CROSSBOW (ARCADE)

“What if God was one of us,” Joan Osborne famously sang, “just a stranger on the bus?” That’s fine as far a middle-of-the-road Christian rock ballads go, but it doesn’t ask the really important question: namely, “what if God protected his chosen by shooting their enemies with some kind of celestial crossbow?” Fortunately, for this particular theological brainteaser we can turn to the power of videogames with Exidy’s 1983 arcade shooter Crossbow!

What a cheerful rainbow logo! Complete with an unthreatening dragon and a slightly less friendly-looking thing that might be a bat, or a bedraggled bin bag. Looks like we’re going to be having a jolly, pastel-hued adventure with this one, folks. Or maybe not - as a developer, Exidy are probably best remembered for their hyper-gory arcade lightgun shooter Chiller, or possibly the controversial run-people-over-with-a-car-em-up Death Race. They’ve got form, is what I’m saying, and indeed Crossbow is a lightgun shooter. However, it should be mentioned that on the original Crossbow cabinet the gun in question was, well, a crossbow. A realistic, full-sized crossbow. Of course, I’m playing an emulated version of the game, and so I’m not using a crossbow to control it. I’m kind of bitter about this. Not enough to carve my own crossbow out of lumber and gaffer tape it to my mouse, but still.

Here are the rules of Crossbow. Joke’s on you, I don’t have any friends. Also, shoot monsters and such. I reckon I can just about manage that.

The map screen shows the game’s eight locations, and true to the promises of the intro you can select your route. The thing is, it doesn’t actually tell you which option corresponds to which path, so while I did eventually manage to see every stage it was only after quite a lot of what is technically known as “bumbling around.” You can even go back to stages you’ve already cleared if you choose a certain path, which I suppose is good for those of you looking to amass a high score.

The first stage I happened upon was this moonlit village, packed with a menagerie of sinister creatures. There are witches, there are werewolves, there are wizards and, as you can see in that window at the top-right, the terrifying sight of an axe-wielding wereduck. Bitten by a mallard on the night of a full moon, this poor soul is cursed to transform into a half-man half-duck creature, prowling the city streets to satiate his dreadful hunger for breadcrumbs. That’s what the axe is for, he uses it to chop bread. I know it might look more like a toothbrush, but don’t be ridiculous. Ducks don’t even have teeth.

So, Crossbow is all about shooting things, but there’s more to it than that. Or rather, there isn’t more to it but it’s presented in a slightly unusual manner. Your goal is to protect the merry band of adventurers that slowly, oh so slowly, walk across the screen, defending them from harm by shooting the various monsters and projectiles that are thrown their way. You can see that Robin Hood sort is taking the lead with his dwarven companion close behind, and they will do nothing but walk from left to right while the arrayed forces of Hell try to kill them. It’s never made clear if the adventurers even realise that they’re in danger – their unhurried gait and complete refusal to fight back implies that they think they’re doing nothing more dangerous than nipping down to the shops. They’re not easy to babysit, either. It’s often easy to mock the fragility of supposed “heroes” in videogames, but these weaklings take it to a whole new level: they don’t just die if they brush up against absolutely anything, they burst into flames, complete with agonised digitised screaming. This seems like something of an over-reaction, especially when one of the things that can kill them is a goddamn ant.

Forget that, though – look at that cool ghost! You don’t often see a traditional sheet ghost flying sideways, Superman-style, but Crossbow isn’t afraid to buck trends when it comes to monsters. That explains the duck-man, at least.
It quickly becomes apparent that the trick to Crossbow is prioritising targets. The monsters in the windows might look dangerous, but as fragile as the adventurers are even they cannot be killed by a glance from a witch. What you really need to look out for are projectiles, and in this first stage that means either the fireballs thrown by the wizards, which can be stopped by either shooting the fireballs or shooting the wizard before he can shout “fireballus exploderino,” or the bolts of lightning that fall from the sky. You shoot the monsters for points, but stay vigilant in case any projectiles start falling their way or a monster is standing directly in their path. You start with three adventurers, and if all three of them are killed it’s game over: if at least one of them manages to amble across the street / desert / ice cavern unscathed then it’s on to the next stage.

Next up, the bootleg Fellowship of the Ring visited a volcano. The volcano launches so many deadly boulders into the air that I have to assume it has a personal grievance with my rag-tag band of hikers. It’s probably fed up of people chucking ancient rings of power into it, but never fear: I will protect my charges by shooting all the boulders. With a crossbow? Sure, whatever. It’s a magic crossbow, and I am the patron deity of extremely stupid people. That doesn’t mean I’m infallible, however. I totally didn’t realise you have to shoot that large boulder to knock it over, forming a bridge over the lava. In this instance, it was perfectly understandable that the adventurers burst into flames. I figured it out on my second attempt, though, allowing the adventurers to forge onward, clearing the stage and collecting the treasure for a points bonus on the way out.

Of course, the real treasure was the friends we made along the way.
Each new friend works as an extra life, essentially. If you’re good at the game, you can end up with a veritable conga line of shuffling, useless fantasy clichés wandering aimlessly through the kingdom like pensioners at the market.

The desert stage is rather barren, which I guess is what makes it “desert” and not “thriving metropolis.” There are vultures and rabbits to shoot, as well as destructible cacti. I love destructible backgrounds in shooters like this, although you can see that I’ve severed the top of the right-hand cactus and yet it has remained attached. Truly, this is a magical world of mystery. You can also see the afore-mentioned ant about to attack my new friend. Okay, yeah, it’s a lot bigger than a regular ant, but it’s still just an ant. None of this is of any concern to my new friend – who may be a monk, or possibly one of the minions from Phantasm – and he walks forward, swinging his mace in a manner that might be mistaken for carefree joie de vivre in a less deadly situation.

I was going to make a “Bridge Over the River Die” pun, but then I thought “hey, that sounds like the kind of terrible joke I would have already made”, and indeed I have. Oh well, I’ll have to settle for pointing out two monsters. First is that brown thing popping out of the water just underneath the bridge. What is that? I am completely at a loss to describe it, apart from it maybe being part-human. A bloke in an ill-fitting otter costume, auditioning for the role of “Aquaman’s lamest villain”? He’s a goddamn enigma, that’s what he is.
Then there’s the eyeball floating in the sky, with the same heavy-lidded expression of contempt I was wearing whenever one of my friends slowly walked into a deathtrap. If you shoot the eyeball it emits a terrible scream, which is pretty good because hey, digitised speech samples! There’s even a disembodied voice that says “you will die!” when you start the game and boy, is he not kidding. Apparently Crossbow was the first-ever arcade game to include digitised speech, which is an impressive claim, and when it comes to presentation it’s an impressive game all around. Even putting aside the fact you can control it with a life-sized replica crossbow, the graphics are pretty incredible for a game from 1983. For comparison, other big-name arcade games released in 1983 include Gyruss and Donkey Kong 3, so Crossbow’s big, bold and full-colour graphics are a stand-out part of its appeal.

Speaking of Donkey Kong 3, this stage is all about monkeys clambering up and down vines while throwing coconuts at your adventurers. A departure for the previous dungeons-and-dragons-ish aesthetic and into more a Disney cartoon vibe, sure, but it still looks nice. You might think it makes me a terrible person to take pleasure in seeing the apes fall from the trees when you shoot them, but in my defence they started it. I would have been quite happy for my adventurers to walk through this jungle without shooting anything, but someone’s got to protect these dopes from a coconut bombing raid.
This is also where Crossbow starts getting noticeably more difficult. It’s never an easy game – it’s a 1983 arcade game that revolves around shooting tiny moving targets – but the sheer number of monkeys that you need to deal with means you’re making more large aiming adjustments than before, and the apes just keep on comin’ so if you’re a bit late destroying a coconut, that means you’ve got less time to shoot the next threat and so on until your attempts to shoot the monkeys are so frantic that you completely fail to notice your friends walking into a giant carnivorous flower.

You want ice caverns? Well we’ve got ice caverns, by gum! Well, one ice cavern. A yeti of some description peers out from behind a rock, concerned for the state of that poor Amazon woman’s bare feet. Bats on loan from Dracula’s castle fly horizontally across the screen, and they’re just as susceptible to being shot as they are to being whipped. A couple of holes in the ice must be plugged by shooting down the larger icicles, but it’s the constant downpour of smaller icicles that cause all the problems in this stage. No, Crossbow hasn’t gotten any easier since the jungle. Those icicles fall fast, and they’re not big targets, and when it was all bundled together like this I suddenly realised I couldn’t tell whether I was having fun or not. Crossbow is a game about shooting goofy monsters in graphically impressive locations, and that part I’m fine with, but something about it irritates me. I think it’s the concept of protecting the adventurers that sours me on experience. This is strange, because if I think about it logically I know it shouldn’t bother me. Imagine a version of Crossbow where you didn’t have to babysit the adventurers, and you simply had to shoot the various projectiles before they reached the bottom of the screen and caused you to lose a life. That is essentially the exact same game as the "real" Crossbow, and yet seeing these utterly useless and totally defenceless idiots blindly marching towards destruction introduces a constant low hum of annoyance into my gameplay experience. Maybe it’s because you’re so used to directly controlling characters like these in other games that your lack of agency leads to a sort of mental dissonance. Or maybe it’s just me, and I lack the necessary compassion to care whether or not Fake Robin Hood and his band of Merry Morons trundle into a frozen chasm.

Here we see possibly the worst attempt to storm a castle ever recorded in a videogame. So bad, in fact, that my adventurers would have walked straight into the moat had I not shot the chains holding up the drawbridge. You can get away with that kind of behaviour if you’re the goddamn Terminator, but if you’re this character here, who appears to be a bride-to-be who fled to the woods on her wedding day and reverted to a feral state, then you’re not going to have much luck. Still, she’s nearly in the castle now. I can’t see the rest of the adventurers having a problem with it.

Ah. I believe this is what’s referred to as “getting Agincourted.” One crossbow is no match for multiple longbows, and so it proves here. I nearly gave up on Crossbow at this point. Trying to keep this cloud of small, fast-moving projectiles away from the tender flesh of my charges seemed like a bridge too far, especially when the hit detection on the arrows is very fussy. That last part is understandable, at least. It’s difficult to shoot one arrow out of the air with another unless you’re Robin Hood, and I’m not Robin Hood. Neither is my adventurer friend down there, despite his appearance. I’m beginning to suspect he’s actually blind and that’s not a sword he’s carrying, it’s a white cane.
In the end, the only reason I made it through this section is that I realised I could hold the fire button down for rapid fire, which let me keep the number of archers down before they could fire. Granted, I did lose a couple of friends to the occasional predatory pterodactyl – like I didn’t have enough to worry about – but in the end I managed to keep a few friends alive.

It’s a bloody good job I did, too, because this final stage is pretty intense. Swords fall from the ceiling, spears are launched from the wall and a dragon sticks its head into the room every now and then to breathe fireballs into the mix. I feel like the dragon is not really pulling its weight in this situation. If I’m roughly ten times more likely to be killed by a falling sword than a fire-breathing dragon, then the dragon is slacking off. You’re the last line of defence against these treasure thieves, dragon! Have a little pride in your work!

The screen gets a little darker each time you shoot one of the flaming torches, which is fun and has the bonus of making it more difficult to see the infuriating smugness of that wizard’s cocky strut. He did nothing to earn that confidence, nothing.
Oh right, the treasure. You might have noticed that it’s sitting on an extremely suspicious panel in the floor, right in front of a statue of a demon that has spent millennia skipping leg day. Yes, of course it’s a trap door, but surprisingly it’s not a trap. When one of your characters stands on it, the demon’s staff lights up. Shoot the staff and the trap door opens, dropping your character not into the usual spike pit but into a confrontation with the villain behind the horror of Crossbow.

Ooh, the Master of Darkness! I wonder who it is? Maybe it’s the rest of that dragon, having finally decided to get its act together. Or maybe it’s some unseen demon whose dark influence is corrupting the land, a real Sauron type.

Or maybe it’s just some bloke. Okay, it’s the giant floating head of some bloke, but it’s still disappointing that the Master of Darkness has the face of someone who looks like they spend a lot of time performing Shakespeare with their community theatre group. It’s hard to take a villain seriously when he has pretty much the same haircut as I do.
To defeat the Master of Darkness, you must shoot him in the eyes with your crossbow. I find this will defeat most things. The more adventurers you have left the easier it will be, and if you’ve got more than two you can ignore the lightning bolts he fires from his face and plug away at his weak points until he dies.

At least, I assume he dies. All the flesh has fallen from his skull and that’s usually fatal, but he’s also reminding me that I have defeated him and his legions. This must be confusing for the adventurers, who presumably have no idea that I exist and have been protecting them all this time. As far as they know, things just die when they walk past.

I’m having a hard time coming to a conclusion about Crossbow. For starters, in this case playing an emulated version of the game is going to differ significantly from the original experience, and I can’t say with certainty whether it’s a good or a bad game without knowing, for instance, how accurate and easy to use the original crossbow controller was. What I can say is that it looks and sounds great for a game of this vintage, and I’m especially fond of some of the weirder enemy sprites. Shooting bizarro monsters in a fantasy setting is A-OK in my book, and Crossbow mostly puts together a solid gameplay base to make it worth experiencing. It can get frustratingly difficult towards the end, and certain small elements have slightly uncooperative hitboxes, but on the whole the shooting part of the game is fine.

But then there’s the whole “protect these dorks” part of it. I am certain that my aversion to this concept is entirely personal – perhaps as a side-effect of always being crap at Lemmings - and that for most other people it wouldn’t be an issue, but I can’t deny that it winds me up. So, in the end I’ll say that Crossbow is a game that I’m glad I’ve played, but I will almost certainly never play it again. Okay, so I might try that first village stage again, if only to unravel the mystery of the duck-man.

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PURPLE HEART (COMMODORE 64)

If you didn’t know the Purple Heart is a medal given to US service members who are wounded or killed in action, the title of today’s game would probably seem kinda weird. You’d have to assume it describes the huge stress-induced coronary event that you might well suffer thanks to the game pulse-pounding, non-stop action. Actually, it’s still weird if you do know it’s a medal, because it implies things aren’t going to end well for the game’s heroes. Hmm. Anyway, here’s CRL’s 1988 Commodore 64 military-muscle-men-em-up Purple Heart!

Sirens blare, confetti flutters through the air and party poppers are popped. A banner slowly descends. “CONGRATULATIONS,” it reads, “1,000,000th Piece of Computer Game Artwork Based on an Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie Poster!!!”
So, like I said: military muscle men, although they’re nothing to do with the toy line of the same name whose advert I’ve had stuck in my head for well over twenty years now. Someone appears to have shot the game’s logo. How rude.

There’s more Schwarzenegger on the screen that introduces out heroes: Striker, over on the left, has clearly has his portrait copied from the Terminator poster, the shoelace-thin headband hastily added in order to throw off the lawyers. As for Cobra, there’s a decent chance he’s Conan. Not based on Conan, he’s actually Conan, who has awakened in the modern age with his lust for battle completely intact. He’s so keen on military conflict that he somehow managed to fight in both Vietnam and the Falklands.

You’re also shown the weapons that you’ll get to use during your mission. They’re all fairly standard stuff for a military-themed videogame from the eighties. You can tell it’s from the eighties because one of the weapons is an Uzi. Had videogames been the pre-eminent form of popular culture at the time, we’d all consider the Uzi to be as much a symbol of the eighties as we do with shoulder pads, big hair and cocaine.
There’s actually a little scene here where the weapons are introduced one-by-one, and each time one appears a brief sound effect of it firing plays. It’s kinda neat, and it shows a certain amount of, if not ambition, then at least flair.

Here’s your mission briefing, not that you need one. “Shoot everything that isn’t you” would have done the trick much more concisely. It might have been nice to know who I’m fighting against and where all this takes place, but I’m hardly surprised that information isn’t included. Ours is not to reason why, and all that. It’s particularly amusing that you’re advised to “use strategy.” Unless “strategy” is the code-name for a new super-gun that fires a million bullets per second and can only be fired by a man without a shirt on, strategy is unlikely to enter into this game.

And we’re off, charging around and shooting our gun at the many brown-shirted soldiers that are intent on protecting this small hut. So, Purple Heart is a top-down shooter in the manner of Capcom’s Commando (not to be mistaken for Capcom’s Captain Commando) or SNK's Ikari Warriors. There’s nothing so fancy as a rotary joystick in this one, though: you use the stick to move, and you fire in whatever direction you’re facing. You can’t even hold the fire button down to fix your aim in one direction while you move about, which can make some sections rather awkward.

Unusually for the genre, Purple Heart’s first stage takes place in the enemy base. That’s just good tactics, really. If you can take out the enemy’s base right away, you could be home by tea time! Maybe I was too quick to scoff at the uselessness of strategy in this situation.
I’m only a couple of screens in, but I’ve already managed to pick up most of the game’s weapons. They’re just laying around on the floor, you don’t even need to shoot them out of enemies or find them in crates, and that’s good because they all have limited ammo (represented by the green bar in the HUD) and they run out quite quickly. This is not the kind of game where conserving your ammunition is really an option, either.
Of the weapons I’ve used so far, this flamethrower definitely feels like the most useful. Its projectiles can pass through multiple enemies, which is handy, plus they leave a small patch of fire wherever they land that the villains can walk into. The shotgun’s not bad, either, although unlike the wide spread of projectiles you might have been expecting from a videogame shotgun, it actually fires two “rows” of projectiles in a straight line. Some on the design team took the phrase “double-barrelled” a little too literally, I suspect.

And so it goes, the action unfolding in a manner typical of the genre and with little to set it apart from the crowd. You die in one hit, which is to be expected. The opposing troops run around like kids from a nursery that swapped the fruit juice for espresso, firing their guns and throwing grenades with wild abandon, which is also to be expected. Computer game soldiers of the time rarely exhibited much in the way of military tactics. At least they’ve all got guns in this one, half the time in games like this there are a bunch of soldiers attacking you with nothing more technologically advanced than knives. The collision detection has the capricious nature of a romantic poet, often flitting about and offering vague notions when all you want it to do is settle down and give you a solid answer about whether an incoming explosion is going to kill you or not. It’s not good, but in fairness the hit detection in Purple Heart isn’t much worse than in many, many other home computer action games.

 

It didn’t take long to make it to the first boss: a trio of chaps with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers who are jealously guarding these oil drums, determined that no side-scrolling beat-em-ups will be able to steal them away and hide roast dinners under them. At least, I think there are supposed to be people holding those rocket launchers. Looking at the rest of the game’s bosses suggests this might not be the case, but I can’t help but see the things holding up the rocket launchers as little dudes with teddy boy-style quiffs.
Whatever they are, they shoot rockets at you. Well, cannonballs, really. I think I might have accidentally attacked a Civil War re-enactment society. They fire a lot of cannonballs, too, and the guy in the middle having dual cannons means he can put out so many projectiles that you can’t get past the relentless barrage without losing a life. “Okay,” you think to yourself, “I’ll just take out the two cannoneers I can reach and then deal with the last bloke,” but that’s easier said than done because the cannonballs move so fast that it’s very difficult (and dull, and time-consuming) to dodge between the shots and fire back when you get the chance. Instead, you have to fire diagonally towards the boss. You might think you’re not damaging the boss by doing this, especially because your bullets aren’t actually hitting them but exploding into little firework shapes when they hit the barrel, but you are hitting the boss. Well, you might be. See, the problem is the game doesn’t tell you whether you’re damaging the boss. There’s no health bar, they don’t flash or make a sound effect, nothing, so you end up firing bullets near them until they either “die” or you move to an ever-so-slightly different firing position and repeat the process. As if that tactic wasn’t thrilling enough, it didn’t seem to work at all with the central cannon. To blow that one up, all I could do was stand right in front of it and hammer the fire button, hoping that I’d only lose one or two lives before it exploded. It worked, just about, and that’s how I cleared Purple Heart’s first stage. Spoilers: every boss in the game is like this.

Now Cobra’s in the jungle. He’s just destroyed the enemy base, so I have to assume that he’s actually suffering a Vietnam flashback.
The jungle’s a lot like the first stage, only with more green and brown. Other new inclusions are spikes that rhythmically poke in and out of the ground and small bridges that perform the twin functions of letting you traverse small puddle and giving your character something to get stuck to when the screen scrolling is feeling uncooperative.

Whoever this evil army is, they’ve embraced drone warfare. I’m not sure they had to make the drone look that much like a real helicopter, though. That seems like a wasted effort, unless they’re hoping their foes will think they’re being attack by many distant helicopters instead of teeny-tiny, nearby helicopters.
The problem with these helicopters is the bombs that they drop. If any part of the bomb touches you, you lose a life, even when the bombs are clearly passing over Cobra’s head. This is particularly galling when the grenades the regular troops throw can be walked underneath. No, the only way to avoid this helicopter is to outrun it. Good old Cobra, what a hero. He can destroy whole armies on his tod, he’s faster than an attack helicopter, he rescues puppies from unscrupulous dog breeders and so on and so forth.

He also fights walls. These walls also have large guns attached to them, despite clearly not being big enough to hold artillery, thousands of rounds of ammunition and the crew required to operate them. Yes, the bosses in Purple Heart aren’t exactly thrilling duels of wits or swelling crescendos of martial combat. They’re walls that shoot at you. This one, at least, is far easier than the first boss. Its projectiles are slow enough that you can dodge them and fire back. It’s still boring, but it’s doable without losing all your lives. Don’t lose all your lives, because there’s no continue option and you’ll have to start the game all over again. The game does give you an extra life every time you finish a stage, though, so that’s something.

August, 1944, and the liberation of Paris is almost complete. Cobra has given the Free French the day off. He’ll mop up the remaining Nazis, so don’t worry. I think that’s what’s happening here, anyway. Or rather, I think Cobra thinks that’s what’s happening. I’ve become completely convinced that every stage is this game is actually a delusional fantasy that Cobra is having, imaging himself as the hero of every war of the modern age. That explains why all the enemy soldiers have the well-drilled efficiency of the Chuckle Brothers, and why none of the bosses look like quite like a genuine weapon of war.

Mostly, though, I’d say Purple Heart looks rather good. The graphics are detailed without being overly fussy and the animations are decent. There are a few issues with perspective, but on the whole I like the way it looks. That’s as well-drawn a motorcycle-riding SS officer as I’ve ever seen on the Commodore 64 – it’s just a shame I can’t shoot him. There are some vehicles that drive across the screen at various points, but unfortunately you can’t destroy them. No, vehicles must be avoided at all costs, even when you’re carrying around a rocket launcher. Even if Purple Heart was otherwise a game at the very pinnacle of its genre, it could never be considered a true great because it teases the player with the opportunity to blow up a motorbiking Nazi and then denies them that pleasure.

The boss is a wall with guns on it. Okay, technically being a house it’s four walls with guns on it, but you know what I mean. The goal, as always is to shoot the guns, but apparently the end of this stage is where the game’s creators decided the cut-off point for having fun should be. Cobra’s trapped in that clearing in the trees, right? And there are four guns in front of him. They all fire at once, filling that whole clearing with projectiles, and I am convinced that there is no way to finish this boss fight without losing at least one life and probably more. Once you’ve knocked out a gun or two there’s a safe zone you can stand in, but until then you will be losing a life and that is just incredibly infuriating. I’m totally fine with losing a life if I’m just shit at the game – and it’s bloody good job I am, too – but when there’s no avoiding it it feels like a proper slap in the face. I even tried to look it up afterwards, and as far as I can see no-one else has ever managed to beat this boss without getting hit either, and I suppose it is nice to know it’s not just down to me being rubbish.

Next is the swamp stage, which consists mostly of narrow, rickety wooden bridges and the creeping sense that Purple Heart doesn’t want you to be playing it. A C64 action game being difficult is hardly a huge surprise, but Purple Heart is so obnoxiously difficult – crowded walkways with no room to manoeuvre, unavoidable deaths in boss fights, ropey collision detection – that it becomes impossible to recommend even despite its good points. It does have good points, too: nice graphics, smooth controls and better-than-average screen-scrolling effects amongst them. Like an accidental Viagra overdose, it simply reaches a point where it’s so hard it stops being fun, and if you’re after an arcade style-shooter whose difficulty level forces you into a gameplay style of cautious tiptoeing and rote memorisation, there are better examples to spend your time with.

When I briefly discussed the collectable weapons Cobra can use, I neglected to mention the rocket launcher. That’s because it works differently than the other weapons: rather than firing a series of projectiles, it fires one big rocket that explodes. The explosion creates a spinning bar of fire, like a top-down version of the ones in Bowser’s castle, wherever it lands, and it spins around immolating any enemy soldiers it touches. It sounds neat, and it does have its uses… but you can only have one explosion on screen at a time and you can’t fire another rocket until it’s dissipated, so if you miss, you’re screwed. The other interesting thing about the rocket launcher’s explosions is that their position is relative to Cobra’s position. If your rocket lands, for example, thirty pixels to Cobra’s left, it will always be thirty pixels to Cobra’s left even if Cobra moves. This means that you can fire a rocket and then run away, “dragging” the explosion along with you, which is a much more interesting concept for a weapon than the same tired old rocket launcher.

There’s also a section in this stage based on the queuing system at Primark, except less grim. I kid, I kid. Primark is a perfectly fine store, and especially useful for us slovenly types who are looking for a shopping experience where the clothes are cheap enough that we don’t have to bother trying them on.

This stage’s boss is a tank, as drawn by someone who’s never seen a tank and had only heard them described by an excited child. “That’s not a wall with guns,” you might say, but you’d be wrong. That’s exactly what it is. It certainly doesn’t move around or anything, and despite being a tank it can still be destroyed by shotgun fire. It’s mechanically identical to the second boss, in fact. Man, what a dumb-looking tank.

This stage is called the Icelands. That’s pretty accurate, I suppose. It’s got ice, it’s got land. Against, I’d sticking to my statement that Purple Heart looks pretty darn nice, and this simple yet effective scene of Arctic tundra is probably my favourite-looking bit of the game.

The Icelands, however, do not make it easy. There are too many extremely well-guarded cottages for that to be the case. That said, I think it’s a bit easier than the last stage even if having the enemies fire their white bullets over a pale grey background is the kind of decision that should have had someone shouting “what? No, don’t be stupid” during the planning stages. There’s also no word on whether mums go to the Icelands. Thank you, thank you, this has been the paragraph where I make references to the advertising slogans of a budget frozen food store. I apologise if you came here looking for actual jokes.

If nothing else, I can give Purple Heart credit for being the only game ever in which I’ve been killed by a hostile skiing chalet.

This is the sixth and final stage: Pierworld. Okay, so the game simply calls it “The Final Conflict” but it is definitely pier-heavy. Lots of piers, in various stages of disrepair. Some are wide and spacious, others have rotted away and crumbled despite still being able to withstand multiple grenades being throw at them. This means there are some parts of the pier where Cobra can come into contact with the water. Naturally, doing so immediately costs him a life, which makes negotiating the twisty-turny ruins of the piers even slower and more plodding than the rest of the game.

On the plus side, all the bad guys seem to have shoulderpads, sunglasses, quiffs and mohawks, so Cobra’s military fantasies must have evolved beyond the real world and now he’s imagining himself as a fighter for justice in a lawless post-apocalyptic future where evil men will do whatever it takes to control the world’s jetties and wharfs.

The final boss, ladies and gentlemen. The hat of some gargantuan underwater priest, rising up through the waves to shoot at Cobra with the four cannons attached to its brim. What else can I say about a boss I’ve already fought five times? Apart from that this is shittiest-looking one of them all, I mean? Obviously by this point Purple Heart’s difficulty level has forced me to cheat my way to infinite lives, so it’s not like I spent a lot of time figuring out a valid battle plan here. I suspect there isn’t one. You’ll just have to hope you’ve got enough lives left to outlive the boss.

Purple Heart draws to a close with this image of Cobra being awarded some medals. It’s not much of an ending, but it’s more of an ending than most C64 games have, so I’ll take it. The best thing about it is that Cobra’s clearly pissed off at being forced to wear a shirt. The only reason he put it one is so they’d have somewhere to pin his medals. He wouldn’t have minded having them thrust directly into his flesh, but no-one was strong enough to force the pin into the steel boulders that are Cobra’s pectoral muscles.
Purple Heart is a game that tries to be good, and for that it should be applauded. Many of its technical aspects are impressive, it has a co-operative two-player mode and sometimes-dodgy hit detection aside it plays as well or better than most other C64 games in the genre. It is a shame, then, that the bosses are about as interesting as a boiled rice sandwich and the game’s difficulty level is frustrating enough to make you want to stop playing. It’s a case of close but no cigar, then, but at least I managed to get into a fight with a chalet. That was a new one.

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LABYRINTH RUNNER (ARCADE)

Hello, all. It’s been a while! I won’t bore you with the grim reasons for my absence, but I’m back for the moment and I’ve brought you a festive gift. What could be better, at this most joyous time of year, than an obscure Konami arcade game? Well, lots of things, as it happens. We’ll get to that, though. It’s the 1987 (or possibly 1988) half-baked-em-up Labyrinth Runner, also known as Trick Trap!

Neither title fits the game very well. There aren’t enough tricks and traps for Trick Trap to make sense, and while there are a few mazes the word “labyrinth” implies a scope and grandeur that they most certainly do not possess. I’d have called it “Shootman Jog-Around” but then, as you can tell from the name of this website, I’ve never been good at titles.

You get a little information before the game kicks off, in the form of this image. Evil fiend, dark castle, kidnapped woman. My First Game Plot, got it. That villain looks a little Dracula-esque don’t you think? Maybe I’ve gotten lucky and Labyrinth Runner is actually an ultra-obscure part of the Castlevania mythos. If only there was some more information!

Thanks, Konami. That’s very helpful. So, it’s not Dracula, then? It’s just Devil. No word on whether that’s just a devil or the Judeo-Christian ruler of Hell himself, but we do know that he’s abducted Princes Papaya. Princess Papaya is the ruler of the Vegetaria kingdom, despite papaya being a fruit and not a vegetable. Maybe she’s a puppet ruler placed there after Vegetaria’s annexation by the neighbouring nation of Fruitopia.
The best thing about this image is the “CASTLE” label. Its sheer pointlessness got a laugh out of me, anyway.

The game begins, and we get our first proper look at the hero we’ll be controlling. That’s him on the left, with his trusty shield, his bright green cape and, perhaps surprisingly, his ruddy great gun. I was expecting, I dunno, magic powers – a crossbow at most – but no, he’s got a gun. As he’s mostly green and he hails from the kingdom of Vegetaria, I think I shall call him Cabbage.

So, Labyrinth Runner is a top-down shooter. You move Cabbage around with the joystick, and he can fire in eight directions (although not at the same time, sadly.) He can collect two other weapons as you play, and you can switch between them whenever you like. His shield? Completely useless. He dies in one hit, so the shield must be more of a ceremonial thing. Maybe later there’ll be a stage where he uses it as an impromptu snowboard in order to make a daring mountainside escape, but I highly doubt it.
As for what he’s shooting at, I’m not entirely sure. Some kind of sand-worm, maybe? They pop up from under the ground and spit slow-moving projectiles at you, that much is clear, but beyond that they’re an enigma. They do kinda look like they’re wrapped in tiny duvets, though.

The enemies only get stranger as you progress through the stage. At the bottom-right of the screenshot above, you can see an ambulatory Christmas tree advancing towards Cabbage, ready to slap him about using naught but its pugilistic baubles. Looks like it’s finally fighting back against the War on Christmas. Stranger still are the creatures on the bridge, which appear to be a cross between a crab and a turtle with a human skull perched on top. The Lesser-Spotted Skull-Bearing Crable, if you will. They feel strangely familiar, probably because I’ve fought so many similar creatures in Final Fantasy games over the years.

You’re also beset by a swarm of angry potato people, traitors against the kingdom of Vegetaria. After years of being called vegetables but not deemed “good” enough to count as one of your five a day, they have risen up in rebellion, hoping to carve a better place for themselves in society. It’s a shame none of Cabbage’s weapons are a flamethrower, really. Everyone loves a baked potato.

The three weapons you do get are the default pea-shooter style gun, a laser that fires more slowly but can penetrate multiple enemies and ricochets off walls, and bombs that travel in an arc and cause a large-ish explosion wherever they land – a side-effect of which is that the bombs are useless for hitting enemies right in front of you, because you throw them over the monsters. Your weapons can also be powered up by collecting, erm, power-ups, and as you do so they’ll gain more projectiles in a very helpful spread-shot style.
Here I’m using the laser against the game’s first boss: a pair of Dungeons and Dragons Beholders that have escape their tabletop roleplaying world and found themselves facing a courageous young knight with a laser gun. I would recommend using the laser, too: while your other weapons can also destroy enemy projectiles, the laser is much better at it. Plus, if you miss there’s a chance your laser will bounce off the wall behind the boss and hit them anyway. You can even pretend you meant to do it, like whenever I pot a ball while playing pool.

Stage one is over. The beholders weren’t much of a challenge. Things that are ninety percent eyeball tend to struggle against projectile weapons. Or non-projectile weapons. Or bright sunlight. Anyway, the between-stage map screen promises that many dangers lie ahead, which wasn’t really true of the first stage. The “runner” in Labyrinth Runner’s title is definitely the most accurate part: Cabbage moves at a fair clip and the monsters don’t seems that bothered about stopping him, so you can run past almost everything in the first stage. It’s a very short stage, too, and you can finish it in about thirty seconds if you don’t stop to say “what the hell is that, a walking potato?” like I did.
It was an okay start to the game. Weird enemies aside, there was little to excite the imagination, but the action was smooth and the music was good – not quite the top-tier Konami tunes of something like Haunted Castle, but a solid B. One touch I did like is that you can see the shadow of the castle on the floor while you’re fighting the first boss. Let’s see what stage two holds, shall we?

I was hoping that Labyrinth Runner might kick on from a relatively promising start and turn out to be fairly interesting, but that’s not how things panned out. The second stage is a short series of aggressively grey parapets, linked by bridges and patrolled by giant spiders and non-giant knights – so even the enemies are less interesting than in the first stage. Surely it can’t be that Konami splurged all their creative juices (oh god, what a horrible phrase to use) on the first stage, because while that was pleasant enough it was hardly brimming with exciting new ideas.

Then you reach the boss. This does not take long. The timer for the whole stage is two minutes and I still had well over a minute left when I got here, which goes to show just how short Labyrinth Runner’s stages are.
The boss is a wall. I somehow manages to be even more grey than the stage that preceded it, and that looked like the book of paint samples the Navy uses when it’s choosing a colour for its latest battleship. Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with the concept of fighting a wall. I can think of a few memorable boss battles against walls. The first stage of Contra, for starters, and the Demon Wall from Final Fantasy VII. No, the problem with this wall is the execution. To damage it, you have to hit the gem in its forehead… except you can’t can’t reach that target with the normal shot or the laser. You have to use the bombs, and of course this is a Konami arcade game from the mid-eighties so you lose all your power-ups when you die. It’s the Gradius problem taken to an extreme, because in Gradius you’re reset to the default when you lose a life but if you’re good enough you can still survive and make progress. Here, you’re shit out of luck if you don’t have the bombs, and you have to spend most of the fight waiting for it to slowly spawn some regular enemies that you can shoot and pray they drop the bomb power-up. It’s a colossal pain in the arse, made more aggravating by the fact that boss takes about seven seconds to defeat if you do have the bombs.

Stage three is a maze. According to the map screen, anyway. I’m not sure you can call it a maze when it’s small enough that you could map it out on the back of a postage stamp. I was having trouble parsing where this is supposed to be taking place – it is a maze carved from stone that’s somehow hovering over a well-manicured bowling green? Possibly. It’s not grey, which is nice, but it’s still not much to look at, and Labyrinth Runner in general lacks the graphical flair you might usually associate with Konami’s arcade game. It’s all just a bit bit boring, frankly.
At least the enemies are a little more interesting here than in the last stage. Demonic whelks and the titular blob from A Boy and His Blob are a step up from the tired concept that is giant spiders (unless you’re playing an EDF game, in which case giant spiders are great). Unfortunately that ice cream is not an enemy, it’s an item you can collect for points. An enemy that’s nothing more than a man-sized cone of soft-serve would have been very appealing to me.

The exit seems to be randomly placed in one of several spots, which I suppose is at least mildly interesting, although the idea of someone wanting to play Labyrinth Runner more than once is a little hard to believe. Oh, and this stage has no boss, either. Konami wouldn’t want you getting too excited after such a thrilling maze, after all.

Oh look, another maze. I think this is actually part of the same stage, which is why there wasn’t a boss. It’s far more blue than the previous maze but no more interesting. “Shrieking, giant-winged bat-head” is a good look for an enemy that haunts an underground catacomb, but other than that it’s basically the same as the last maze.
The most notable thing about the mazes is that they’re so much easier than the rest of the game. The narrow corridors mean there are fewer directions the enemies can attack you from, and if you’ve picked up even one of the weapon power-ups your shots will spread out enough to fill the entire path ahead of you. It makes it feel like you’re walking down the pathways with a large broom simply sweeping the monsters aside as you survey the maze for the thirty seconds or so it takes to spot the exit.

This time there is a boss, and it’s a distant relation of Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I appreciate a horrible blobby tentacle monster that looks like someone drew a face on a particularly disgusting medical diagram as much as the next man, but I’m struggling to remember anything about this battle. I’ll hazard a guess and say that the boss fired some projectiles at me, but I avoided those projectiles and shot the boss with my laser gun. That must be what happened. If it had been different, I would have remembered it.

Next up is the seldom-enjoyable mine cart stage. Are there any good mine cart stages? The ones from Donkey Kong Country aren’t bad, I suppose. They’re very tense, certainly. Feel free to let me know your favourite mine cart stages, maybe I’ll remember one I enjoyed.
I doubt anyone will submit Labyrinth Runner’s mine cart stage as a particular favourite, because it’s pretty terrible. The actually rolling around part is fine, it's just like the regular stages except you’ve got no control over your movements while you’re fighting the monsters. The problem comes when you’re forced to make a decision about what track you want to ride. You can switch between them at junctions, but some of them are dead-ends that result in unavoidable death. If you’re on the wrong track, tough luck, you’ve just lost a life. Oh, and you only get five continues, so if you want to make it past this stage you have to basically memorise the layout of the tracks, or cheat. I did one of those things. I’m sure you can figure out which. If I wanted to spend my time doing lots of boring memorisation and still not coming out of it with much reward, I’d go back and re-do my physics A-Level.

Yes, let’s. That would be a nice change of pace.

The final stage is the clearly-labelled castle itself, the front gate guarded by another pair of bosses that can only be damaged by the bomb weapon. The bosses appear to be half man, half spark plug but somehow less cool than Spark Man. There’s a conga line of strange humanoid creatures that you can kill if you need to collect the bomb weapon – and after the frustrating tedium of the mine cart stage, you probably will – and they might even drop one of the lightning icons that gives you a screen-clearing smart bomb.

Here’s the castle’s… foyer? Lobby? Whatever, it’s this room, where weird soldiers that look like phone books with heads on top repeatedly spawn and chase you around the room. I killed quite a lot of them, using the ruined pillars to funnel them into the path of my projectiles, but nothing much was happening, so I killed a few more. “Maybe it’s some kind of puzzle,” I thought to myself. The geometry of the room and the symbols on the floor and walls have sort of a “videogame puzzle” look to them, don’t you think? But no, they didn’t seem to do anything, so I shot some more monsters. Then I realised I could walk through the doors at the top of the screen and just, like, leave. I’m not sure what it says about me that my first instinct was “this problem must be solved through mass slaughter.” That I’ve played too many videogames, probably.

Just beyond lies this room that only avoids being totally bland by having the Blockbusters board for a floor. It’s also home to the game’s best enemies: fat, turd-like clouds that wear sunglasses and attack by sucking on big cigars and blowing smoke at Cabbage. They’re Slimer from Ghostbusters, if he was less into food and more into emphysema, and I kinda love them.

There’s also a giant centipede to fight. You’ve got to shoot it in its glowing weak point – in this case it’s the arse, traditionally the most vulnerable area of all insects. Unfortunately for the centipede it can only attack by running into our hero, so the fight quickly devolves into Cabbage running in a circle, chasing the boss’ backside while the boss chases Cabbage, forming a perfect loop of extremely forgettable gameplay.

At long last, it’s the game’s final boss! I say “at long last”, it took me less than fifteen minutes to reach this point but it feels like so much longer. The boss is a very angry meatball, which makes sense. You’d expect meat to be the natural enemy of a place called Vegetaria. The boss has large smashing fists, although he doesn’t really use them, electing instead to throw what are either green pumpkins or large bell peppers at our hero. Actually, no. On closer inspection they appear to be unlit green candles, a shade of green that implies they’re scented like lime jelly.

Oh, it’s a robot meatball. Of course. Is this what Twinbee looks like underneath its external shell? They’ve got the same arms, after all.

After applying enough lasers to the boss’ exposed core it will explode, freeing Princess Papaya who was right there the whole time, apparently. She’s so pleased to see Cabbage that she bestows upon him a shower of human hearts, which she has developed a taste for during her time as a captive of the evil Meat Empire.

And that’s it. The game closes with a picture of Cabbage – who is apparently a prince, or possibly the late Prince himself – and Papaya, along with a text epilogue that states they’ve got to travel back to their kingdom and that “another long journey has begun.” For a moment my blood ran cold at the prospect of Labyrinth Runner having a second loop, but I’m happy to report that it doesn’t and it really is over.
Labyrinth Runner started out looking like it might be okay but gradually got worse and worse as it went on, so if nothing else it’s a good metaphor for 2016. There’s just no sparkle to it, no joie de vivre and certainly nothing like the level of quality Konami were capable of releasing at the time. It’s a competent if uninspired gameplay base, smothered by layers of boring scenery and poor design decision, the mine cart stage being the mouldy, fluff-encrusted cherry on top of the cake. It’s not truly awful, and I’d even say it’s more fun to play than Black Panther or Battlantis, but it’s only real use is as a cure for insomnia. Oh well, merry Christmas, I guess. At least the soundtrack was okay.

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