AKKA ARRH - Cascade

Jeff Minter's latest psychedelic screen-wiper is a remake of an unreleased Atari cabinet demo. By all accounts, the original code of Akka Arrh was pushed out to a small test market in 1982 only to be deemed 'too difficult' by the assembled consumers. The junked version of this failed coin-gobbler was recently made available on the Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration; Minter's delirious take on wave shooting is, we are promised, coming soon. 

Laser Blast

Another stark Atari 2600 Game Room alumni; Laser Blast is notable for being an early effort by Pitfall designer David Crane, and for a pounding monotony that easily feeds into attainable high-scoring. Players control a single golden flying saucer, cursed to roam featureless expanses, frying trios of ground based resistance with pulsing purple death rays. Clock up a thousand points, easily accomplished once your multiplier starts to multiply, and you get a reinforcement. On a peak point earn you'll be chalking up ninety points per kill, adding an extra try for every four screens cleared. Once you've got yourself locked into a twitch and shoot pattern, you'll be near invincible.

The game doesn't change either; it's always the same enemies, trapped in the same world. Eventually your real foe becomes complacency. You'll break out of locked extermination sequence, trying to showboat, causing your craft to be mercilessly shot out the sky. A short, sharp shock, forcing you to readjust back to mechanical input. You must comply. Successful interaction with Laser Blast is rapidly shifting into place, and firing. Pause, or miss your shot, and you'll be punished with a lethally instant retaliation blast from below. Your only real means of self-expression exists when you fail. Once destroyed, enemy attack sequences freeze allowing you, if you so wish, to adjust the fall of your dying craft so that your wreckage lands on the enemy. They won't even attempt to move. They expect to die. Although terminally basic, Laser Blast is interesting because it exists as a kind of benign hypnotic funk. You're constantly rewarded with points and lives, simply for memorising a brief series of button taps. The game never gets harder or easier. It's just a static, endless, war of attrition. Who will get bored first?

Yars' Revenge

Bundled somewhere in Microsoft's interactive hawker Game Room (released today) is Yars' Revenge, an 80s vintage Atari shooter by Howard Scott Warshaw. Players assume the role of a buzzing insect ship tasked with vanquishing a shielded floating face. A thick line of graphical corruption intentionally runs down the length of the screen, and the soundscape seethes with throbbing jeopardy. Divorced of any mechanic explanation, Yars' Revenge is an exercise in the nightmarishly abstract.

Shooting the face's shield only ever seems to make it angry, a state that eventually causes your enemy to fling itself wildly about the screen, hoping for a collision. Chugging bullets are infrequently launched that track and follow your fly, remorselessly zeroing in on your twitchy wandering. Moving into the corruption prompts the white noise soundtrack to sharpen, suggesting decay for anyone caught lingering. Die, and you get a brief readout of context free numbers. Eventually you work out that to damage the face you must cross the screen and begin nibbling at it, this feasting cues up a calamity cannon. Shots must be carefully lined up, firing where you expect the cornered face to be. Hit, and the screen explodes, before instantly dumping you back into an assault. Yars' Revenge wants to induce stress; nothing about the game encourages any sense of comfort or safety. It's all shrill noises, and relentless hysteria tasks.