Weather War II

Bring it on!  Let's see what you got, Commodore!

Everybody is familiar with the old artillery game that's been around for about as long as video games have.  You know the one.....where you face off against a friend, each of you on opposite sides of a computer screen (yep, that's right kids!  Back in the day multi-player meant you had to cram in around the same computer monitor!) and you had to fire artillery at each other, plotting trajectory according to wind speed and the terrain and such.  The Worms series of games took that concept and brought it to a whole new level, but that's the basic concept.

Here's an interesting take on that well worn battle game:  Weather War II by Bob Carr.  Published in 1982 by Magic Carpet Software, WWII puts you in command of your own weaponized cloud.  The aim is to completely destroy your opponent's castle.  You can choose to attack him with rain, hail, lightning or even a tornado!  Much like the old artillery game, you must factor wind into the equation in order to land the most devastating hits on your opponent.  Rain is the weakest of the attacks.  Tornado's will to a fair bit of damage if you land them just right.  Lightening does the most damage, but is quite difficult to control.  Hail is the weapon that you will find yourself coming back to again and again.

Prepare to die, Computer Castle!  

I open up my attacks with a torrent of rain.  Not the most devastating attack, but I'm testing the waters so to speak.

When the game begins, it's quite easy to land hits on your opponent, but as the rounds wear on it becomes more difficult to target the tiny bits of castle that remain.  There is absolutely no physics engine when it comes to the destruction of the castle.  If you were to blow a chunk of the upper corner of the castle out, anything above the damage will remain floating in space.  It becomes quite a pain in the ass to try and target little floating bits of castle sometimes especially when they are scattered about and you really need to land as much damage as possible.

Round 2 see's me getting pummeled by a tornado.  Well played Computer!

As you can see, harnessing the power of lightening can be quite devastating!

This game can be played in a 2 player mode, each player naming their castle.  If you wish to play a solo game, simply name player two as computer and the CPU will take over.

This game certainly isn't for everyone and it's really not going to hold your attention for too long as a one player game.  If you're having a two player game and perhaps having a few drinks (maybe even turn it into a drinking game.....chug a beer when your castle is destroyed or take a shot when you take damage) I could see this being quite a bit of retro fun.

It gets tricky trying to aim for those loose floating pieces!

By Round 11 it becomes apparent that we're both in deep trouble!

Wanna see all the pixellated weather madness in action?  Look no further friends!  Watch me battle it out with the Commodore.  Who will win?  Who will have some serious rebuilding to do?  Watch to find out!

Glacier Patrol

Glacier Patrol
1983/1989
Telegames


I just sort of stumbled across Glacier Patrol, having never heard of it before.  The box art certainly is not on par with the old school Atari artwork that were found on most boxes, and would most definitely be a competitor in a bad box art competition.  The back of the box does a bit of a better job trying to sell the game though.

Yep.  That's a block of alien ice parachuting out of that spaceship.  Majestic, ain't it?

You play as Mountie Mac.  You are defending the arctic circle from aliens from the planet Aquafreeze (?).  To help you in your mission you are packing a nuclear powered heat gun that you use to melt alien blocks of ice that are being dropped out of a spaceship.  The ice would obviously shatter if it just fell straight down so the aliens have attached parachutes to the blocks to slow it's descent.  I find that rather amusing that these aliens have mastered technology enough that they can travel billions of light years through space, seek out a suitable planet (sadly, ours) and hatch a plan to envelope the entire planet in ice, thereby blocking out the sun's heat and turning the Earth into a giant ice ball that they can vacation on.  However, when it came to developing a plan to actually ice the planet, the best they could come up with was parachuting blocks of ice onto the surface of the planet???  Nice thinkin', Chet!

So basically you're going to be running around the bottom portion of the screen blasting away at parachuting ice blocks with your nuclear powered heat gun (not to be confused with the Ghostbusters' nuclear powered Particle Proton Packs™).  You don't have any lives in this game....which is due to the fact that there's nothing that will kill you on screen.  You're biggest (okay, ONLY) immediate threat are rogue snowballs that roll along the ground at a rather quick pace.  No worry though, you can easily jump over these.  Okay.  Actually, it's not so easy to jump over them.  Why?  Because every fiber of your being is screaming at you to press up on the joystick to jump.  However in reality you have to press down.  DOWN!  WHY IN THE HELL WOULD YOU PRESS DOWN TO JUMP?!??!?!?  So be prepared to be aggravated.

That rogue snowball just knocked me on my ass just as I blasted an alien ice block out of the sky with my nuclear powered heat gun!

That is pretty much the entire game in an icy nutshell.  Blast away at the ice blocks that float down.  If the aliens manage to cover the planet in ice, you lose and die a horribly frigid death.  If you manage to keep the ice from landing and rack up 10,000 points, the sun comes up and melts all the ice that's landed effectively clearing the playfield.  However, because each alien ice block only nets you 50 points when destroyed and there are no other ways to earn points, you're going to be at if for quite a while before the sun comes up.....and then it's just more of the same.

I won't say that it's a bad game per se, but there is alot about it that could use some tweaking.  The controls as mentioned above are in dire need of remapping.  It would be nice if there was a bit more going on too.  Shooting alien ice blocks and jumping over rogue snowballs gets a bit stale rather quickly.  The idea is quite interesting however and I'd love to see what a modern developer could do with the concept.

Apparently the game itself was originally created by the studio Sunrise (who also created the excellent Quest for Quintana Roo) though they never released this game.  It was instead picked up by Telegames and released later on.  Which is why the year of the game is split.  It was originally created but Sunrise in 1983, but it wasn't until 1989 that Telegames released the game (also re-releasing The Quest for Quintana Roo).  Both games were available to purchase from Telegames up until 2004.  If you want to find a cartridge in the wild you can find the occasional copy on E-bay or Amazon.  A Complete In Box copy will go for up to $250 while a loose cartridge brings in around $50.

After you get whacked by a rogue snowball you just sit there for what seems life forever.  Oh good, here comes another one!

It's not the worst game I ever played and it has a somewhat mesmerizing quality to it after you've been playing for a while.....like any other action shooter, you sorta get sucked into "THE ZONE" and next thing you know an hour's gone by.   Okay, maybe more like 10 minutes, but you get the drift.  If you get a chance to play it, give it a go.  If nothing else you will have then earned the right to brag that you saved the earth from an alien ice invasion!

Another Visitor! Stay a while.......STAY FOREVER!!!!!!!!!

Welcome to the Retro Game Fortress.  Having successfully escaped the confines of the high tech Space Dungeon of Vestron (it was pretty simple to escape since it was pretty much abandoned), I have sought out a suitable place to build my fortress and review the retro games that kept me sane within the cold cheerless walls of the Space Dungeon.
While I know that there are many, many, MANY retro gaming sites around the Internet, I hope to shed a light on some games that are not talked about on a regular basis.  You may very well see reviews of games like Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros. and Zaxxon on here, but you will also see reviews for more obscure games on a wide variety of systems.  Forbidden Forest for the Commodore 64, Starglider on the Apple ][, Caverns of Mars II for the Atari 800 and Nightbreed for PC/DOS will also all be discussed.  Games that you've never heard of.  Games that I've never heard of.  Games that probably haven't been played by anyone since 1983.  They will all be discussed.

I hope that you enjoy the content that is to come and I hope that the Retro Game Fortress will become one of your daily go to destinations.

Until next we meet......



Rygar Starkong