Star Avenger 4

Star Avenger 4

Release type: Incomplete
Release date: 1996
Levels: ?
Author: Adam Tyner, Alan Caudel
Website: DummyDuck.com
Related games: Star Avenger, Star Avenger II, Star Avenger III

After the first two games, Star Avenger turns into a series of sketches. Star Avenger III gets caught up in an epic ambition, establishes its basic ideas, then rests. Star Avenger 4 sticks to one idea, and uses just a single level to explore it, but it makes more of that idea than any previous Star Avenger game and indeed sets up a model for other non-traditional space shooters to follow.

In its design and narrative, Star Avenger 4 recalls both Space Invaders (or, level three of the previous game) and Choplifter. From the former we get a vessel skirting horizontally across the playfield, shooting upward at encroaching alien forces. From the latter, we get a rescue operation. Make your way across the lunar desolation, pick up a stranded human, and deliver your charge back home again.

Mechanically this is simple enough; the people ahead of you act as keys, unlocking doors behind you. Go back and forth; fetch, unlock, fetch, unlock, until you're done. A reductionary reading does the game no favors, though, and doesn't begin to get at what's happening here.

Screenshot from Star Avenger 4

The presentation is the first thing to strike you. This moonscape is bleak, and lonely. The solitude of your little missile buggy is all the more stark for Caudel's shadow technique (also employed in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi; it's unclear which use came first). The tiny, open vehicle, driven by an even smaller Nestoly-sized figure, occupies the top block of a two-block-high character; the bottom block is a flat gray shadow, cast across the foreground. The plane across which the character travels the landscape cuts through a deep and layered perspective, rolling from the foreground back to the horizon. As the buggy cuts across the view, its wheels kick up a cloud of fine dust.

The perspective and the character effects emphasize that aside from the player's tiny avatar and the oncoming alien hordes there's really nothing out there, no one to turn to. This sense of emptiness lends the player's mission, to cross that hopeless expanse as the sole beacon of hope for a scant few survivors, and then to cart them back to safety, a sense of weight and purpose.

In Star Avenger 4, the mechanics work jointly with the presentation, to create a narrative that only works because the mechanics pragmatically reflect the dramatic logic of the presented scenario. What on its own might feel tedious -- repeatedly puttering back and forth while shooting or dodging enemies -- instead carries a certain tension. The player's actions feel meaningful, and the logic of the narrative makes the world feels consistent and solid as it rarely does in a Game-Maker game.

Another curiosity is the player's firepower. Aside from the rescue element and backtracking, Choplifter and Defender are fairly straightforward shooters: enemies come at you, you blast them out of the sky. Here, the cart doesn't shoot sci-fi lasers or bullets; it contains a missile launcher, that fires rather large, slow rockets into the sky. Laying aside where it gets this limitless supply of rockets, the physical action of firing contains its own curious logic. Clearly, whatever its original purpose, this vessel wasn't meant for the task at hand. It's not meant for defense; it's not meant for rescue. It's a mobile launching platform. It must be that this cart was all that was available to the character.

So, the platform does have a means of defense, or of offense -- but it's not an ideal one. The rockets are clumsy, and they only shoot straight up. To fire to the left or the right, the player needs to reposition the whole cart. This is, of course, the codified design of the Space Invaders clone, but here it makes a kind of sense that it never does elsewhere. Furthermore, the awkwardness of the platform is just a little bit funny -- which lends all the more pathos and tension to the scenario.

Mechanically, Star Avenger 4 could hardly be simpler: Space Invaders, with its sideways motion overladen with lock-and-key busywork -- but experientially, it feels unusually fresh. Thanks to the presentation, the action feels purposeful, consequential. The game is an elegant little portrait of suspense, that certainly could be built up and expanded, but could hardly be improved other than by tweaking the enemy motion and attacks.

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Star Avenger III	Star Avenger 4	(Overview)
Star Avenger series

Story

N/A

Instructions

Destroy or avoid the alien invaders!

Scout the lunar surface; try to rescue the research scientists, and return them to the lunar base.

• Right/Left arrows: drive in those directions
• Enter: Fire missile upward

Credits

By Alan Caudel and Adam Tyner.

Availability

This game is not known to have been distributed in any form, prior to its addition to the Archive.

Archive History

After an earlier wave of rediscoveries, on July 13 2011 Alan Caudel provided another archive of previously missing Game-Maker material, including the following:

Alan! Alan B-Day Alan '95 Alan '96 Bear Fun Show Benny Bone!

CGA Hell Doom Off The Page DD4: Canadian Boxing Day Frisbounce Godzilla Hamsterman

Jon '95 Kozmo Kat The Legend of Budd Mr. Berkel Derkel! Mister Spiff IV Nathan Rocks Ninja

Palladia: The Game Power Budd! Power Flux Robo-Wars Ski Star Avenger Star Avenger III

Star Avenger 4 Star Wars Stickman!!! Die Stickman Die!! Trees Twister, argh! What the...?!?

Links

• Play Star Avenger 4 online

Downloads

• Star Avenger 4 (87 kB)