Timezone is an action/exploration game inspired by Activision's 1984 classic H.E.R.O. (from here on referred to as HERO because those extra periods mess with my punctuation sensitivities). I played this game a lot, thus I have quite a bit to say about it. Please excuse the occasional lack of structure and if I sometimes ramble on a bit too much.
Also, I have a confession to make: I only ever completed the game years later when I started replaying it on an emulator and made use of save states. For shame! With that out of the way, let's take a look at Timezone:
The game starts up with a snazzily animated intro accompanied by a short but catchy tune that plays on a loop. Several pages of text explain the backstory and gameplay elements.
Incidentally, the game is set in the distant future of 2017, which is the same year I'm writing this article on my thought-driven holographic multiphase computer. Anyway, Timezone's plot goes like this:
Kate Jones, inventor extraordinaire, tests her latest contraption, the Timeblaster, a device that allows her to jump to other solar systems in mere seconds. During her exploration of the remote planet Zynox, her invention gets mysteriously dismantled into eight parts which are then scattered throughout the caverns of an expansive cave system.
The backstory provides no explanation as to why this happened, so I'll just make up my own right here: Clearly, the quantum singularity inside the Timeblaster shifted out of sync with repeated use, and this caused an unintended teleportation-aftershock. Like a faint echo, the effect sent parts of the Timeblaster to random locations, but luckily just within the nearby area.
Yeah, I've watched too much Star Trek.
In any case, Kate has just a few hours left to find all parts and reassemble her invention before she either runs out of oxygen or the planet's heat melts off her space suit.
As mentioned in the intro text, pressing the arrow left key starts loading the game. This happens in a rather ungraceful manner with the music getting stuck on whatever notes it was playing last and the screen starting to flash erratically for a minute. You can see an abridged version of this here (warning: flashing lights).
The first couple of times I tried starting the game, this loading routine made me think something was wrong with the program, and I reset the computer prematurely. In December 1989 I was still new to the C64 and didn't know that loading screens often looked like garbled messes.
The game's title screen looks similar to the intro, but instead of music, a low, ominous rumble is playing. I always interpreted this as distant underground tremors that could be heard in the game's cave system.
A gentle push of the joystick's fire button provokes a comical plopping sound and throws you right into the caverns. Kate Jones has a jetpack that allows her to move freely in all directions. Her mobility comes at the cost of safety, though, for her means of transportation apparently runs on nitroglycerin. If she so much as brushes against a background pixel, her sprite evaporates in an equally pretty and violent-looking explosion.
Luckily, Kate recovers from such incidents almost immediately and respawns at the spot where she previously entered the current screen. The game provides an unlimited amount of lives, but each death costs some oxygen. The game only ends in a Game Over when Kate either runs out of air or if she can't find the eight Timeblaster pieces within four hours. This is similar to Epyx's Impossible Mission (1984) where each death resulted in some time loss.
Kate's helmet not only prevents her from suffocating, it also has a sweet head cannon built into it which essentially gives her laser eyes.
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| pew pew pew |
This is her main weapon against the bizarre wildlife that inhabits the cave system. While it is very similar to the helmet laser in HERO, it doesn't shoot a constant beam. Instead, each fire button press spawns a shot that travels until it collides with something in the world or reaches the end of the screen. Also, there are no walls in Timezone that can be destroyed with the use of weapons.
Something else the game shares with HERO is Kate's ability to stand and walk on even ground.
Although her walking speed is slow, it is sometimes helpful to walk, especially when there are enemies flying close to the ground and you're trying to get past them.
Off the ground, Kate is very easy to control, as neither gravity nor inertia affects her movement. She can hover anywhere, and she immediately flies in any direction you point her to. Her vertical speed is slightly slower than her horizontal movement, which can make some parts a bit tricky to maneuver.
At the start of each new game, the following pickup items are placed semi-randomly in the world:
Eight invention parts: You have to find them all in order to complete the game. The strange design of these always fascinated me. This is all you ever get to see of the Timeblaster, as the game never shows you Kate's invention in its assembled state.
Three oxygen units: Each unit extends Kate's oxygen supply by three cylinders. She starts out with six cylinders, so finding all of the extra units considerably improves her chance to survive.
Four keycards: The cards are color-coded and open the corresponding doors. They faintly remind me of the chips found on credit cards, except in the game they are about the size of a human torso. I question the practicality of this kind of locking system, unless these cards were designed for much larger lifeforms.
Six box units: These strange containers unlock certain functions, like access to the Zynox Electronic Network (ZEN), which is the planet's equivalent of the Internet but with all the fun stuff taken out. More on that later.Timezone is largely a non-linear game that allows you to freely explore the caverns. The colored doors act as a gating mechanism, and since the placement of the keycards is randomized, the ideal route through the cave system is slightly different with each playthrough. I must say, for a C64 game, and a budget title at that, Timezone has a lot of features and feels quite complex.
Similar to HERO, the game doesn't scroll, instead it flips from one screen to another when you reach an edge. Timezone consists of 221 screens, or caves, as the game refers to them. There is no automap, so you either need a solid sense of direction or don't mind getting lost on occasion. Despite my initial plans not to invest time into putting together a map, I did so anyway. I silently hoped to find a secret hidden in the cave system, but I don't think there is one. Click on the image to see the map in full resolution.
The SHAFT labels I added to four rooms denote locations where you have to battle the dark priest - wait, wrong game. They denote gates that close off two long (ventilation?) shafts. In order to remove the gates, you need to find two of the six box units. The first unit gives you the shaft code, which is a random combination of four letters and numbers. When you find the second unit, you gain access to the ZEN computer.
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| The latest in 2017 technology! |
Here you can enter the shaft code (if you can remember it) and thus open both shafts in the cave system. The computer has some additional functions, like displaying your remaining oxygen tanks or the cave number of your current location. In a fit of completionism, I also added all the cave numbers to the map.
 When 256 Is Not 256If you look at the map image, the top left cave isn't numbered 1, but 256. Since there are only 221 caves in total, this numbering seems rather weird and out of place. Now, consider the following:
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ZEN's option to "TAKEOFF FOR EARTH" only works once you've found all eight parts of the Timeblaster. It concludes the game with an end screen and a brief congratulatory text which unfortunately doesn't go any further into the established backstory. Let me take this opportunity to just come up with my own ending:
Upon finding the last piece of her invention, Kate Jones immediately starts reassembling the Timeblaster. This is an intricate and slow process where any mistake could result in a transporter malfunction that would make the one shown in The Fly look like a paper cut. Due to her dwindling oxygen supplies, she soon has to throw all caution to the wind and just put the thing together without any time for double-checking.
Her suit is already starting to visibly disintegrate when she finally attaches the last component and steps into the Timeblaster. Holding her breath, she hits the activation switch and promptly explodes into a million particles. The End.
I'm kidding, she arrives safely back on Earth and becomes a millionaire when the oil industry buys her invention and keeps it under lock and key for decades. The End.
So much for the game's features, but how does it actually play? The controls are responsive and allow for swift maneuvering through the caverns. Even though the player sprite explodes a lot, the instant respawn takes the sting off death. Doing away with a limited amount of lives was definitely the right design decision for this game.
As mentioned before, the game doesn't scroll but switches from one screen to another. A lot of games did this back then, but Timezone incorporated a rather unique idea into this feature: Depending on the side from where you enter a screen, the enemies that appear can change drastically. E.g. in one room you can get swarmed by flying saucers as soon as you enter from the top, but if you enter from the bottom, the same screen features only a slowly turning cannon. Or sometimes you fly through an empty corridor, only to realize that the next screen is a dead end, and when you return to the previous screen, the game suddenly throws angry spark plugs at you.
If you know the cave layout well, you can use this to your advantage by navigating rooms in a way that gives you easier to avoid enemies.
The flip-screen nature of the game never bothered me at all. On the contrary, it made each cave feel like a contained challenge. Speaking of which, when I played Timezone for the first time it didn't take me long to hit a massive roadblock. Behold Cave #094:
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| My Pièce de Résistance |
This was my Veni, Vidi, Vici long before VVVVVV existed. And it was only one screen. You discover this location very early in the game. In fact, if you just go to the left from the starting point, you end up right here. The only way to continue is to navigate past that ball-spouting pipe without touching any of its projectiles and then either exit down the bottom or to the left.
Oh, boy. 28 years later it's really hard for me to pinpoint why I had so much trouble getting through this screen. One factor probably was that the player sprite moves much slower vertically than horizontally. So while you're trying to escape the screen by slowly flying down to the bottom exit, an errant ball could hit you at any time. Another factor certainly was simple inexperience. I was still new to playing computer games at the time, and I didn't possess the required coordination yet. Or maybe I just had a crappy joystick, which sounds like the oldest excuse in the book. Whatever the reason, I died at least 50 times before I finally managed to get past this screen.
This made me furious. Not outright throwing-my-joystick-across-the-room furious, but tiny me was pretty pissed off and wanted to break something. Unbeknownst to me, this experience was somewhat prophetic for the future games I would encounter on German diskmags during the next couple of years: A lot of them would look and sound very slick and polished, but the gameplay would turn out to be an arduous exercise in frustration.
Now, I'm not saying Timezone is bad and shouldn't be played. Quite the opposite. Despite my past grievances, I think it is still worth a try today. To make screenshots I had another go at the game, and it made me appreciate its strengths. Admittedly, the fond memories I have of the game probably stem less from how it plays and more from the world it painted in my head.
This leads me to Timezone's graphics which held me in awe when I first started playing. At the time the majority of games I had encountered on my C64 were older titles like River Raid, Frogger, or Blue Max. Those were certainly fine to play, but graphically they showed their age.
Along came Timezone with its striking mixture of technology and natural elements, all wrapped in lovely color ramps. I didn't exactly notice the latter, as I had a monochrome monitor, but even in shades of green it still looked all pretty spiffy.
I loved how the background objects were just there without any context. Most of them didn't look like anything familiar to me, so I could only guess at their function. Here are some of them, along with my (mostly made-up) explanations as to what purpose they serve:
It always bothered me a bit that the glass dome isn't perfectly circular.
I swear I've seen something very similar in an eighties sci-fi movie, possibly in Aliens or Blade Runner. As far as I remember, it was even larger than it is depicted here.
On your way through the cave system you come across more of these, all of them completely harmless (as long as you don't touch them). And then, when you least expect it, you become a witness of this structure's true, vile purpose when it starts shooting bubbles at you. Bubbles not of the soapy fun kind, but more of the deadly kablooey type.
Note how the tower cunningly reuses the glass dome from earlier, but with a spinny thing in its center instead of a glowy thing.
For some reason, these pillars have become my main association with Timezone. I like their metallic, segmented look and the clever use of black. In fact, I like them so much, I repurposed them as part of the background graphics for the music videos I'm posting on YouTube as an aside to this blog.
UPDATE: I have since realized that this pillar (as well as a few other graphical elements) was lifted from Firebird's IO - Into Oblivion (1988). Please take my praise for Timezone's graphics with a grain of salt, as I hadn't known about the pilfered artwork when I wrote this article.
For the longest time I didn't know that this thing actually had a purpose. It's one of the four gates that lock off access to the two shafts. As soon as you find the shaft code and enter it in ZEN, they disappear.
Their true function is probably something boring like pneumatic delivery.
Not only the background graphics had my imagination racing, the enemy design was also quite unique:
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| Spark plugs, alien eggs! |
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| Flying saucers, auto turrets! |
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| And whatever that thing on the left is! |
The enemies not only look like beings from another world, their behavior is outlandish as well. They never actively pursue the player, instead, they just fly/walk/hop along their paths without any regard for obstacles.
This totally breaks Timezone's scoring system, as you get points for destroyed enemies regardless if you shot them or if they just flew into a wall. Since they all seem to be intent on killing themselves, stuff like this happens a lot:
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| A case where AI stands for Absent Intelligence. |
If you want to amass a lot of points, just stay in a room with an endless flow of enemies and let them fly into obstacles over and over. This way you can easily reach 400,000 points. You'll run out of air eventually, but the top place on the high score table will be yours. Not that it matters much; the scores are not saved to disk anyway.
Markus Schneider and Jens Blidon are credited (as "Lords of Sonics") for creating sound effects and music for the game. No music is playing during the game, all you can hear are the enemies' noises and the sound of your head cannon. Caves without enemies remain completely silent, except for the occasional "pffprbst!" if you manage to crash into a wall.
I always got the impression that a conscious effort was made in Timezone to create unique-sounding effects, especially for the enemies. They give off noises that remind me of insects, only more mechanical. Now that I think of it, this actually fits quite well with their appearances and erratic flying patterns.
The game's only music track is a short loop that's being played during the introduction where you can read the backstory and instructions. Curiously, there is no title music and no ending tune either.
Years later I found Timezone's SID file in the High Voltage SID Collection, and to my surprise it contained an unused music track that was an extended version of the intro tune. To be more precise, the unused track was most likely the original music which was then shortened for the intro. In any case, it's awesome and quite a pity it wasn't used in the game at all. If you want to take a listen, I've uploaded an emulated recording of the track on my YouTube channel:
CONCLUSION
Timezone can be a frustrating experience at times, and there is quite a list of misgivings I have about it:
Some screens require pure luck to get through, in many cases because enemies just keep swarming in at random. Since there are no invincibility frames when you respawn, you can immediately die again if an enemy happens to be at your spawn point. Sometimes the collision detection bugs out and makes the player sprite explode immediately after respawning, even though there's nothing to collide with. In rare cases, you can even get locked into constantly exploding until you've run out of oxygen.
But despite these flaws, I consider Timezone to be one of the better games that ever got released on Magic Disk 64. It is actually fun to play, and while its difficulty is quite high, it remains within achievable range. That is if you are patient enough to accept some Game Overs until you are familiar enough with the cave layout.
The graphics and sounds are a significant part why this game has stuck with me until today. You get a glimpse into an alien world that remains largely unexplained, a brief impression that acts as a catalyst for your imagination. Maybe not so much nowadays, but when I was eleven, this had quite an impact.
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