart from that there isn't much meat to the game. It's a test of reflexes, and it gets hard very quickly. If that appeals to you, give it a go.