Review by Shiuming Lai and Wiesbaden Gaming Lab, Germany

UK-based Creature Labs is very proud of its latest game development, carried out for Infogrames, so much so that it sent us an import copy of the North American market Atari Revival pack for PC, featuring among others its new millennium take on Atari's Warlords.

Now anyone over the age of 25 will probably hear alarm bells. People still like listening to old records, because the teeny bopper renditions and trendy re-makes blighting the charts are so dreadful. Games are no different and messing with a good formula often ruins a classic.

Preconceptions aside, let's see how this shapes up. First things first: the box is gorgeous. Glossed, embossed and a holographic type reflective surface on the front which produced nasty streaks when scanned, so here's the somewhat less sparkly back for you to enjoy.

How many Atari gaming fans could walk into a shop and pass that one up? Upon closer study of the packaging and contents I had a sense of déjà vu... Missile Command was produced quite a while ago, under Hasbro's ownership of Atari. I remember getting a demo of this from a magazine cover CD, playing for about 30 minutes and coming away disappointed with the graphics (restricted to 640x480, most annoying) on what should have been a stunner, given the undemanding nature of the game logic itself. Someone should also tell Infogrames that the "cosmetically-enhanced" Atari logo it inherited from Hasbro is naff! The cheesy rounded box has been dropped but the Fuji symbol is still out of proportion at the sides. If old Atari gamers are part of the intended target audience then this will be seen as sacrilege... Fortunately the official Atari web site (http://www.atari.com) has the correct, classical form of the Fuji, exactly as it made its mark in popular culture.

In the deep end
I'm not about to explain the original concept of each game, I'll assume if you're reading you already know. They're not very complicated anyway.

Combat was installed first. Part of my first experience with Atari was playing this on the VCS, 20 years ago, getting soundly thrashed and being amused that if two tanks were lined up face-to-face, it was possible to deflect each other's shots by firing them back out as they entered each other's gun turrets!

This update boasts 3D graphics, lots of power-ups, a range of tanks with different handling characteristics, and network play via LAN or internet. Conceptually it is like a 3D Gauntlet, each of the maze levels being interconnected by a portal orb that you have to find in order to exit the level. As you can see from the box it includes "...the original Combat for the Atari 2600" though I'm not sure where despite having checked the game options and manual several times. For beginners there is a training mode supposedly based on the original levels from the VCS version but it's still 3D and I think this is slightly stretching the definition (if someone knows there is a "real" original version hidden in here please tell us where).

Right from the start I noticed a lot of niggles about this game which interrupted my getting into playing it. Not a good sign, after all, the charm of the old VCS games was their pick-up-and-play quality. First annoyance was having to re-start the game after changing up from 640x480 (very chunky on a 21" monitor) to the maximum 1,024x768. I chose the first level to evaluate its basic game quality before delving into other features. Look at the screen-shots below and you can see it's done in a first-person style 3D. The graphics immediately appear bland and lacking imagination, it all looks like a really old first-person shooter, before programmers got the hang of decent lighting effects.

Get your head around the over-sensitive controls (not to mention the tanks are now hovercraft, therefore you also have to deal with inertia, expect to make heavy use of the emergency brake!) and then you're faced with the steep angle and narrow panorama of the perspective. It simply feels slightly unnatural and closed-in, not helpful in a game where you're supposed to move in all directions. Switch the view to a lower angle and the inflexible camera tracking becomes more evident as entire surfaces disappear revealing the background bitmaps and polygon structures, very disturbing. I soon got bored: the gun-fire is a damp squib, things explode and instantly disappear without trace, enemies also come from off the playfield (airborne) and then the music just becomes irritating.

For me, Combat doesn't cut it as an action game, it didn't hook in the first five minutes and there isn't the arcade feel. It lacks conviction in its design and execution. Too bad because first impressions count and there was promise and potential - I wasn't compelled to try the other game options, how could they bring any improvement if the fundamentals are not right?

In my frustration with Combat I installed Warlords, hoping the distraction would allow me to sub-consciously "get it". To keep my main machine free so I could write my review in "real-time" I installed it under 98 Second Edition on a spare test machine consisting of a PIII 600E at 781 MHz, 256 MB RAM and 32 MB Creative GeForce 256 DDR with NVidia's latest WHQL certified reference driver and Creative's Display Director to pump up the core and memory clocks to 135 MHz and 333 MHz respectively. First, to get in the right frame of mind, I loaded the "classic" mode (developed separately by Digital Eclipse). Expecting an emulation of the VCS version, I was pleasantly surprised to find it is in fact based on the arcade version. It's beautifully done, made to look like the real arcade cabinet with original artwork, even the large monitor scan-line effect is simulated, very authentic indeed.

Pokey-esque sounds blast out accompanying the frenzied pace of action. Think street football: no flashy paraphernalia, just raw energetic play, simple yet difficult to master. For fun, I expanded the atmosphere by routing the Windows Multimedia wave device output through a high quality DSP reverb. This is on my main "power" machine. By this stage I'm getting all tangled up and doing different bits on different machines. Don't attempt to comprehend that yet, I'll explain the significance later!

Creature Labs' updated Warlords
Installation was a breeze - in common with the other games in this pack it requires the original CD to be present each time you want to play. I find this not only inconvenient, in real terms it offers no security in this age of CD-R. Why do publishers still insist on this outdated method? I've already damaged my Unreal Tournament CD beyond repair, due to its permanent residence in one of my drives, and had to buy it again (partly as self-punishment for being careless enough to wreck a CD this way for a second time - hint: CD drives work equally well horizontally or vertically but don't ever change the orientation while the machine is on and the disc potentially spinning). A program launcher comes up before every start so you can tweak options and, more importantly, choose the version to play (classic, which I've just covered, or updated). Resolutions range from 640x480 to 1,280x960, the latter of which puzzled me enough to do some quick maths leading to the mystery of how I manged to totally convince myself and others that my default desktop mode of 1,280x1,024 is 4:3 aspect ratio rather than 1,280x960!

Before I knew it my "quick go" on the simple one player against the machine match had effortlessly idled away 30 minutes. This is much more like it! In stark contrast to Combat, Warlords' key to success is subtlety and dedication to craft, it doesn't attempt to fix something that ain't broke. The graphics are lush, look at the screen-shots and details, the control is finely weighted, the dynamics of the animation are believable and there are fanatical embellishments like the character expressions, somersaulting upon victory and wincing when a fireball gets dangerously close - this is what makes a fantasy scenario engrossing. When fireballs bounce off the sides of the playfield there is a "splashing" effect like water, they have transparency, and when they hit a wall, debris tumbles out, unlike Combat where there is not so much as a shard of space-age alloy (except for when your own tank gets destroyed, as if to rub it in), flames from explosions rise, giving a true feeling of depth in the screen. Catch a fireball, whizz it around the corner and your hand is followed by a realistic red-hot trail of flame, but don't hold on to it too long or the excess energy starts destroying your own walls, faithfully carried over from the original.

Check these screen-shots of the very first level. I was immediately at home with the game mechanics and presentation, nothing stood in my way of playing, only enhancements like the excellent rain effect, plasma style energy bolts, explosions and flashes, subtle but highly effective lighting and shadow rendering, a stirring, but never intrusive, well-engineered soundtrack with medieval/gothic overtones, giving precedence to the pounding game effects. Supercharged fireball impacts are announced with a more substantial explosion further spicing up the audio and the quality of the texture maps is also far superior to those of Combat.

On the bonus rounds you have to shoot the dragon by returning its own fireballs, supercharged (by grabbing them), not as easy as it sounds because not only does it fly around it also swoops up and down, scaling smaller and becoming darker as it goes near the ground and larger and brighter as it comes up. At this point a well-aimed fireball can fry it, do this several times and the creature is satisfyingly destroyed.

The second theme (of which there are ten each with several levels) set in a desert shows off yet more excellent detail with a great sand-storm effect. As befits a modern game, the various options may be called up mid-game and changed at will, everything from resolution (without re-start) to toggling particle and lighting effects, for slower machines. A neat game-play feature: if you find yourself going cross-eyed from the sheer mayhem of textured 3D walls, multiple fireballs, falling stone, passing birds and so on, the grid feature under the video options menu cleverly draws a white 2D grid under the bricks on each castle top, revealing itself as the fireballs blast bricks away. Once again this is a wonderful touch which shows the development team hasn't got carried away dolloping on features without a thought for their potential consequences. There are also two types of castle bricks adding depth to the game, larger bricks take more hits to destroy. Straight from the old-school wisdom of game design, as are the effects of some of the power-ups. Use them strategically to outwit opponents - you can enlarge (or down-size, most unhelpful, this is a power-down!) your shield (just like the bat in Breakout), get multi-shields, reverse fireball trajectories, repair wall damage or even switch castles if yours has taken too much of a battering and left your defences wide open. Power-ups are activated by hitting them with a fireball, quick reflexes are needed because only one power-up is ever on-screen at once and its function "cycles" so you have to hit it at the right time as well!

Ideally a rotary controller like Atari's old paddle devices would be most suited to this game but mouse is a close second-best. Impeccable rodent hygiene is necessary unless you're using an optical model, for the precision and timing required is not forgiving of little skips due to dirty balls and rollers. You have been warned.

Multi-player modes
Just like the original, up to four players can get cosy around one machine. Alternatively, each player can have a separate machine connected by a LAN. Furthermore, Creature Labs has implemented a neat variation called co-operative mode, it's essentially tennis doubles and you have to penetrate the opponents' walls and hit a moving target behind to eliminate players! See the screen-shot immediately above.

Other touches that give Warlords arcade-like quality include the bold messages superimposed over the playfield announcing power-ups, in the same font used on the box. No matter how pretty the icons look, in the heat of the action it really helps a lot to have a verbal or written description to give a clear indication of what it is, apart from the obvious ones like speed-up, which can't be said of Combat. Bizarrely this changes to very tiny text when counting down the start of a new level or prompting the player to enter a name for the high score table, not very comfortable at game-playing distance even on a large screen.

Sometimes you pick up a game and the attention lavished on it is very evident, this is such a game. You can tell the designers were aiming for something they wanted to play themselves. Good job this arrived after I'd finished editing and laying out the three main features for this issue!

My only regret with the updated Warlords, of all the games in the pack, is a minor one: it doesn't work with my CreamWare Pulsar II DSP audio card, it stutters like crazy - and there's my spare machine built from scrap with a SoundBlaster 128 costing 100 times less working flawlessly. The only other game I've had so far which is also incompatible is Mercedes Benz Truck Racing (an outstanding racer whose 3D system was programmed by Michael Bittner, a name Thalion Software fans should remember well). On occasions like this I switch over to the stand-by SoundBlaster Live! card and make do without super-revealing D/A and studio quality effects.

Since I reviewed Combat, I thought it only fair to give Missile Command a closer look especially as this is the final released version. Suddenly, perhaps I missed it first time, I noticed an option to choose the 3D display device (it's even in the manual but real enthusiasts don't read manuals...). Changing from software rendering to Direct3D opened up options for in-game resolutions corresponding to those available from the installed display driver (I tried 2,048x1,536 on my main machine with maximum detail for a laugh and it flaked out even with a 256 MB AGP aperture but 1,920x1,440 worked a treat). D3D mode also filters the textures, which are heavily pixellated in software mode (hence my early impression), in the higher resolutions everything is sharp and the lighting effects can be appreciated. Unlike Warlords the classic and modern options are available from within the game. Elsewhere, the music is great, the graphics are nearly as good as Warlords and it has that arcade feel, too - it has an attract mode which was playing for much of the duration I wrote about Warlords, so it sounded like a real arcade machine in the background! This one is also very enjoyable and it's growing on me. I rate Warlords as the star of this compilation, artistically, technically and in terms of game-play, worth the asking price alone, with Missile Command a close second and Combat trailing far behind.

Atari Revival is available at Amazon.com (www.amazon.com) for $19.99 plus shipping, that's a pretty good deal.

Following my review session I sent Warlords to Mad Butscher at Wiesbaden Gaming Lab, our game testing facility in Germany. The WGL crew has full access to a large range of original working Atari game systems and an ever-growing reference library of classic software, for the ultimate comparison.

MyAtari magazine - Review #1, August 2002