Message-ID: <174@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 3-Aug-83 23:45:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.174
Posted: Wed Aug  3 23:45:23 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 5-Aug-83 12:43:32 EDT
Organization: Bell Labs, Columbus
Lines: 97

After hunting for it for weeks, we finally found Q*bert for sale
today and snapped it up.  (We paid $35 for it at Gold Circle.
It was "on sale" from the "regular" price of $40.)

After trying it out, I'm pretty underwhelmed.  They couldn't have
done much less and still called it Q*bert.  Here is a review:

The really neat things about the arcade game are the sound effects
(the coin clinking into the coin slow, Q*bert swearing under his
breath, the klunk when something falls off the side, etc) and the
comic balloon with the swear symbols in it when Q*bert gets hit.
None of this is present in the Atari 2600 version, which is made
by Parker Brothers.

The screen is a 6x6 triangle, of which the bottom row runs slightly
off the bottom of the screen.  The cubes are irregular, and they
don't look very realistic (the tops look detached from the sides).
Q*bert's figure is reasonable, but all red.  He looks either left
or right, and his nose is angled up or down, to show the direction
he's facing.  There are only a few colors that ever show up, two
of which are black and gray.  Coily and Sam look reasonable, but
the balls tend to look smashed when sitting on a square.  If Coily
and Sam appear at the same time, they flicker.

The controls are not what I expected.  You have to hold the joystick
diagonally, with the fire button away from you, and move the handle
diagonally (which is orthogonal to the program).  I expected them to
use the 4 diagonal positions of the joystick, but they didn't.
The stick does not feel nearly as bad as Atari 2600 PacMan, but it's
still not very good.  Many times we tried to move in a given direction
and either it wouldn't move at all or it moved in a different direction.
Bolting the joystick to a table would probably help a lot in this game -
just pressing it against the floor seemed to help.  You can't hold a
joystick diagonally in your left hand as firmly as you can when it's
square.  The button doesn't do anything except start a new game after
you loes all yoru Q*berts.

The sound effects are the biggest disappointment.  It plays the Q*bert
theme song at the start and after each round, although it doesn't sound
as good as the arcade version (nor as good as the Parker Brothers 2600
Frogger theme).  Instead of swearing, Q*bert makes a noise not that
different from the "raspberry" that Space Invaders makes when you get
hit, and the three 5x7 dot characters !#
				       ? appear on the screen (arranged
as you see here) without a balloon around them.  Depending on the
background color, the !#? may not even be visible.  It does make a
fairly convincing whistling sound as Q*bert or Coily fall off the
edge, and there is a small thump when they hit bottom.

The game: it's less than the arcade version.  The purple ball turns
into Coily and can be lured off the side.  (He's too easy to lure
off the edge in both games.)  The red ball will stomp you.  The green
ball gives you points when you catch it, and freezes everybody for a
few seconds while you run around and touch cubes.  (The screen flashes
weird "negative" colors during this and you hear sound effects.)  The
other green figure, Sam, turns cubes back to their original color and
scores points for you when you catch him.  Sam and Coily make the same
gargling sound effect when they move - it's kind of an unpleasant noise.
There was no sign of Slick, Ugh, or the other ugly guy in the arcade game.

You get 4 boards at each of 5 levels.  In some levels, if you hit a
cube again it goes back to the original color, so you have to hit
every cube an odd number of times.  In others, it goes back to the
intermediate color or the first color, where you have 2 colors to do.

The game seemed very quickly done.  Often the score (and spare Q*bert's)
disappear from the top of the screen, for no reason.  The game starts
immediately after you power it on or hit reset.  The game select and
B difficulty don't do anything.  A difficulty supposedly makes it more
or less hard.  There is no two player version - just the one game.
When you get smashed jumping onto a square, your new Q*bert starts life
by falling into (and changing the color of) the square you were trying
to get.  There is no audible warning when Q*bert can move - you just have
to keep trying until the joystick responds (there is about a 2 second
pause at the start of the game and when a new Q*bert starts.)  There
is no indication when you change a level, nor any level status indicator.

As for the hardness of the game, it seemed MUCH easier than the arcade
version (except for the problems with the joystick).  Everything else
moves very slow, and I can move very fast.  I can change about half the
board before the first monster comes out.  Within a dozen or so games,
we were getting scores of around 19000 (we lost the last Q*bert on the
first board of the second level each time).  There is no question, however,
that the different levels get MUCH harder.  I'm convinced that PacMan
style patterns are the only way to win at this game, if only because
of the "touch each cube an odd number of times" requirement.  I also
noticed that each game starts with the same random number seed, because
Sam always comes down in the same place right after you do in the first
board.  We had it set to novice - the only difference with "expert" is
apparently that the red balls don't appear for novices.

Overall recommendation - wait for the price to come down.  (This may
take until after Christmas.)  And don't bother unless you have a
better joystick than the standard one, or can firmly attach it to
a fixed surface.

	Mark