Zarch

Zarch is hard.

Most games work on the theory, give em a couple of easy levels, get them used to it, then ramp up the difficulty to keep interest. Most games you can get to level 3 on on first play. Zarch (David Braben, Firebird, 1987) takes that rule and drops it from a great height.

There’s an (interesting?) debate in some gaming fraternities about simulation vs. gameplay. Zarch simulates a very convincing physics model, the relationships between thrust, air-position, tilt and gravity make flying really enjoyable, and there’s a nice sense of ‘oh my god I’m going to crash’, just before the exponential build up of thrust fires you away from the ground, if your lucky. It’s really fun, like virtual bungee jumping.

But then if it were a simulation, surely nobody in their right mind would build a hovercraft that exploded if it so much as looked at a blade of grass. It’s a game, and despite it’s 3d modeling, it’s only representing ‘the world’ insofar as it needs to for the game. Sure there are decoration in the little houses, trees (although I’m sure pines and palms don’t normally grow so close to each other) and wind-turbines (at least that’s what I think they are) which help build a representation of a simple utopian/idyllic rural setting. The muted natural colours selected from the Archimedes 256 pallet immediately set it aside from the often cartoony style or cmykrgbw world of earlier Acorn games.

If Zarch was forced into a genre, it would be low-polygon 3d action shooter. It’s most familiar predecesors are Elite** (David Braben/Ian Bell ), Defender (Eugene Jarvis, Williams, 1980) and Thrust (Jeremy Smith* Firebird 1986) ). Not all elements got taken in, there’s no tractor-beam from Thrust, just great physics, and no saving of humanoids from Defender, just very fast, hair-trigger controls. What it genetically takes from Elite, is that you only need, erm… 7 polygons to describe a spaceship.

Zarch was later released on other platforms (Amiga, Atari ST, Spectrum and Ms-dos) in 1988 with the name changed to Virus and some minor gameplay elements altered - most notably in the Dos version the map no longer updates with your craft as the central point, but displays your position as a similar pixel moving over a fixed map, making it much harder to spot where you are (and incidently, no longer making the player-character the center of the universe - not a good thing).

Many thanks to Tom at Arculator for implementing the scan-lines on/off in version 0.4 of his archimedes emulator which enabled the clean screen-captures, and other help with this review.

*Jeremy Smith who went on to create the historic Exile, and perhaps isn’t the Jeremy Smith who set up Core?

** macos version of Elite Oolite recently launched…

23/10/2005 | Games, New Media | + Comment | Trackback |