Gunsmoke - a cracking little game in which you take on the role of Clint Eastwood and lay waste "Unforgiven Final Scene"-style to the bad cowboy dudes of Tombstone. It has that intriguing Software Invasion loading screen, a First Byte joystick option, good graphics, some pleasing little musical introductions and the degree of playability that makes for pure addiction. Small wonder then that when (thanks to a very odd chain of events) I found myself locked in a boxroom with just an Elk, Plus 3 and disc version of Microvalue Four Games 2, it was to this game I turned first. What was to happen as I honed my skills though is quite another story...
Now, you probably cannot think of Gunsmoke as a 'classic' Electron game. It did the rounds on both the Microvalue 2 release and two standalone ones but it was neither packaged nor promoted very well. It had a dowdy inlay and, like many early releases for the Elk, had certainly disappeared from the scene by the mid Eighties. It would be interesting to know just how many people do remember it though. I certainly had a pirated copy of it as a boy and probably waited patiently for it to load from cassette, building up its buildings screen in Mode 5, on many occasions. In fact, getting hold of the "new breed" ADFS 1D00 disc version (downloadable from Acorn Electron World) which loads in less than four seconds, I was not coming back to it 'raw'. It was amazing how many of the playing tactics came flooding back!
"Well, yes, this is all very interesting, Dave," you may be thinking. "But we've already seen Gunsmoke and Microvalue 2 reviewed numerous times before and what we really want to know is why you think this little-known game warrants yet another article!" The answer I would give you is that I have now personally gone further in Gunsmoke than ever before and am in a much better position to highlight what happens as it gets tougher and tougher.
Before I start the revelations though, a quick introduction to those unfamiliar with Gunsmoke's simple premise. You stand alone at the bottom of the screen; a monochrome, chunky, ten-gallon-hatted cowboy, gun in hand. A nicely rendered, colourful town fills the top of the screen. This consists of buildings; the doors and windows of which are occupied by smaller monochrome cowboys. At the very top of the screen is a status bar recording your score, the high score and how many lives you have left. An enemy cowboy appears in the town above you, waits a random period of time, then fires at you. The bullet is a pixel which moves at speed across the grass separating the backdrop and foreground and, should you still be in the line of fire when it enters the foreground area then your cowboy loses one of his lives.
The instructions detail a grim challenge ahead of the player. Each time you have shot sixteen gunslingers, they say, you advance to the next level and must defend yourself against more of them at the same time. To my mind, this is what gives the game its immense addictiveness. On level 1, there is just one badass firing at you from, say, the town saloon. Take him out and there is a vapourising sound, he flashes and disappears. But another baddy appears in the store and you need to run, aim at him and fire too. When you get him, dude number three starts off- loading from the far-left of the screen. Sixteen men down in this manner and your work is done on level 1, you stroll off screen-right and the level increments. Now the number of badasses blasting their weapons at you at the same time is two; one from a window in the barn, the other from the doorway of the sheriff's office. Deal with one and another appears in the same way. The game therefore demands a high degree of concentration even for the beginner. While dealing with one guy, you also need to keep a wary eye on the other. If he fires, you need to move.
You do soon get the hang of this though because there is a gun-shot sound whenever a new collection of pixels are flying toward you. What you quickly appreciate is that between the sound and the bullet reaching the foreground, you can, by running left or right, cover a lot of ground. You also realise just as quickly that this is essential because the bad guys always aim at where you are standing and, if you don't move, their bullets never miss. On level 1, you are simply running out of the way of one bullet of course. But as the level and number of gunslingers rises, you may find you're running out of the path of one bullet and into the path of another!
The instructions go on to say, however, that there will come level 16, where all the positions an enemy could occupy will be filled by separate gunslingers. I suspected for a long time that it would be impossible to make any headway in a level that difficult but, as I said earlier, circumstances dictated that I would be playing Gunsmoke quite a lot and, as I got better and better, I began surviving level 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 in turn. Level 10, with the lone ranger up against ten rustlers at a time, actually seems to leave you with only enough time to fire off two of your own shots before you get picked off. But, one fateful day, and due in no small measure by the reward of an extra life whenever you complete a level, and level 10 was toast. It was a frantic hullabaloo that took off eight of the lives I'd accummulated!
Now, because the instructions indicated as much, I expected level 11 to be even more difficult - with no less than eleven bullets whizzing across the foreground at different trajectories. "Bring it on!" was my mentality, such was my level of addiction. But shock horror - although eleven gunslingers did show up in the doors and windows of the town, only one of them fired at me! Clearing the level was a piece of cake - in fact, even easier than dealing with one gunslinger at a time on level one! The silent ten men were just sitting targets who would not fire back! Level 12 was just the same - twelve enemies, eleven of them in permanent vegetative states. On I played, level after level went by with no increase in difficulty. I went past 16. Past 32...
More and more odd things began to happen. Whenever you clear a level, you are given another life to fight with. But the status bar evidently does not recognise a life-count in double figures and begins to espew ASCII characters instead. "GUNMEN: F" it reached. My score, which if you are deaded on level 10, averages 1,400 points, reached 9,990 then wrapped around to 0,000 again. Finally (!), when despair set in and I realised the game would never get any harder, I checked the number of gunslingers on screen and found, even on level 50, it never went above thirteen!
Eventually I quit with a score I knew to be 10,200 but which the game thought was just 200 so it didn't update the High Score either!
Now I was playing Gunsmoke as it was originally intended, without an Elk Turbo Board attached. It is probably worth pointing out at this point that a Turboed Elk speeds up this game by 50-60% and the lesser time you have to react to the enemies' bullets at this new speed means you are very unlikely to survive anywhere near this long! Still, I must confess that the addiction factor that kept me returning to this game was dissipated completely by the level 10 discovery.
It also seems to me to be dishonest to challenge the player to reach level 16 with its sixteen gunslingers when all levels above level 12 are the same and the addiction factor abruptly expires at level 11!
There is no escaping that Gunsmoke is a tough game - reaching the dizzy heights of any level above 7 is probably only to be achieved by hopelessly addicted games' players like myself. But the only explanation I can find for the loss of playability at level 11 is that the game code is bugged and the creator/software house never thought to test the higher levels in the belief that no-one would ever survive long enough to reach them! Had they done so, it would have been wise to correct them or alter the code so that completion of level 10 was to complete the game itself.
Needless to say, if Gunsmoke was no 'classic' before, it is even less of one in my book now. Don't misunderstand me - I do still believe it is a great tactical arcade rush and its jangles of The Magnificent Seven theme and Oh Suzanna between scenes and the ability to aim the gun at three different angles are welcome features on a game of this type.
But the recent revelations have sent me instead to a clone, one Sas Commander by Comsoft. I pray that this version will continue to increase in difficulty to the very end. That way, my addiction will continue and, if I break a level barrier, it won't be just to find anomalies that only serve to disappoint.