Is Sabre Wulf a bit naff?
Go on, I'm feeling controversial.
I have never, ever liked Sabre Wulf. It looks pretty nice but even back in the day I found it a tedious and frustrating game to play. Its flaws are numerous:
I honestly can't see why the game was released to such acclaim, nor why it's still held in such high regard today. I'd be interested to hear your opinions/insults :)
I have never, ever liked Sabre Wulf. It looks pretty nice but even back in the day I found it a tedious and frustrating game to play. Its flaws are numerous:
- You can only attack left and right, leaving you totally defenceless going up and down.
- Enemies frequently spawn on top of you, killing you before you can react.
- You can get instantly killed by enemies you can't see when moving onto another screen.
- Sprawling, dull map with way too many tight, boring corridors. Atic Atac felt more structured and explorable than this.
- Everywhere looks exactly the same! Maze games are fine if there's actually landmarks or variation in the scenery.
I honestly can't see why the game was released to such acclaim, nor why it's still held in such high regard today. I'd be interested to hear your opinions/insults :)
Comments
- It's part of the gameplay and I don't see it as a problem (also see following point)
- Not in my experience; if you proceed in up/down direction while waving your sabre around (oo-er) you will get rid of enemies anyway
- That might only happen (not frequently in my experience) if you leave and re-enter a screen immediately
- I guess that's due to the fact that the map is supposed to resemble a maze in a jungle, hence the cramped areas and corridors
- Partially agree - that's one of the reasons I like Atic Atac even more (see below) - but again, that's a jungle we are speaking of, and honestly, there's not much space for other things than vegetation... However, there are some graphical hints to make you understand whether you are at the edge of the map (mountain ranges) or at the center (rock walls)
That said, I like Atic Atac even more: you get to play with three different characters, each with their own peculiarities (weapons, secret passages etc.), maze is much less linear with different floors and doors needing keys to be opened, there are objects to let you get rid of otherwise invulnerable enemies.
But that does not mean I dislike Sabre Wulf. Far from it :)
Author of A Yankee in Iraq, a 50 fps shoot-’em-up—the first game to utilize the floating bus on the +2A/+3,
and zasm Z80 Assembler syntax highlighter.
Member of the team that discovered, analyzed, and detailed the floating bus behavior on the ZX Spectrum +2A/+3.
A few Spectrum game fixes.
Now, was Sabre Wulf a bit naff in 1984?
I've just looked at Infoseek for the games released in 1984 with a similar score or higher. There are like 3 pages of them, and Sabre Wulf fits there very well. This was a time when the official Pac Man game was released on a 16k spectrum with an ok reception.
So, I'd probably say that it wasn't too bad in 1984.
However, it's not my kind of game, but if I had it in 1984, I'd probably played it for a while.
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In fact, the only time I've ever actually made a map was when my friend and I decided we needed to map out Soul of a Robot. So we sat down and took turns playing the game while the other person drew. However, at one point we got completely stuck and didn't know what to do next. So that exercise proved futile.
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
I guess it was meant to give a form of distance/perspective to it. :)
For me it was another 'style over content' title from Ultimate - but that debate has been done to death already!
It's no Ku-Ku either.
Wham / Beverly Hills Cop /Absolutely Fabulous / Rocky
... and I just stand there non-plussed (or nauseous in the case of Wham).
Anyway I vote it a brilliant game, which was quite advanced compare to a lot of the games around at that time. Looking at he list, the arcade games I immediately see as on par:
(Quality in graphics, technical design and play-ability)
Ad Astra
Airwolf
Beaky and the Egg snatchers
Boulder Dash
Bruce Lee
Chuckie Egg
Combat Lynx...
Ok got bored, its seems like the year of quality stuff where the big boys seem to be pulling out the stops and upping the game by the them. Gone were the single screen, 8x8 pixel graphics and in came the flip screen / scrolling larger 'sprited' stuff.
@luny@mstdn.games
https://www.luny.co.uk
Hilariously I'd agree about style over content with most Ultimate titles, but not so much Saber Wulf, and a lot of the problems in the OP's post I didn't suffer from either. I found myself able to defend myself from left to right whilst moving up and down, it is very much possible to do so, and it's not ideal by a long shot, but it's doable, and a part of the game one must get used to, to be good at it...
The actual "Wulf" could be a complete bast*rd in which it'd knock you over before you realized it was even there, but then again there were also times when it'd stand there like an idiot....
Having said that, I equally struggled to get in to Atic Atac too, but I suspect if I had actually bought those two games (rather than, um, er, "borrowing" them), I would have persevered longer to get much more out of them.
In the end, once maps and Infy Lives pokes appeared in mags, I spent much more time getting better playing (and completing) Sabre Wulf, to much satisfaction. So in the end, I would still rate it highly.
I know times were different back then and you really needed to dedicate time playing games over and over in order to get good and progress (also true of arcade games), but I can't help thinking many were just too hard - to their own detriment.
These days we're much more used to getting so far in a game and then being able continue on after we "die", and the difficulty is set accordingly so that you make reasonable progress over a suitably satisfying number of playing hours.
What? Oh come on. Maybe the later 'Ultimate' (US Gold) games were. But the early arcades were full of game play. They all had content. Even the controversial Nightshade, which to me was an old Ultimate style arcade with a modern perspective style graphics. It had the changing monsters, the different viruses and their affects. People only whinged cos tey kept using there new engines, which is odd as the critics were happy to praise other games which were in 2d or scrolling, which you could argue were just the same old engines from the past. To me it was the ideas and the game play that made their games.
@luny@mstdn.games
https://www.luny.co.uk
Not disputing that at all, Jet-Pac is still one of my all time fave pick up and play Speccy games, but Lunar Jetman was sh*t. I liked Psssst!, but was never a fan of Cookie. Atic Atac, and Sabrewulf are great, no arguments there. Underwurlde is OK, aaaaaand…..Buuuuuut…….I also thought TranzAm was a bit cack as well tbh. So out of 17 actual titles that got released I only really like 5 and a half, or there about. So really I am still pointing wards "Most" of Ultimate's titles. Pretty much all the rest were the angular plod fests we "fondly" remember them for. Surpassed by Ocean, and sadly even Mastertronic in that department if you ask me.
I just don't think they were all that really, and the games released later bored the living sh*t out of me.
I'm kind of the same.
Jetpac was brilliant and is one of the greatest 16K titles ever. I played it over and over, and it's still a very good pick up and play game today.
Atic Atac was fun. I even enjoyed Tranz-Am for a bit.
Sabre-Wulf just felt like a very pretty yet average explore-em-up and never hooked me, but I can get why a lot of people loved it.
Lunar Jetman was bilge.A really, really poor game.
Knight Lore and Alien 8 both looked fantastic... But I found the game-play to be average at best. Once the appeal of the graphics wore off it both were very average games underneath it all. I never bothered with Gunfright or Nightshade.
They seemed to get by on reputation and hype; beautifully designed 'big box' cassettes did make you want to pick up and buy the games, and a lot of effort went into the overall packaging.
For me other companies produced more quality software over a longer period. As Boozy says, Ocean Software were one, and for me, Hewson were another. Ultimate never did anything special with the Beeper either, other developers made massive innovations there with probably the weakest part of the ZX Spectrum hardware.
I don't much like Cookie, which is a shame as it's the only cartridge I own.
Although the company lost it's way a bit towards the end, before that the Stampers themselves were responsible for 13 games over a 4 year period! After 1986 they were gone! Just think about that - they were only around for 4 years and the technical quality of their games at that time was way ahead of most of the crowd. It's only in the second half of the 80s that others pushed the platform more.
Many decry them for the whole isometric genre, but how can such innovation possibly be seen as a negative? It was truly jaw-dropping in 1984! I can accept that some don't enjoy Knight Lore, but I loved it and played it to death! I've always prefered that to Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy... :P
And I don't accept that Lunar Jetman is rubbish.
Yes, it's frustratingly difficult - but that was a problem with many a good game back then. Consider the ambitious and varied game design concepts: flying, shooting, driving, object collection for difference uses, teleporting, bombing, missile attack etc. And the multitude of different aliens and the polish of other graphics. This game was released in 1983! Show me any other game that came close back then!
From Software would like a quiet word ;-)
As for Sabre Wulf - back in the day I was absolutely stoked to own it but, if I'm being honest, even back then it wasn't as good as Atic Atac. Still a good game though.
It was my first £9.95 game and I would always treasure it as long as I lived until I sent it to the TZXVault for preservation (it had a different loading scheme to all the copies that had been archived prior).
I can see why they were regarded as 'the best' - but I just didn't think they were at the time
I never bought any of their games either, but I picked up JetPac from a bargain bin!
I played Alien 8 and Knightlore on my friends Spectrum, and yes, they both looked amazing... But after a few goes the veneer of the visuals wore-off and I found the actual 'game' to be very average. I never even bothered borrowing them. At the time I wasn't drawn in - now I look at them as "tech demo's"
Jetman was just too random to be playable. It felt difficult but not because it was difficult, it was kind of unfair. For proper difficulty see Airwolf! :-)
2 games from '83 off the top of my head impressed me more than anything Ultimate offered: Scuba Dive and Night Gunner.
I always felt that Hewson, Ocean and Durrell turned out more impressive and playable software
And I still stand by 'Beeper' comment, Ultimate didn't push that piece of hardware at all
Joffa's 'plip-plop' engine and the drivers that Follin came up were truly genius.
Of course no-one here is saying others didn't do as well as Ultimate. There was plenty of skills out there, some just came a bit later. but that was down to age.
I never understood the QWERT key layout, that seemed so lazy when spending so much effort on a game like Jetpac. (It meant you only needed a single IN statement to read in all of the key presses for the player.)
Maybe they just thought everyone would have a joystick.
@luny@mstdn.games
https://www.luny.co.uk
*Cough! Cough!...…..Sandy White *Cough Cough!...….1983 :p