MAME ROW #115 - Black Tiger

[IanDaemon]

Safari Rally looks very simplistic, but I enjoy the simple as well as complex games. Games like Frogger (Arcade) and Jawbreaker (Atari 2600) are great. Heck, Keystone Kapers (Atari 2600) is one of my favorite games of all time and it's a pretty simple high-score chase. There is beauty in simplicity. The games were often tight. The design of Keystone Kapers is great and the controls are simple. Safari Rally has to grow on me, but the concept is easy to pick up and play. If someone from the 1950's can quickly see the fun, then it's a hit in my book. (P.S. I'm not from the 1950's.)

I played all three games last night (from ROW #115) and Gun Force II always gets me with an enemy bullet I didn't see. Safari Rally looks interesting in a really early "video game" way. Black Tiger is my least favorite; it's frustrating, but then again maybe I'm rushing and not being patient enough.

[VictimRLSH]

Really digging Black Tiger, but I have a thing for action RPG style platformers. This is along the lines of Magic Sword and Rastan.

[GtBFilms]

I already have a couple of these installed on my cabinet, so must have thought they looked good at some point (although having them on my cab doesn't mean I've actually played them!)

Gunforce 2
As already mentioned, this one looks a lot like the Metal Slug games, although not quite as polished. This game pre-dates Metal Slug by two years so can be forgiven for not looking quite as nice. The presentation is still good, but there's just too much going on at the same time, or perhaps it's that the bullets aren't easily seen against the busy and moving backdrop, but I too died due to bullets I didn't notice until it was too late. Many times. This game looks nicer than it plays in my opinion.

Safari Rally
This is really old-school! Drive your car straight up the screen 'eating' all the dots, while avoiding a kamikaze driver driving in the opposite direction hell bent on killing you and presumably himself in a head-on collision. Running into a giant snake spells instant death, while curiously, running into a lion seems to bag you 300 bonus points. I guess that's the Safari part of the title, but I've never heard of this sort of bizarre road-kill safari. I guess in 1979 it was probably okay. Sadly today it doesn't seem much fun.

Black Tiger
They used to have this one in our student union. It was an old machine even then, and there were better cabinets available, so I only occassionally stuck a coin into it. I remember it being a pretty unforgiving and difficult game, and playing it again now I haven't changed my mind. What is nice about this one are the RPG elements, which make it a little bit different. Also there are a lot of hidden secrets to discover in the levels. For example, right at the start of level 1, go left instead of right and batter the wall to reveal a secret compartment. There are lots of secrets like that in this game, which do give it some replay appeal, especially in the arcade where you would watch over someones shoulder and see the secrets, then stick a coin in to try them yourself.
It's not a brilliant game, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a little bit different from all the other platformer left to right games of the same era.

So this week, my vote goes to.....

Black Tiger

[obsidianspider]

This week's winner is Black Tiger

[Cornervizion]

Excellent!

Black Tiger one of my favourites and I'll be submitting a hi-score soon. :)

[pjft]

I'll try to submit a score for Black Tiger. I remember playing this on my Spectrum but never seriously played it in the arcade so it'll be fun.

[AndersHP]

In homage to Ready Player One (the book) I'll truly enjoy this weeks MAME ROW. Well done!

[VictimRLSH]

I know the mods get annoyed at people resurrecting old post topics, but for MAME ROW is it cool to go through the past postings before I came along and add screenshots, etc?

[mitu]

@VictimRLSH Feel free to do so. Necro-posts are not annoying if you add useful/pertinent info to an existing topic.

[pjft]

@AndersHP it’s a great book indeed, I liked it better than the movie :)

Sadly, my performance here won’t be enough to even get to that level :D

I’m starting things with a paltry 18.100, early level 2.

EDIT: for the record, on the mame2003 build I’m on, I couldn’t see the high-score entry cursor, so I had to count keypresses to guess where I’d be. Maybe in a more recent version, or on lr-fbalpha it works better.

[GtBFilms]

Had a few attempts at Black Tiger tonight. Making use of the dungeon at the far right of level 1 for extra points, I made it to level 2 and a score of 31700.

It's a nice game, I'm sure repeated play would reveal a lot more secrets.

[pjft]

@GtBFilms Nice score! I'll give it another shot today then to see if I can get anywhere close to that, but I'm not confident that that'll happen :)

[obsidianspider]

MAME ROW #116 is live!

[pjft]

@GtBFilms I have mixed feelings now. Indeed, milking the dungeon to the right of the first level does allow you to increase your score quite a bit, though I kind of feel wrong about relying on it. Maybe we should do one run without milking it (i.e. just going through it straight ahead, not staying longer and killing more)?

I got 39,300, died in the middle of the second level.

In the dungeon, immediately to the left of the starting location if you destroy the wall I received an item that was worth around 10k points, I think? Unsure if it’s permanently there or random, but hope it helps.