Nuke
Release type: Incomplete
Release date: N/A (Last revised July 1998)
Levels: 1
Author: Yurik Nestoly
Related games: N/A
As these descriptions tend to hammer home, Game-Maker is not an ideal environment for scrolling shooters. As a codified genre, the grammar of the shooter is fairly inflexible and is not readily adapted to Game-Maker's adventure-focused design language. Making a shooter in Game-Maker is like hacking The Legend of Zelda so that it plays like R-Type. In principle the feat may be possible, even impressive -- but its road to success is going to be rough.
The best examples in this engine tend to be the games that approach the genre laterally. Rather than directly replicate the structure of a shooter, they borrow a few key elements and then build them a new context out of the native rocks and soil. To this end, Nuke recalls some of the more fascinating efforts like Earth vs The Flying Saucers and Star Avenger 4, with their shifted focus toward a situational context beyond just the relationship of projectiles and targets.
Whereas those two examples build on a Defender or Choplifter model of backtracking a hostile environment while nursing a vulnerable payload, Nuke is comparably straightforward: destroy everything in your way. There are hints here at an abandoned or refuted rescue element, with occasional stick-figure civilians; as with all elements of this world, they serve only to perish at the player's hands.
What, then, distinguishes Nuke from a more traditional scrolling shooter is less in the grammatical role that the player undertakes than in the nature of, and the player's relationship with, the entities that the gameworld defines as targets. Typically a horizontal shooter will present three kinds of environmental objects: background architecture, hostile entities, and hostile projectiles. The background architecture is the geography that defines the player's path; some specific elements may be destroyed (e.g. the organic membranes in stage one of Life Force), but largely the architecture exists for a structural purpose: to guide and shape the player's progress. As such, it must largely remain static. In most games, touching the architecture is fatal -- the strictest possible incentive for a player to stay within the lines, and perform the tasks assigned.
In the case of Nuke, the player's relationship with the background architecture is akin to the giant beasts in Rampage: it constitutes a world for you to demolish. As you fire upon buildings, they collapse under the weight of their own debris, sending up plumes of fire. If you want to pass a particularly tall structure, this is your chance -- plunge through, before the chaos settles into a grim skeleton of human endeavor.
Whether you're shooting lasers or dropping bombs, the only real verb here is to destroy -- and yet it is an unusually cathartic destruction, due to the sense of total agency afforded the player within that strict grammatical structure. Given that in traditional game design the primary role of the player is to destroy, for an author to engineer an environment that is so wholly affected by the player's destruction is to provide the player a huge sense of positive feedback. Yes; we recognize your presence and importance within the given framework. Every choice that you make does in fact matter.
It's a bewitching fantasy, and one that as a medium videogames do a better job than most media at propagating. To that end, Nuke does its job as a videogame quite well: it serves more deeply than most similar efforts to mythologize the player's role at the center of the game's purpose. It is a power fantasy writ as large as can be achieved, with the tools at hand. Unfortunately for the spell, it lasts for just a single level. Within that, however, it certainly gets its point across.
Contents
Story[edit]
N/A
Instructions[edit]
- Arrow keys: Fly in those directions
- Enter: Fire laser
- Space Bar: Drop bomb
Credits[edit]
Designed by Yurik Nestoly
Background[edit]
Alan Caudel:
- This was by Yurik. Fly your jet through the city and destroy everything! Press Enter for lasers and Space for bombs.
Availability[edit]
This game is not known to have been distributed in any form, prior to its addition to the Archive.
Archive History[edit]
On August 22, 2012, Alan Caudel tracked down copies of Nuke and Alan Fun Game!, and provided them to the Archive.
Links[edit]
Downloads[edit]
- Nuke (75.5 kB)
