In the early days of gaming there was a small problem with the graphics, in that there really couldn’t be that many moving on the screen at once. A lot of games got around this by faking it, exactly the same as they do today but with far more limited resources, with a well-known example being Space Invaders. Space Invaders had one enemy move every sixtieth of a second, so the entire rack of five by eleven invaders moved a little more quickly than once per second until you started trimming the numbers down. Enemy bullets were accurate but sparse, and the player could only fire a single shot at a time, so although the screen looked like it was packed with danger the real threat came from enemies that targeted where you’d be with just a couple of bullets.
A Peek Into An Arcade Past That Never Happened
Vector graphics games like Asteroids, however, felt far freer of these limitations and could even do good fake 3D, like in Tail Gunner or Battlezone. Soon enough color came along with Tempest and Star Wars being the best remembered of the bunch, but by then games like Robotron were blowing people’s doors off, and even mid-range hits like Mr. Do and Crystal Castles showed far more detail than a vector monitor could display. The tech faded away, not helped at all by being notoriously touchy and sometimes catching on fire, but stil fondly remembered for being a different branch of gaming that never got a chance to fully evolve. Pixeljam has been working to fix that recently with the development of its V99 engine, and after the excellent Utopia Must Fall the second game developed on it exited Early Access today, Grid Ranger.
All Good Things Must Come to a Start with Utopia Must Fall Release Date
Utopia Must Fall is an arcade game yanked from 1983, when color vector graphics were at their peak with games like Star Wars Arcade and Major Havok.
Grid Ranger is your basic “fly into the screen and shoot things” type of game, designed to be small and fast for a bite-sized arcade experience. The player is a pyramid-ish object pointing towards the horizon shooting rapid-fire bullets in a three single lines, one straight ahead and two to either side, designed with full mouse control for precise or twitchy free-range movement, depending on the needs of the moment. The grid of the level is bounded by walls on either side creating a corridor to fly down, and obstacles and enemies pop up to make the journey a bit more crowded. It doesn’t take more than a run or two to understand the color-coding that shows which level objects are destructible or not, and after that it’s a straight-up game of reflexes combined with a little muscle memory to know how to approach the many attack patterns the grid throws your way. Shoot, navigate, collect enough of the occasional drop to earn a new shield, and try not to plow face-first into too many hazards.
For the final major update to bring Grid Ranger out of Early Access it’s added an Infinite mode plus controller support. The Infinite mode is ridiculously playable and similar to the normal mode but without the boss fights, while the controller support is more there for those who want it rather than a recommended method of play. The game isn’t meant to be a Space Giraffe-style magnum opus but rather a dip in, dip out arcade quarter-muncher, booting up fast and exiting just as quickly after you’ve put in a couple rounds, and it works perfectly nicely for this. Just as importantly it’s the second outing for the vector-style V99 engine, and while we may never know what vectors could have become if they’d been given half the love showered on sprites and polygons, it feels great to bask in their neon glow again.
