Ant
Attack - Quicksilva - 1983
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Well, the summer's here,
and we all know what that means. Pleasant afternoons sitting in the park
with the love of your life and a cheese and bacon baguette will be ruined,
as a horde of ants takes the opportunity to crawl all over your lunch and
make you look really stupid as you try to look as though you're ignoring
them, while you're really desperately trying to get rid of the little basts...
You think they're annoying now. Imagine how much more annoying they'd be if they were six feet long and wanted to eat the love of your life instead of your baguette. This is the premise behind this 1983 classic by Sandy White. The city of Antescher is overrun with ants, and they've kidnapped ten lovely young women (or lovely young men, if you choose to play as a girl). Being a bit of a wannabe-hero, you decide to rescue them. Alright, so it's a B-movie plot. It's 'Attack of the Giant Ants From Mars' under another name. But who cares about plot, eh? |
| You start just outside the
city limits, with just a low wall separating you from the ants' domain.
Somewhere inside, the hostage is lying helpless, tied up by the evil ants.
Naturally you won't be going in completely unarmed. In your possession
you have a bag of grenades. They're not the most reliable or safe weapons
in the world, but it's better than going up against the ants with nothing
more than a frown and harsh words.
Of course, it's a big city out there, and the hostage could be anywhere. Luckily you have a nice and simple scanner that changes from red to green if you're walking towards them. Without this, the game would almost certainly be completely impossible – the city is too large and dangerous to be searched thoroughly without some idea of where you're supposed to be looking. |
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The real test of skill comes
not from finding the hostage, though. The real test is getting both yourself
and the hostage out of the city again, especially since by the time you
find them the ants will have found you. Escape is a hectic task – the number
of times I've panicked and accidentally blown up the hostage or led them
off the top of a tall building are too many to count.
The first thing that strikes you about this game is the graphics. Using an isometric system called 'Soft-Solid', Antescher is constructed entirely from grey cubes. This simple basis for construction actually makes everything feel more solid than in the many isometric games that succeeded Ant Attack. There's a great feeling of weight to the walls as you run into them or jump onto them, although the actual controls are a little sluggish. The people are reasonable enough, although they look suspiciously like 'programmer graphics' – the ants, for instance, don't look particularly like ants, although I suppose you could argue that they're mutants, or something. |
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Those controls, though,
are quite a let-down. I'm always suspicious of any game that uses Symbol
Shift as a control key. I don't know why, it's a perfectly viable key (at
least it is on a rubber-keyed Speccy). But there are also four different
fire keys, varying with how far you want to throw a grenade. You'll probably
find yourself sticking to either one or two, since using all four is just
too difficult to do. There are also four keys for changing to a particular
view (a feature not seen since in isometric games), although I find myself
running around Antescher holding down the spacebar to keep my character
centred in the initial view. I certainly can't remember what the other
three keys are for the other views (I think the zero key is one, and maybe
Enter, too... um... nope, no idea for the last one, sorry).
The sound is dire. Horrible little bips and beeps. On the other hand, this game was released in 1984, so I think I could be expecting a little much from the old piezo-electric transducer. In fact, if this game is entirely the product of one person, then I think Sandy's done pretty well with the sound (better than I would have, anyway). The entire front-end, too, is nothing special, the game's options consisting of whether you want to play as a boy or a girl, and even that makes no difference to the actual gameplay (not that it should – I'd just have liked some more options – higher difficulty settings, redefinable keys, that sort of thing). |
| In the end, though, despite the crappy controls and squeaky sounds, Ant Attack's gameplay pulls the whole package above the level of average. Succeeded by a billion and one other isometric games (not least of which is Ultimate's Knightlore), and the game concept stolen by Lucasarts for Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Ant Attack is still a superior game to these pretenders. |
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