indie games

The Goodwill by my house is a well of pleasant surprises, from a $3.00 unopened, factory sealed copy of Torchwood: Children of Earth to a well-kept VHS copy of Dark Crystal. Yesterday on entering I noticed a glass cabinet by the register. The first thing that leapt at me was Spider-Man for the Sega Genesis. Decent game; I have the very similar Master System version. I don’t need it. Still, they had Genesis games! On closer inspection I also saw a stack of NES cartridges. The spines faced away, so I could only see the top game — some sort of top-down racer. The cashier was busy, so I waited.

On the way out I flagged down the lady and asked to flip through the games. The selection did not inspire me. there was a Wheel of Fortune game. There were two copies of another racing game. There were a couple of licensed games. And then at the very bottom, a well-worn rental copy of Air Fortress. That was it; though I had only played it in emulated snatches, I knew that I wanted to look deeper. The game was fairly obscure; it had a strange structure and mechanics; it was by eventual Nintendo second party Hal Labs. It’s just, when you’re flipping from one eccentric ROM to the next it’s hard to focus on any game for too long. Having the physical cartridge would give me an excuse to do so.

Air Fortress is a curious game, and obscure in more than one sense. Its director, designer, and programmer Hiroaki Suga didn’t seem to do much else. He ported the second Eggerland (or as we know it, Lolo) game from the MSX to the Famicom Disk System. (Later the first Lolo for the NES proper would compile the best levels from all of these earlier games into a single megamix for Western audiences.) He was in charge of New Ghostbusters II, and wrote music for a pinball game and a Game Boy version of Shanghai.

His game was released in severely limited quantities. The history of the NES being as opaque as it is, there are many conflicting version of the story — but according to one version Hal produced just 20 copies to sit alongside the NES test launch in 1985. In 1987 Hal pushed it out again for a larger official print run of 385 copies. As the story goes, people had to order the cartridge directly from Hal Labs — and in turn Hal would throw in a wall poster. Finally in 1989 the game entered regular production, and even was selected for a major Nintendo-sponsored game-playing competition — but its time was past and it never really gained traction or widespread recognition.

So check this out. The game is at least as old as Zelda and Metroid, and it feels like a postmodern indie retro game. It starts off with a Zelda-style story scroll that you’d swear was deliberately ripped off of that game but which was more likely parallel development. The character is named Hal Bailman because, well, Hal Labs and… Bailman? I don’t get that part. It’s a cool name, though.

The game has, for the time, an eccentric structure; it alternates between side-scrolling shooting segments and… well, not platformer areas. And it’s not quite action-adventure. Let’s just call it action-adventure platforming, though, to make the point and move on. During the shooter segments you bulk up on the game’s two kinds of power ups (of which we will speak more soon), then the adventure-platforming segments are where we see the real Hal-style contextual puzzle level design come into play.

The hesitation in that last paragraph comes from the game’s unusual mechanics; in the platformer sections Mr. Bailman has two main moves: shoot, and fly. He also can walk along the ground, slowly. The D-pad is used for all motion, and both buttons shoot. One shoots a standard projectile; the other shoots bombs. The effect of this control scheme is a little like the dual-stick, dual-trigger setup of modern first-person shooters — except minus a dimension.

There are two on-screen counters: one for energy, and one for bombs. These two counters correspond to the two power-ups. You can use the bombs at any time, and they can be replenished; they work sort of like the missiles in Metroid, except more so. Some things can only be destroyed with a bomb, and some things are better disposed of with one. Energy is an interesting thing, worthy of its own paragraph.

Energy serves two roles: not-dying, and fuel. Think of the way breath meters work in so many water levels, where a character’s life will drain to represent depleting oxygen — and often the less life the character has, the less breath available for submersion. Similar concept here, except we’re talking up instead of down. As you fly, your energy temporarily depletes — making you all the more vulnerable. As you sustain injury you lose freedom of motion, and you need to think harder about what you’re doing.

So there’s a minor juggling act. Next let’s add gravity and momentum, so the player needs to master the physics of the jet pack — all while avoiding injury and keeping an eye on fuel.

While we’re speaking of momentum, let’s conserve it — meaning recoil. When the character shoots, floating around or otherwise, he is repelled in the opposite direction. The game makes use of this property alongside everything else to construct clever, deliberate logistical problems. Say, you float down a well with spikes at the bottom and along the left wall. To move ahead you need fly below an underhang, just pixels above the tips of the spikes — yet that narrow passage is blocked by a robot sentry. If you shoot the sentry without thinking, chances are you will fly back into the spikes. If you lose control of your flight, chances are you’ll graze the bottom spikes. If you dawdle to think about it, chances are your fuel will run out.

So the levels are nice. The build-up of new concepts is very slow, and indeed there aren’t many to play with — but then the game keeps throwing in new loopholes. When you beat the first fortress and destroy the core, you continue a screen or two to the right and board your little, er, space scooter, which has somehow found its way to the exit. Presto; on to level two. When you beat the second fortress, the screen begins to blink and shake. After way too much time wandering you realize the place is going to blow up. There’s no countdown timer; you just have to intuit that things aren’t right, and bolt back to the entrance fast as you can. Otherwise, game over!

The game’s map designers had more storied careers than its director; the head one, Akio Hanyu, went on to program several of the Kirby games and the first two Smash Bros. games. The others worked on Sylvalion and the GBA e-Reader. (Remember that thing?)

Aesthetically the presentation is all over. The game looks bright, simple, and appealing, but hardly sophisticated. Then you look closer and you notice the backgrounds. What could be a flat color or repeating pattern, and in another game would be, will instead be a complex web of cross-hatching or dithering, the scratches getting denser toward the walls and more scattered in the center of a room. The character seems to have all of four frames of animation, but does he need much more? The same uninspiring music repeats through the whole game, or at least seems to; only the space opera bombast of the main theme really stands out.

Should you die, and you should, the game has a password continue — a short one; maybe only half a dozen characters. Considering its vintage (again possibly pre-Icarus), that’s novel stuff as well.

Air Fortress is a progressive game from an era when that didn’t make much sense. It trades spectacle for concept — and the kind of concept that only someone who designs games or has been playing them for long enough to look at them analytically (much longer than they had existed at the time it was made) would really notice or appreciate. It’s actually a very simple concept, that raises several questions about the assumptions that go into most design — and that works largely because of the game’s careful, didactic level design, that helps to illustrate how very simple the concept is yet how complex its ramifications can be at any given moment.

That concept? That you have a jetpack and a gun, and that every simple little thing you do has consequences. Physics and the energy system make sure of that. I mentioned how the controls bring to mind modern first-person shooters. The energy system calls to mind the “shield” innovation in Halo, and the attention to the physics of every motion is still fairly novel after twenty years.

As I play Air Fortress I think of Fishbane and Hero Core. This might well be their contemporary. The decisions here sort of make the game feel like a modern literate gamer’s idea of 8-bit design, with the benefit of a lifetime of hindsight and with the limited resources and attention span of most indie designers. It’s designed just far enough to make its point, play with its notions, and move along.

These days, that’s all I ask from a game — and it’s all I really have the patience to absorb.