The Game-Maker Archive: The Brussels Spout (Book 2)

December 2, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

The Martins and their burgeoning demo group known as PPP Team seized Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker with a ferocity and a measured European flavor of design. Over two or three years they assembled upwards of 24 games, each more ambitious than the last. Since they were developing with an unlicensed copy of Game-Maker, most of those games were strictly for their own entertainment — which may to some extent explain the energy that went into them.

There are three branches of PPP Team software. In our previous article we discussed their one-off, often experimental titles. These games tend to be both character driven and strongly inspired by Commodore and shareware design sensibilities. One of those games, Blork Carnage, introduces a character named Jack Booster. This game and this character serve as the roots for the second of PPP Team’s branches — their defining franchises.

If the one-off games housed a wealth of interesting whims, it’s PPP Team’s series that received the bulk of their effort and originality. Of those, both the most significant and the most varied series are spun off from the Duke Nukem styled Blork Carnage. A third, early series also showed itself during the team’s Game-Maker era, to further build off one of those spin-offs. We’ll start with the series that more or less equates with PPP Team, in terms both of iconography and of their design sensibility.

Badman

Our eponymous hero is basically a chubby, inept satire of DC’s Batman — or at least that’s how he started off. Badman’s first role was as an incidental enemy in Blork Carnage. Yet after doodling the character for a while, he captured the Martins’ imaginations and rather like Fonzie on Happy Days, he soon became the center of PPP Team’s attentions. Other ties to Jack Booster include the overall art design and the antagonist Seb Valenti (who served a more nebulous role in Blork Carnage).

The first Badman game is a rough assembly of materials — some borrowed, some original — into a fairly genial Tim Sweeney flavored action platformer (complete with music lifted from Jill of the Jungle). Maybe with a whiff of Mighty Bomb Jack. Notably, Badman avoids feeling like a typical Game-Maker game. The character’s movements are perfectly married to the level design, and both the character and backdrop strive less to show off than to achieve a certain consistency of style and tone. Each level has its own fairly original theme. Instead of ice and fire worlds, we have blue skies and desert caves, a rooftop stage, a Japan world (where Badman trades his gun for a samurai sword), a Lego dungeon, a haunted castle, a prison camp, and — well, a Peach the Lobster zone. Very little in this game was just slapped together; you get the sense that every tile, every monster placement was agonized over.

With Badman II: He’s Back Again!, the series really finds its identity. All of the visuals are original, and indeed both clean and distinctive. All of the sprites, including the character, have received an upgrade. Then after the presentation ropes you in, you start to appreciate the scale of the thing. The game includes sophisticated boss battles, involving moving and shooting villains and complex solutions. There are all manner of hidden secrets, including a warp zone. And finally we find the most clever credit sequence we’ve seen in years, calling to mind the Zelda inventory roll and all those NES instruction booklets that named and illustrated all of the game’s monsters and their personalities. For all of Game-Maker’s limitations, Badman II is about as good a demonstration as you’ll find of its latent potential.

If Badman II was sort of the Sonic 2 to Badman‘s Sonic the Hedgehog — new sidekick and all — the unfinished Badman III: Badboys Are Back! is PPP Team’s Sonic 3 & Knuckles. This game is ridiculously huge — so much so that its 42 level nodes account for only the first world and a half or so. Even in its unfinished state the game is so vast and complicated that it’s difficult to take in. Again the visuals have received a total upgrade, this time with the benefit of Deluxe Paint gradients (lending the game that Sonic 3 flavor of 3D shading). Now the game gives a choice of two characters, each of whom can interact with and navigate the levels very differently. Badman himself controls much more smoothly, and has more abilities. PPP Team included some in-game cutscenes, and even managed to compose a bit of original music. Overall Badman III gives an imposing sense of command and professionalism. Had they ever finished the game, PPP Team would have created a monster the likes of which rarely even saw a commercial release. This is proto-Cave Story material here.

Panzer

If Badman progresses like Sonic, Panzer develops more like Ikari Warriors. Accordingly the Panzer series is maybe less iconic than Badman. What it shares with that series is a refusal to be bound by the normal Game-Maker tropes and limitations. Panzer goes further, though, in refusing to be bound even by its own format.

In a broad sense Panzer 1945 feels like your typical overhead view tank game. What makes it unusual from a Game-Maker perspective is its Robotron-style controls. One wonders, given the key binding limitations, why more games didn’t hit on this control scheme. Granted in this case they’re all cramped over by the numerical keypad, making fast reactions rather difficult. Yet once you get used to them it’s impressive how much nonsense four-way firing can resolve.

Finally we see a fast-paced action game with nuanced player responses. Furthermore the exploration-based design melds a sense of danger with one of ownership. When you clear an area, it stays clear — yet there’s no telling what the next screen will bring, and whether you will find all your progress undone. Though on paper it may sound dubious, in practice you get some of that unfolding physical mystery of the Zelda overworld crossed with the action of an arcade title. Granted there’s only the one level, and the graphics and sound feel very tentative, as if the designer was unsure whether to fully commit to the game. Still, what’s here is pretty enlightening.

Panzer 2019 takes the series in a different direction entirely. It may not be obvious, but ostensibly the tanks in these games are all piloted by our friend Jack Booster. Following his trip back to 1945, Jack slips back to the future and swaps his ride for a futuristic single-trigger cannon. The new tank zips smoothly along the neon and chrome style backdrops, blasting monsters and aliens with a tap of the space bar. As refreshing as the first game feels from a Game-Maker perspective, 2019 is a relief from the aimless plodding of its predecessor. You’ve got a corridor, you zoom down it. You’ve got a crossroads, you make a decision. You’ve got a threat, you hit fire. It’s all very simple now. And as far as Game-Maker based shooters go, they don’t get much better.

Panzer III takes another sharp turn to the left, and switches to an apparently Metal Slug inspired side-scrolling format. As with the third Badman, the game is perhaps overambitious and left unfinished. Whereas with Badman the problem was more of hardware failure and required effort, with Panzer III it’s an unfortunate (and for PPP Team rare) clash of concept against the engine’s limitations. Basically Panzer III depends on diagonal surfaces that RSD’s engine cannot supply, and no amount of tweaking or fudging can blur those edges. What the game does bring us is our first glimpse of Jack Booster in the driver’s seat, and an appealing flat-shaded cartoon style. Maybe a tank isn’t an ideal character for this design, but it’s a very nice setting. Which brings us to our final entry for the day.

Calimero

I’m not as clear on this as I might be, but I gather that the first Calimero game, Calimero against the Black Empire, was the Martins’ first ever attempt at a platformer, developed in BASIC some four or five years before they discovered Game-Maker. The game involved a black-feathered bird wearing half an egg as a helmet.

Later, at the height of their Game-Maker career, they chose to take advantage of a design cul-de-sac and insert the character into the skeleton of Panzer III. The result, Calimero II, comes off as sort of a cross between Wonder Boy and Sonic the Hedgehog, with maybe a bit of a Codemasters flavor. Although again they chose not to pursue the game to completion, the game does exhibit several advanced — or at least fascinating — techniques. To facilitate a Sonic-style vertical spring, they employed a complex lock-and-key system that momentarily flipped the gravity on all the background blocks. The character can throw apples along a wave pattern, and can do it quickly enough to establish a sort of an unbroken wave beam.

Jumping is an occasional issue in PPP Team’s older games; the levels demand a precision that the character animations barely supply, forcing the player to repeat certain jumps over and over. Calimero takes this frustration to a new level; often it’s unclear whether certain jumps are possible, and the answer only supplies itself when one realizes there there are no other routes. With a bit of adjustment, and some improved jumping behavior, this game could have really gone somewhere. You can feel that this game was never a priority, though — not in the same way as the above series.

Epilogue

Although we’re done with PPP Team for the moment, you will notice a dangling end. I said that these series form the second out of three branches, which leaves one more branch to go. We’ll get to that, presently. When we do, you’ll understand why it sets apart from the others.

In the meanwhile you can download the above games here. Try them out in DOSBox. If you’re running Windows 7 or Vista, you may have a few sound issues. If so, I’m afraid I don’t know how to resolve those. There’s probably a workaround. There usually is. Go ask one of your IRC cronies.