Ryshka

Published on Game On 06/90

Vertical shooters belong to my favorite video game genres whose classics I still revisit regularly. There is just something uniquely satisfying about blowing up various enemies raining down from the top of the screen while having to weave through an onslaught of bullets.

It's a pity, then, that the first vertical shooter featured on Adventures in 16 Colors isn't very good. Say hello to Ryshka:

The loading screen looks quite promising and comes with an energetic music track. I'm not a big fan of the messy dithering in the background. Errant pixels are floating around everywhere as if a massive explosion had occurred just moments earlier and spewed a massive cloud of particles into the air. Even the pilot's helmet looks as if it is about to disintegrate. I also have a hard time parsing the rest of his body. Is that gray/blue mass below the helmet supposed to be his shoulders? If so, he must be in a very uncomfortable pose. Maybe he's performing some awesome flight trick which currently pushes his entire body into the floor?

The logo below makes the common (or deliberate) mistake of using the Cyrillic Я as a backwards R. But hey, at least it forms a nice symmetry with the A at the end. If you are curious about the name, here's my take on what it means: In Swedish, Ryska stands for Russian (the language), and that's what this game is going for, if the hammer and sickle didn't already make it obvious.

Also, is that saying "THE TALE" in small, gray letters in the bottom right? If so, there is no backstory attached to the game, at least none that I know of. The corresponding article in Game On's magazine doesn't elaborate on the game's plot. Instead, it tries its darndest to downplay the fact that they packed a "violent" military shooter onto the disk. Germany was a bit touchy in that regard, seeing how River Raid and Blue Max got onto the index because they apparently glorified war.

The blue Elite logo in the top left corner is the most confusing bit to me. It looks like it might refer to Elite Systems, a software publisher that was known for its numerous home computer conversions of arcade games, among them Capcoms's 1942. But as far as I know, there is no relation. Maybe it was wishful thinking by the creators to be picked up by Elite.

Okay, I think I've waffled long enough about the loading screen. Let's continue:

The title screen features a larger version of the logo along with some Soviet imagery in the back. The music stands out for running at breakneck speed and making very aggressive use of digitized drum samples. It is quite the experience, and I mean that in a positive way. You can listen for yourself here:

It seems to me that the people credited here only ever worked on this game. It's a bit hard to tell, as they didn't use their full names. The musician, Bo "Bodil" Mellberg, at least made some additional SID tunes, but none of his music appeared in other games.

But enough about that, there is a game waiting to be started!

A brief jingle plays and then gets replaced by a nicely filtered engine sound as the jet accelerates and lifts off the runway at the last moment. The game does a good job depicting an airfield with a couple of hangars. Naturally, the scale is off, but I don't expect realism in a vertical shooter anyway. Please excuse the somewhat jerky scrolling in the above animation. I had to remove half of the frames to reduce the file size. The game runs much smoother than what you can see here.

The first flying enemies are three jets that approach from the right and rapidly fly across the screen. If you don't take evasive maneuvers, you'll collide and explode with one of them. This first encounter already reveals one of the game's biggest flaws:

ASPECTS OF ARCADE CONVERSIONS On home computers, a lot of vertical shooters required converting to a different aspect ratio, as players could not be expected to turn their monitors sideways just to emulate the verticality of the arcade machines. Arcade conversions either made the playfield vertical by only using part of the screen (and sometimes displaying a large HUD on the side) or they used the entire width and changed the levels to account for the different view format. I always found the latter a bit weird, as if the gameplay and the technical execution stood in direct conflict with each other. That said, most arcade conversions on the C64 ended up with a different aspect ratio, probably because there was concern that players would be annoyed if the game was restricted to only a part of the screen estate. One of the few exceptions to this was Toaplan's Flying Shark from 1987, converted to the C64 by Firebird in the same year. To the right you can see a direct comparison. While the aspect is still not precisely the same, it is at least close enough that the original level layout could be maintained.

Ryshka is a good showcase for an inappropriate aspect ratio that fights against the player: Many of the game's enemy formations rely on the fact that Ryshka is a vertical scrolling shooter using a 2:1 landscape playfield. If opponents come from the side, you won't be able to shoot them unless they decide to fly further up. Same story with enemies appearing at the top of the screen when they are on the opposite side from where you are. Your jet simply moves too slowly to allow for fancy dogfights.

The game's first thirteen attack formations are exclusively planes entering from the sides. This seems like a bad way to start a vertical shooter.

In some ways, Ryshka is more similar to Namco's Xevious, the genre's archetype: Not only can you shoot down air targets, you can also drop bombs to destroy enemy units on the ground. Since a regular C64 joystick only has one button, you have to hold fire for a second and then release it to trigger a bomb. There is no crosshair to help you gauge the bomb's point of impact, so you just have to get used to how far the projectile flies ahead. In the above screenshot, I just exploded one of the tanks. The road was only wide enough for one war machine anyway.

Oh look, we finally get a different attack formation! Even though these planes fly diagonally, they're not much easier to shoot or evade than the previous waves. If you find yourself in a situation like shown above, all you can do is dodge to the side and hope your jet moves fast enough.

What may look like an image straight out of a Magic Eye book is, in fact, the first occurrence of enemies that attack from the top of the screen. These are also the first opponents that don't just fly in a fixed formation. While their downward movement is constant, they try to home in on your position by moving sideways. Luckily, that makes them pretty easy to shoot down. Even if you don't hit all of them, they're moving slow enough that you can still dodge any remaining planes.

The shooting is a bit peculiar, as it only allows for one player shot to be on the screen at a time. That means your plane's fire frequency can change drastically depending on if you're hitting something or not. Also, your bullets are not particularly well visible against the background. I just fired a shot in the above image. Try to guess where it is.

And here's where Ryshka shows off the other major gripe I have with the game: Enemy bullets move in a needlessly erratic fashion and constantly blink in and out of existence. It's the complete antithesis to almost every good shooter in existence, where projectiles are clearly visible and move smoothly across the screen. I had to replay this sequence several times to realize those bullets had come from the tanks.

Here's the first level's mid-boss, a large plane that shoots quantum popcorn at the player. Just look at the crazy trajectories of those bullets! Good luck dodging these.

There is a technical reason why bullets were implemented like this: In order to keep within the C64's limit of eight sprites, only one sprite was reserved for enemy bullets. Thus, if there are several bullets on the screen at once, the sprite alternates between them from frame to frame, thus causing this flickery mess.

I don't think the plane is on the screen long enough for you to shoot it down (if it even can be destroyed at all). After a short while, the boss loses interest and just leaves.

Shortly afterward, the end boss makes its appearance. It's a giant... turret? Missile silo? Whatever it is, it doesn't do much. It just sits there and occasionally shoots blinking bullets at you. If you manage to hit it with a bomb, it explodes, but you can also just fly past the installation without any repercussions.

And with that, the first level is completed. The plane automatically lands on the airstrip and the unexplained mission goal is considered to be accomplished. I imagine it involves reaching the Soviet border to deliver some Top Secret information about Tetris.

The second level takes place in a harbor area and changes the background's tileset and color scheme accordingly. The game does not access the disk between levels, so both graphic sets are held in memory.

This stage's first enemies are two large boats that can only be destroyed with bombs. They don't hesitate hurling wobbly bullets at you that move significantly faster than the ones in the first level.

Next up are choppers whose sprites look a bit messy due to the rotors being a smear of black and white pixels. They move in formation, but they're pretty slow and usually do not constitute much of a threat.

As these large battleships scroll into view, Ryshka starts resembling the 19xx series of games more and more. Graphically, this is one of the game's highlights. There are even animated turrets on the ships, but for some reason, they do not shoot at the player. Maybe some peace treaty got signed in the meantime and nobody thought of telling me.

This level's mid-boss is the same as the previous one, except that it's green instead of brown. It's again advisable to just dodge its bullets, as it can't be shot down anyway.

And here's the second stage's end boss. Surprise, it's identical to the first level's. Since I already knew where it would spawn, I made sure to greet the turret/silo with a bomb before it could even get on the screen completely. It still managed to fire a bullet at me. Sneaky little war machine!

Thus concludes the second mission. The plane lands on the airstrip and you get celebrated as a hero with fireworks and cake. Ok, I made up that last part. No festivities are shown, but I sure hope that somebody is happy about my accomplishment, as I still have no idea what I was supposed to be doing here.

As a matter of fact, I won't ever find out, since this is essentially the end of the game. It doesn't stop, though. Instead, it simply loops back to the first level. The difficulty remains the same, so if you know both stages well enough, you can just continue playing through them until you've had enough pew-pew for a day.



CONCLUSION

Ryshka is a rather average vertical shooter that doesn't radiate a lot of originality. Its inspirations are quite obvious, even if the setting is different. Despite its shortcomings, the game can be moderately fun. Once you get used to the erratic bullet patterns and some unfair enemy placement, Ryshka becomes pretty easy.

The graphics are serviceable, albeit a bit monotone in color, and the scrolling runs quite smoothly. While the enemies can be told apart from the background very clearly, the same can't be said for the bullets, unfortunately. There aren't a lot of enemies that shoot back, or I would've died a lot more often otherwise.

For me, the music that's playing during the title screen is probably the most memorable part, thanks to its mad application of digitized drums. In stark contrast to that, the game itself only plays sound effects, and most of the time it's just white noise because I keep pressing fire over and over. It's a shooter, after all.

If there is something else that stands out about this game, then it is its theme. However, due to the total absence of any backstory, the Soviet setting feels rather tacked on. If you ignore the title/loading screen and just look at the game itself, you wouldn't be able to tell where this is taking place or on which side you are.

This brings me to an anecdote which is probably the main reason why the game stuck in my mind despite its mediocrity: I vividly remember showing Ryshka to my younger cousin and being taken aback by his reaction: He usually loved playing any kind of vertical shooters, but as soon as he realized that he was flying a Russian plane, he immediately dismissed the game with the words "I don't want to play as the bad guys". I don't believe he had any real political views at that age, so I think his attitude purely came from 80s western action movies where Russians were usually portrayed as the antagonists.