#llamasoft

Trip-A-Tron

"Planet earth needs you.... Hostile aliens have used genetic engineering to mutate camels from normally harmless beasts into 90 foot high, neutronium shielded, laser-spitting death camels!!"

Attack of the Mutant Camels (1983) artwork by Steinar Lund.

Iridis Alpha (C64)

Developed/Published by: Llamasoft Released: 1986 Completed: n/a Completion: Played it so, so much and still only managed a measly score of 8740.

The thing that strikes me most about Jeff Minter after, by this point, playing nearly every game that he released until 1987, his most prolific period, is his contradictions. His games have wacky narratives and comical graphics, but also have complex designs. Then despite those complex designs, they lack strict rules to game feel, and can feel not just sloppy and frustrating but almost unfinished in some cases–like half-formed ideas, untested by anyone but Minter himself. And Minter would be quick to attack on being accused of this–clapping back in his newsletters, in a public spat with Zzap 64–but by all accounts otherwise an incredibly gracious person with a ton of time for his fans.

With that in mind, it’s kind of hard, frankly, to not be frustrated with Minter’s progress in this period. To not question if there’s some sort of unconscious self-sabotage in his releases from the high point of Ancipital, with Mama Llama and Batalyx simply incomprehensible. It feels like there’s a chip on Minter’s shoulder; that in his mind he’s showing that games are more than just action adventures where you pick up objects and take them to another room or shooters where you shoot everything you can see, but his designs are so uncompromising that no one can follow him where he’s going. And yet where he’s going often seems led by whim rather than reason.

Which brings us to Iridis Alpha. A second attempt at an overhaul of the Defender-a-like after Sheep In Space, which has all of the issues discussed above, Iridis Alpha pushes things even further than Mama Llama in terms of complexity, but is actually controllable at all, so it’s at least got that.

You play a pair of “gilbys” which are robots that either whizz around like the ship from Defender or which walk back on forth on land shooting bullets in the air like a popcorn popper if you land. Your goal is, ultimately, to survive all the waves of enemies on a level and then move to the next one.

However.

After the first 3-wave level, you’re doing this with both Gilbys at the same time, one on the top screen, one on the bottom, and you switch between them by flying through warp holes left by the enemies you kill. You have to switch between each ship regularly because if you don’t, you build up entropy in the side you’re not controlling, which leads to a death.

In addition to this, you can’t just blast wildly. Every enemy you kill gains health, which is good, because as usual you die if you take too many hits. However it’s also bad, because if you gain too much health, you also die. Meaning that you either have to take some hits or land on the ground so your Gilby can discharge some of their power (which eventually leads to a mini-game where you can gain extra lives.)

There also is an extremely complex level map that I will simply express to you now that I do not understand.

The thing that strikes any player of Iridis Alpha is that it honestly feels very good to play. Your gilby stays locked in the center of the screen; acceleration and speed feels good, the auto-fire is rewarding, and while it’s a little annoying trying to take off from the ground when you’ve landed, it’s not insurmountable. Within the first waves you’re only controlling a single Gilby, so you start to pick up the energy managing mechanics. You think–adding entropy to this won’t be too hard. I can do this.

Anyway then the next thing that happens is that the third wave features ships, "lickers", that stick to you and drain your health until you explode, and they seem to do this immediately, unfailingly and be nearly impossible to shake off so you lose all your lives and have to start again.

It is the closest, it feels, that Minter has come to straight up telling the player to fuck off.

The lickers appear. This person's game is already over, they just don't know it yet.

A game like Mama Llama is simply idiosyncratic; Hell Gate is simply pushing intensity as far as it can go. But this is naked contempt. Minter has created a hard game that requires optimum concentration, but he won’t actually even let you play it to the fullest unless you can beat a truly cruel difficulty spike that isn’t even fun in the name of making it brutally clear that he’s making a “thinking man’s shooter.”

You see, the trick here is that it’s a harsh lesson in that you can’t just use auto-fire the whole time. In order to survive this wave, you have to learn to manoeuvrer your gilby at the maximum speed you can manage, avoid the ships in front of you, and quickly turn and fire briefly to spawn lickers, who begin to track you, but die if they don’t touch you within a second. Fire constantly, you spawn them in front and too many. Don’t go fast enough, they get you. Go too fast and they fly off screen before they die.

It’s probably the worst brick wall I’ve ever faced in a video game. This isn’t, say, an exacting jump in The Lost Levels; this is having to track several things at once while having complete mastery of controls. Managing it with one gilby is a nightmare and I certainly haven’t reached the point where I can do it with two–once you unlock the “full” game they show up with regularity and you have to beat the third wave licker gauntlet for a second time upside down, providing a second difficulty spike and by that point, honestly, the game feels to chaotically unfair to want to push through.

It is astonishingly frustrating, because otherwise the game has an interesting design and feels good! You start to wonder if there’s some kind of unpleasant gatekeeping here; notably the number of enemies left in a level is listed in hexadecimal so it’d be gibberish to anyone except another programmer.

The message is clear: you aren’t part of the club. The question is how much you want to try to be.

Will I ever play it again? For me, there's a limit. The lickers are it.

Final Thought: Unusually, there actually sort of is a club for Iridis Alpha, unlike, say, Mama Llama, and the very few members seem invested in having you join it. You can read an entire book that goes over the assembly code of the game–I would argue possibly the least commercial book ever published–and there’s even a YouTube video from someone laboriously trying to explain how to play it that seems to be narrated by Jerry Springer (though he doesn’t make a point of explaining how to get past the licker ships, absurdly.) There’s even an unlisted video I found that’s another play guide too! 

I appreciate this kind of thing, but seeing a rare few putting this kind of effort to express the artistry of Iridis Alpha only makes me more disappointed in what it is, a game that no human past 1987, who hasn’t just stumped up £12.95 saved up from their paper round, is going to put their time in to get past the third wave in. Christ I played it for days on end and I can’t do it consistently and using rewind feels like a cheat.

There are more missed opportunities in Minter’s career, but this might be the most insane own goal. 

‘Gridrunner’

[ATARI 8-BIT / C64 / VIC-20] [USA] [MAGAZINE] [1983]

“Gridrunner is a series of shoot 'em up games written by Jeff Minter/Llamasoft. The original Gridrunner was first published for the Commodore Vic 20 in 1982, and ported to various 8-bit computer platforms. It is the developer's longest running series, and remains one of his most enduringly popular, with eight titles released between 1982 and 2018.

(...)Llamasoft released Gridrunner in 1982 for the unexpanded VIC-20. The game was written over the course of a single week, which Minter refers to as "the best week of work I've ever done." Although it draws its inspiration from the arcade game Centipede with the concept of a snake-like enemy descending the screen through a series of obstacles (mushrooms in centipede, pods in Gridrunner) it plays much faster. Versions of the game appeared for several of the home computers of the early 1980s.” ~Wikipedia