Game Review: GWNN (Commodore 16 and Plus/4, Mastertronic)

Your mission in GWNN is to effectively head across the galaxy and to find the enemy bases, where you will need to rescue the scientists and then destroy the alien bases.  There are six missions to achieve which includes rescue of said scientists, destroying a generator, getting the auto-fire, destroying an ammo dump, a fuelling stage and then destroying the alien home base.  That all sounds promising and a good challenge, with four tasks to each level and the instructions briefly explaining what to do – even if they do differ from the author Patrick Strassen’s hand written notes which were sent in at the time.  But why the name GWNN?

The Origins of GWNN

With credit where due to the folks at Plus/4 World for their excellent research (do read the game entry for this game there) it transpires the originally, the game was going to be called Challenger.  However, in 1986 the space shuttle Challenger suffered a dreadful accident, with seven astronauts passing away soon after take-off.  Here in the UK, it was a breaking story on the children’s television news programme Newsround, and I can remember watching that with some horror as a teenager.  The game was submitted to Anco in 1986 under the name Challenger first, which they rejected.

The game was then submitted to Mastertronic, but it was held up from release because the game did not have a name, and became known as the Game with No Name.  No one could find a suitable name for the game and so in May 1987 the game was released with the title Game with No Name (or GWNN for short).  It is also interesting to note that some of the cassettes for the game were labelled as GWYNN (note the extra Y being included here) and indeed the screen shots from the back look slightly different too – more on that as we get into the game itself.

Taskmaster

Each of the six missions have four stages within – and mastering those can accumulate masses of points.  The first is to achieve the main mission objective, so in the first mission you collect the scientists, handily marked with an icon with an S, and you can hover over them to pick them up.  You can shoot the enemy ships and pick up icons with an E which are marked for extra energy, which you will need.  There are also blocks with a caret symbol (^) on them which are ones to avoid – you can run through them but at a quick loss of energy.  The level scrolls both ways smoothly, although you need to head left to right, and provided you have achieved the objective, you can then dock the ship.  There is a runway at the far right which you need to land at and hit the end of it to dock.  However, the runway itself has two border lines which you will lose energy if you hit, so you need to be spot on with your approach.

Challenging Simon Says

At this stage you are awarded points for the remaining energy you have left, and you will then face the challenge task, and this is the same at the end of each level.  Effectively you need to survive for a period, avoiding the caret symbol blocks but also shooting the blocks you need to shoot – if you miss one and you pass it, you crash, like if you smashed into one of the blocks.  If you do survive long enough, then you will manage to achieve warp speed and enter the bonus stage.  Here, there are four boxes which will flash, like the game Simon, with several points to be awarded.  Move the joystick in the direction of the right flashing box and you get points, ranging from 10 to 1,100, so you can rack up considerable bonuses here.

Destroy Him, My Robots

The second mission (destroying the generator) and the fourth (destroying the ammo dump) have similar aims, in which you need to locate all the ground targets – which fire missiles either up, down, left, or right depending on the direction their guns face, and one other block target, which is the key to completing the level.  On the second mission, this is a block to the right of a caret block close to the runway – which did take me some time to discover which one it was, and on the fourth, there is a block mid-way through the mission.  There are sound effects to guide you as to the fact you have destroyed the right object, but if in doubt, shoot the lot (apart from the E symbols) anyway and rack up points whilst doing so.

Fire! Fire! Auto-Fire!

On the third mission, collecting the auto-fire is relatively easy to locate, there’s a symbol with an A to locate and that does mean you could potentially speed to the end of the level, but craftily there’s plenty of those caret symbol blocks in the way, so you need to go at a fair pace so you can dodge those and keep the eyes on the E for extra energy.  The fifth fuelling mission just is a case of surviving and picking up the E symbols as much as you can, before taking on the final mission of destroying the alien base.  There are caret symbol blocks a plenty and lots blocking the main target of this, but if you can blast all of it and dock, well done.  The game does then loop after completion should you get that far, but it is getting there in the first place of course.

Today Is My Enemy

One thing you may notice in the game is that some of the enemy craft do not look quite right, and in one level resemble more blocks than anything else.  This was due to another excellent discovery by Plus/4 World in that the game code is supposed to check parts of memory for the graphics and copy them to another location ready for each level, and in the prototype Challenger version, these are spot on.  It looks like during mastering an error occurred, and so part of this memory location was duplicated, a check for the correct values fails, and therefore whatever was in lower memory during Novaload appears instead – and that means random characters.  Although easy to fix by having the correct values in memory, it may not have been noticeable for the first couple of levels when playing the game because they are not as badly corrupted as later levels.  Also note the different character set at the bottom – this was also a later addition and   easily compared to the screen shots on the back (which appear to be from the Challenger version, and with the enemies correct.)    Some of the screen shots here are from the fixed version, so you can see for yourself.

Smooth and Strobe

The game does move at a relatively smooth and fast pace, with the top half of the screen showing the status display, a nice coloured raster split, and then the bas relief graphics of the level at the bottom with some strobe effects. These can be turned off with the F3 key (and back on with the F2 key), but must be done at the start of each and every game – a permanent toggle off or on would have been preferable.  Also undocumented, you can change the border colour with F1 too.  Controls are nice and responsive with your ship moving smoothly and accurately, and although the main play area is smaller, it still works well and does save memory to get more game in, so solid reasoning there.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in GWNN are very good in terms of the base layouts, with the colour palette being used well to create some lovely bas relief graphics, reminiscent of another Patrick Strassen game, XCellor-8, and the likes of energy, scientists and the care blocks clearly marked out and easy to spot.  The enemy ships are clearer and more defined in the fixed version, but in the release version they range from sort of okay to a block of mess, which is a shame as it can spoil the look of the levels at times.  However, the sound is also pretty loud and, in your face, with a drone sound of the craft in the background, some shooting effects, and for collecting items, and other useful and functional sound effects that are well worth playing the game in the dark for.

Final Thoughts

GWNN has an interesting back story as to how the game came to be, and the game it is has six varied and frantic missions of shooting action that really does seem entertaining. You do get further with every go, and achieving the warp speed for the bonus points section really does give you that sense of achievement too.  The shooting sections are solid and play well, and the game as a package works nicely, especially when playing the fixed version, but even out of its original cassette box it is a good example of what the Commodore 16 and Plus/4 could do in good hands, and how much Patrick Strassen had grown as a game programmer since Street Olympics.

My many thanks to the hard-working folks at Plus/4 World for all their additional research for this game – they really are doing an excellent job and please do support their efforts.

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