Game Review: Sidewinder (PC, Mastertronic)

Well received at the time, Mastertronic’s release of Sidewinder delivered a perfect conversion of their arcade game released on their Arcadia range of cabinets. Well, at least the Amiga original did that the arcade hardware used. The ST port followed with mixed results, but how was an arcade shoot-em-up going to transfer across to the PC, a system not really an accomplished platform for the genre at the time…

Sidewinder – Options A Plenty

Before you get started, the game offers you a choice of difficulty levels, the chance to play with joystick or keyboard and the choice to have sound or play in complete silence. One thing you’ll notice at this point is that it’s designed for use with analogue rather than digital joysticks like the arcade original which seemed to be quite a strange decision. In fact, this does have an impact on gameplay with the joystick controls being a bit too oversensitive at times.

The Game

If you’ve never seen it before, Sidewinder is a no-frills vertically scrolling arcade shoot-em-up. Spanning several stages, your craft flies over various different landscapes and comes under attack from numerous waves of air and ground-based craft and weapon placements. Your ship is equipped with a forward-firing gun (which can be upgraded) and nothing else and it’s a case of destroy everything in your path – enemy craft, ground based gun turrets, and static targets that offer plenty of bonus points. Some targets need more than one shot to take them out – usually the ground based ones – making forward planning essential.

Powerups can be collected as you play but instead of getting these from destroying attack waves, they appear either at fixed points throughout each level, and they make very little difference to the game. Most just give you score bonuses, and the only one of any real use I did encounter was a rapid fire upgrade.

As with all old-school shooters, the only real objective in Sidewinder is to survive each stage, destroying as much as possible to rack up the best score you possibly can and get to the end of each stage so you can move on to the next.

Graphics And Sound

When Sidewinder was first released, scrolling and sprite based games were never one of the strengths of the PC. So with that in mind I wasn’t expecting a great deal from it technically, nor was I going to be too worried if it didn’t match up to the Amiga original.

To be fair, the PC port copes reasonably well with smooth vertical and horizontal scrolling and while the colour palette has been limited (and in some cases this does make enemy bullets harder to spot) everything is intact and it runs at quite an admirable speed. The same lack of variety for the enemy craft is there from the other versions though even if the background graphics are quite diverse (if a little garish at times).

Where it does fall down is the sound… but I don’t know if this is an issue with the port or a configuration issue as all I got from it on my PC were some blips as I fired shots off and painful screeches to accompany explosions. No music, no sampled sound effects – nothing. We all know the issues surrounding PC hardware compatability in the days before DirectX so all I can assume here is that it was designed for a specific sound card and without that the effects wouldn’t play properly.

Gameplay

Sidewinder is a strange one for me as it was the first game I ever owned for the Amiga so it does hold some fond memories. But it hasn’t aged particularly well, and when it comes to the PC version that applies even more so. It’s mildly entertaining and fun in short bursts, it’s also incredibly frustrating with poor collision detection, and it has a tendency to respawn you right in the middle of enemy craft causing unnecessary loss of life all to often.

I also mentioned the controls earlier on and there are times – especially when playing using the joystick – when your craft just won’t do what you want it to, causing you to fly head first into an oncoming bullet, craft or even a solid wall at the end of a level. It’s just added frustration you don’t need.

The only other issue I had with Sidewinder on the PC – and again this is something that carried over from the other versions – came with the start of each level. The levels start with your ship being positioned in a tunnel. To begin, there’s no indication that the sides of this tunnel are physical barriers and coming into contact with this will lose one of your lives. This is the only time in the game where you can collide with the background so it’s bizzarre that it happens when there’s nothing else going on in the game. I can only imagine how frustrated players must have felt in the arcades paying to play and having that happen.

Leave It At Home…

Regardless of which version of Sidewinder I played, one thing that the game design highlighted was the core problem with the whole Arcadia project. Pretty much every arcade shoot-em-up I’ve ever played follows a couple of basic formats. They’re either designed around attack waves that the player has to defeat (Galaga, Space Invaders etc), or they’re level based and at the end of those there’s always a boss that you need to destroy to progress to the next. While Sidewinder is level based, there’s no end of level boss so there’s no real sense of achievement. And for a game that’s come straight out of an arcade, that just leads to disappointment.

There are bullet hell elements here – which is fine in games like this – as they can add an extra challenge for players (and loss of life can be a good way to create income using credits) but there’s no continue system in place in Sidewinder to encourage players to stick with the game. The start of the game, as I mentioned, just adds to the frustration and would lead players to walk away from the cabinet in frustration. But there’s just something lacking that stops it from feeling like an arcade game.

PC vs Amiga vs Atari ST

Having played all three versions of Sidewinder, many of you will want to know how this stacks up against the others, especially the Amiga original. Obviously, on a technical level the Amiga version wins hands down above all the others, which was expected. The PC struggles both with the visuals, sound, controls and thanks to the collision issues the playability is affected as well.

Strangely enough, despite its limitations, I still found the Atari ST version to be more playable than the Amiga. Having had more time to work on the game and look at the issues the Amiga original had, it obviously gave the ST coders time to refine the gameplay making that the most playable of the three.

Overall

Sidewinder is one of those games that was doomed from the start. It was never a stunning game to begin with, and add to that the PC’s hardware limitations, poor collision detection and repetitive gameplay and its one you’ll tire of very quickly.

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