Let's get it out of the way right from the start -- yes, this game is actually named S.C.A.T. It's meant to be an acronym here, standing for Special Cybernetic Attack Team. But you and I both know that "scat" is also another word for, well, poop. Fecal matter. The morning aftermath of your last late night run to Taco Bell. So you'll need to push past that truly, truly terrible title first -- but if you do, the actual game you're getting when you buy S.C.A.T. is a pretty solid shooter. S.C.A.T.'s an under-the-radar release from the NES days, originally published by Natsume in the summer of '91. As an 8-bit shooter in that age, it had some pretty stiff competition to go up against -- true classics like Gradius, Contra and Life Force had already asserted themselves as the staples of the system. Gamers of the day who gave it a chance, though, found that S.C.A.T. even gave those greats a run for their money.
It's intense, right from the start. The loud and explosive opening cutscene is so overly dramatic that you can't help but be drawn into its tale of aliens invading America -- and then Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up. Seriously, the main character of the game is named Arnold and is intentionally modeled after the Governator. Even better is the female protagonist for Player 2, named Sigourney, who's looking like she just stepped off the set of Aliens.
And then there's the NES-perfect digitized voice-acting -- used only for one clip, because that's all that's needed. It says "You must destroy them! The Earth is counting on you! Good luck!"
Heck yes, S.C.A.T. Let's flush these turds.
The action begins with you controlling either Arnold or Sigourney, flying through the air with a compact jetpack and blasting everything in sight. That's another check mark for the list of awesomeness -- the jetpack gives you full control to move up, down, left and right across the screen at will, which somehow feels much more satisfying when your player character is a human than just some futuristic spaceship.
The screen scrolls automatically, initially moving you along in the standard left-to-right progression. But then things switch up a bit -- at a certain early point in the first level, the side-scrolling stops and the screen starts moving up instead. Then, a bit later, it switches back to the right. Then it starts going down. It's kind of crazy -- and kind of novel, especially for an NES game from 1991. Life Force, as a contrasting example, had side-scrolling and vertically-scrolling sequences too -- but never both in the same level. S.C.A.T.'s unique in that regard.
Some Contra inspiration shines through, too, in S.C.A.T.'s weapon upgrade system, as after starting out with a fairly basic rifle you can find and collect items that transform it into a laser blaster, a grenade launcher or a wave cannon. S.C.A.T. takes this to the next level too, though, by complimenting your main weapon with two secondary orbs that constantly orbit your character -- and continuously fire supporting shots in all directions around you.
Unless you lock them. While the 1 Button on your Wii Remote is handling your main gun's trigger, the 2 Button toggles your satellite's movements on and off -- so you can leave them to constantly spin around you, firing at random, or you can strategically freeze them into position behind you to cover your rear, or in front of you to boost your primary attack vector, or above and below you to counter vertical threats. It's pretty slick. You can see shades of other shooters' ideas, like Irem's R-Type series, showing up through this inventive mechanic.
And last on the list of positive points is S.C.A.T.'s simultaneous multiplayer mode. The NES had an incredible array of great action games, but the ones that let you play through them in two-player co-op with a friend were a special kind of awesome -- and S.C.A.T. is one of them. Sending both Arnold and Sigourney into a flying jetpack machine gun alien battle for the fate of America, together, is classic 8-bit fun.
But now the bad.
Beyond its use of the worst acronym in gaming industry history for a title, S.C.A.T. also comes up short in a few other areas too. Some of them, like the screen flicker that makes it occasionally hard to see incoming enemy attacks, just comes with the territory of playing an NES game. But the game's length -- or lack thereof -- is definitely an issue.
There are only five levels. That's it. NES action games like this weren't normally known for their length, but S.C.A.T.'s shortened runtime makes it feel unfinished -- like its developers had planned another few stages or so but just didn't bother putting them in and shipped the game out anyway. That stinks, as even just a handful more would have done wonders for the overall adventure.
As it is, the levels that are here are fairly long themselves -- and their inventive swapping of scrolling direction mid-stage helps make each one more memorable than any given stage you might put against it from a competing game. But still. Five levels. That's a buck apiece.
No comments:
Post a Comment