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 future space shooters to follow.
In its design and narrative, Star Avenger 4 recalls both Space Invaders 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.
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 landscape cuts through a deep and layered perspective, rolling from the foreground back to the horizon.
demonstrating the bleak loneliness of the player's journey. Besides the player's character there's nothing out there, no one to turn to. Makes the player's mission, to rescue a small group of people and cart them across that landscape to safety, feel significant. Contextualizing the firepower with the character sprite and its animation.
The mechanics work jointly with the presentation.
It's a simple mechanism, but adding a delivery element to what would otherwise be a very fundamental shooter changes the narrative flow in a significant and meaningful way -- and in a way that may actually trump Choplifter or Defender in expressive value.
What Star Avenger 4 presents is a portrait of suspense.
Rescue stranded people and bring them home. More than just a shooter.
Tension. suspense.
Mechanically it's just a lock-and-key situation, but thematically, experientially it feels fresh and nuanced. Lends weight, purpose, consequence to the player's action. Shooting for a reason. Playing for a reason. It's functional, in order to protect the player long enough to ferry precious cargo.
This seems to follow up on the third level in Star Avenger III.
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
- Godzilla
- Jon '95
- Kozmo Kat
- The Legend of Budd
- Mr. Berkel Derkel!
- Mister Spiff IV
- Ninja
- Palladia: The Game
- Power Budd!
- Power Flux
- Robo-Wars
- Ski
- Star Avenger
- Star Avenger III
- Star Avenger 4
- Star Wars
- Stickman!!! Die
- Trees
- Twister, argh!
- What the...?!?
Links
Downloads
- Star Avenger 4 (87 kB)
