MegaParatrooper!

Published on Game On 02/90

Today on Adventures in 16 Colors I take a look at MegaParatrooper!, a multi-stage game that switches genres so frequently that you spend more time waiting for additional parts to load than playing the actual game. I'm not exaggerating.

That is certainly one of the largest title logos I've come across in a while. It also belongs to one of the worst games I've had the pleasure to review so far. We've officially reached a low point in software that got published on Game On.

But first things first, let's see what MegaParatrooper! has in store for us:

Right, we're on board of a space ship, arriving at Gate 1, and we're expected to FIGHT IN THE SPACE. Apparently, it's really important for us to know what time it is. Let's just nod and not go into detail how interstellar timekeeping works.

Thanks for letting me know, I guess? I assume the game expects me to press the space bar, not literally hack into the vast reaches of cyberspace.

During this message, a short, unobtrusive tune is played. Oddly enough, this is the only part where there's music in the entire game. Otherwise, it's just rumbling ambient noise and the occasional sound effect.

I pressed space, and another message appeared. The game is really playing this fight up, isn't it?

Finally! The game part of MegaParatrooper! is about to start. I just have to press space again...

... and get a GAME OVER within a couple of seconds. Admittedly, I didn't shoot at all, because I wanted to demonstrate what happens if I don't touch the joystick at all.

It's a bit hard to tell what's going on: The player ship is on the left side, and it automatically drifts towards a vertical barrier. The only way to temporarily make it stop moving is to fire shots. Once the ship touches the barrier, it blows up, and after the loss of three lives, the game ends.

Note how, when my ship explodes, all enemies explode as well. Excellent programming there.

The entire sequence doesn't play any sound effects at all. Maybe the creator was going for realism here. There's no sound in space, after all.

Wait, why did the game suddenly switch to German? This is the Game Over message you get if you fail at the shooting part. Let me translate the text here because it's rather inane:

"Your attempt to defeat evil was sadly unsuccessful. You could not convert the Savior of Mankind to the good side. Your mission has failed."

Who is this Savior of Mankind, and why do we have to convert him to our side? I mean, his title already implies that he's with the good guys, doesn't it? Also, what does this have to do with me shooting at enemies flying in sine curves?

Let me try that again, and this time I'll just keep shooting as fast as I can.

Actually, I don't have to be fast at all. I just have to keep the fire button pressed, and the enemy formations get decimated without a shred of a challenge. As the first message implied, every shot automatically counts as a hit, so there is no need to aim. You can see in the above animation that every shot simply explodes in the middle of the right playfield, and one of the enemies just vanishes.
Let me reiterate: All you have to do to win these fights is to keep the fire button pressed. Yes, this game is broken.

But hey, firing a shot actually makes a sound. So much for my realistic physics theory.

This is stage 2, titled "Planets in Front of the Harbor", like some futuristic impressionist painting. I don't quite understand how a space harbor can have entire planets in front of it. Either this harbor is really large, or the planets are extremely small and bunched together unusually close.

Just like in the first stage, keeping the fire button pressed is all that's needed to succeed. Did I mention that this game isn't very good?

And we're back to German for some reason. The message says that you've won this fight, but reaching your goal will take you on a long and arduous journey. You're not providing me with much confidence here, game.

And with that, we've reached Gate 2. I like the surface detail of that moon. It's about the only positive thing I can say about MegaParatrooper! so far. Although I don't see a space harbor, I trust the game that there is some place to land nearby. This part uses the exact same animation as the one seen at Gate 1.

Oh, that's the harbor. We're still in cutscene mode, and I guess we are seeing the ship's approach from the perspective of the space port's surveillance system.

Apparently, the only reason why we went to the harbor was to receive this TELELETTER. Good to know that the future will see a resurgence of dot matrix printers and feed paper. Gotta love that sweet screeching sound of ink getting slowly punched into paper, line by line.

Once again, the game decided to give in to its German side. The message is a bit hard to decipher, because it's written in a very abridged form due to lack of space. Let me try to reconstruct it:

SUBJECT: INFORMATION: FIRING DEVICE MEGABOOST-L9 --- PURPOSE: ANNIHILATION OF PROTECTED, NONSYNTHETIC LIFE FORMS!!! --- TEST POSITIVE: DESTROYS SHIELDS, HIGH FIRING POWER (50MM + FLAMETHROWER KILL9C --- TEST NEGATIVE: BAD WORKMANSHIP. RELOAD TIMES, BLIND SPOTS!! END!

If you can't see what this message has to do with anything, you're not alone. And yes, the closing parenthesis is absent, which aggravates me more than it should. Let's just continue and press space.

Uh, what? Now the game wants me to select a shield! Am I supposed to equip myself, based on the information I received from that teleletter? I assume, that's what the game is trying to tell me with REMIND THE TELEX. Either that, or the telex needs to be reminded to take its pills. Is it too much to ask for MegaParatrooper! to stick to English or German and not just wildly switch between the two on the same freaking screen?

The second selection asks which protective suit I want to put on. There was mention of a flamethrower earlier, so I guess I should go with SPECTRA ASBEST, even though asbestos is not exactly known for being healthy.

I like the fourth option, which essentially translates to Butt Naked V2.

Lastly, I have to grab the appropriate weapon. If I understood the teleletter correctly, then I'm going to encounter a weapon system that also comes with a flamethrower, which probably means it's not susceptible to fire. F5, Cotton Balls, is the obvious comedy option. This leaves me with a choice between F3 (Paratrooper Bazooka) and F7 (RocketMaster GTA). While I don't expect to shoot down military parachutists, the name MegaParatrooper! may or may not imply that this is the intended selection.

Balls.

Oh, just rub it in, will you?

If you press N here, you're unceremoniously dumped back to the C64's BASIC prompt. If you press Y, you're starting from the very beginning. Because that's fun, right?


What I got wrong was the shield selection. You're supposed to go without a shield. The teleletter mentions that the weapon system destroys shields, thus it's apparently a better idea to not equip any at all. Because that totally makes sense.

Thanks, game. I wonder if we're in for another round of keeping the fire button pressed.

Gate 3, already? Did the game just skip the fight entirely? The same cockpit animation is used for the third time here, but with the added bonus of some graphical corruption happening above the gate logo.

It seems we're still in the space harbor, but we're approaching the deeper rooms now. Maybe that's where the epic fight will take place.

Epic!

On second thought, let's not fight. Let's play Snake instead!

This is not a joke. The game expects you to play Snake at this point. Freaking Snake. A very monochromatic, low contrast version of Snake, that feels more like an eyesight test than something remotely enjoyable.

This genre shift is spuriously explained in the documentation for this game, which can be found in Game On's diskmag part: You are supposed to get to the final gate. The only person who can tell you its location is a sailor who wants you to beat his high score in Snake.

The score in the top left doesn't display correctly once you've reached more than 9 points, and you lose a life if you run into the text, as it's treated like an obstacle. The game also doesn't bother to tell you what the sailor's high score is or when you've surpassed it. Through experimentation, I've come to the conclusion that you need to get at least 3000 points, which is borderline ridiculous.

Of course, even the victory condition was implemented in a backward way: You'd expect the Snake part to end on its own once you've reached the required score. But no, you have to kill off your remaining snake lives first, and only then does the game continue to the final gate.

Prepare yourself for the ULTIMATE FIGHT! I hope you brought your stethoscope, as you're going to need it...

... to crack this safe. You weren't expecting an actual fight, were you?

By moving the joystick left and right, you can turn the dial which snaps from number to number with an audible click. The safe emits a louder click and shows a blue line for each number you get right. However, it's not enough to figure out the correct combination, you also need to enter it the right way, or you'll have to start over.

The first number is 9, but it'll only click if you move the dial to the right (which in this case means the dial is counting down from the higher numbers). If you then continue moving the dial to the right, the combination resets, because for the next number you need to go into the opposite direction. This back and forth continues until you've entered all four numbers.

Unfortunately, it's very easy to overshoot a correct number and accidentally reset the combination. There is also a time limit of two minutes which makes the task virtually impossible. Even if you know the combination, it takes 55 seconds to enter it, because there is no way to make the dial turn faster. Guess what happens if the timer reaches 0? You get the Game Over screen and have to start over from the game's very beginning.

The only way to enter the combination in time is to play this part several times and write down the numbers. You need to know when to stop in advance, so you don't overshoot. Even though I doubt anyone in their right mind would want to play this game, I'll provide you with the right combination anyway:

9 (right)
2 (left)
41 (right)
27 (left)

And with that we've opened the safe and completed the game. All we're left to do is to lean back and watch the ending:

...

Hm, a blank screen and nothing is happening? Why is the disk drive's LED blinking? Wait a minute, does this mean what I think it means?

Sure enough, I entered a POKE to change the background color, and the problem revealed itself: The ending part is not on the disk.

What an exceptionally fitting conclusion to a horrible game.



CONCLUSION

I think I'm pretty tolerant when it comes to flawed C64 games, especially when they're intended as budget releases, which includes almost all titles that were published on diskmags. They were usually made by one person or a very small team as hobby projects, not as anyone's full-time job. I can understand how sometimes deadlines and Real Life(tm) can undermine one's intention, and the end product might not come out as well as intended.

But in the case of MegaParatrooper! I have no qualms in calling it one of the worst games I've ever encountered on the C64. None of the playable parts are any fun, and even if you manage to struggle through the whole thing, you're ultimately rewarded with a disk loading error.

I don't remember seeing any letters in subsequent Game On issues where anyone was complaining about this rubbish in software form, but even if the editorial staff received letters to that extent, they probably wouldn't have published them.

Despite my dislike of the game, or maybe even because of it, this blog post turned out longer than intended. Maybe I needed to describe the game's atrocities in detail to get the bad memories out of my system. I think I'm feeling indeed better, and I'm going to play some Bubble Bobble now.