Game Review: Sidewinder (Atari ST, Mastertronic)

For a brief period, Mastertronic made the decision to dabble in the arcade business, releasing their own line of machines under the Amiga-based range Arcadia. They were a commercial flop, but it did give them a boost to their range of home titles that were released across a a number of platforms, starting off with the vertically scrolling shoot-em-up, Sidewinder.

Sidewinder – A Strange Start

With the majority of arcade shooters, and especially with those released during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, it was fairly safe to assume that if it was joystick controlled, a single press of the fire button would start the game. While that is the case here, once you’ve done that before the game starts you’re taken to a second rather bland menu asking you to choose a difficulty level before you can get started.

The difficulty setting can be selected using the keyboard or joystick but you have to go through this every time you play. Surely having this on the main screen or on an options screen and remembering the setting for future games would have made more sense? It may only be a minor irritation, but it slows the game down when you just want to get stuck in and get shooting!

The Game

Onto the game itself and 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. Your ship is equipped with a twin forward-firing gun 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 on each level or randomly, and they make very little difference to the game. Most make no noticeable difference to the game and just give you score bonuses, and the only one I noticed that did do anything was the 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

As Sidewinder loads up you’re presented with an attractive title screen giving all the author credits. Once it loads up fully, the screen shifts to the game’s logo with a scrolling background underneath with an impressive conversion of David Whittaker’s music from the Amiga version, which in itself was a reworking of his tune from Panther for the C64! Rather than recreating the music using the sounds from the AY chip, the Amiga music has been sampled and re-created and while not perfect they’ve managed to do an impressive job with it so it gets the game off to a great start.

In game sound is just as impressive. It is filled throughout with loud sampled sound effects for everything – explosions, gunfire, background effects and more and as people have said over the years you’ll recognise almost all of them! The effects have all been “borrowed” from TV shows such as The Twilight Zone, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers and many more. They’re all fairly easy to recognise and I’m surprised this didn’t cause any issues for Mastertronic at the time, especially considering the copyright problems they had with Chiller back in the 80s.

Back to the graphics and the in-game visuals are pleasant enough and while the enemy craft don’t really vary too much from one stage to the next, there’s plenty of variety in the level design itself. While the graphics aren’t stunning by ST standards, they’re above average and certainly do the job adequately. Highlight has to the explosions which fill the screen at every opportunity.

Each of the stages has a different visual style which helps with the variety though from desert to forests, futuristic landscapes and more and they all make excellent use of the 16 colour palette. Scrolling is quite smooth as well, although instead of gradually scrolling smoothly sideways when you move to the edge of the screen it “jumps” although I would assume that this was done to make it easier for the ST to keep up with the vertical scrolling as well as handling all the on-screen action without worrying about two way scrolling.

Gameplay

I have to be honest and say that the game itself is something of a mixed bag. While it’s mildly entertaining and fun in short bursts, it’s also just as frustrating. While the collision detection seemed to be pretty accurate for the most part, the enemy bullets were quite small and were hard to spot when they were near to any explosions so at times you could get shot without realising it.

My only other real gripe 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.

An Arcade Flop?

What playing Sidewinder at home highlighted was the core problems 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.

The Amiga Version

Now, I will be honest and say that comparisons are obviously going to be made with the original Amiga version of Sidewinder. And truthfully the Atari ST version holds its own remarkably well. The scrolling understandably isn’t as smooth and the graphics aren’t as detailed or colourful. It’s also not running in full screen as the Amiga version does. It has to be said though that the difference in the in-game sound effects is negligible. However these are merely cosmetic differences.

Where the real differences kick in are the gameplay. The ST version runs slightly slower than the Amiga, but that improves the game immensely. The ship now feels far more responsive during play and it’s a lot more forgiving. You’re far less likely to be killed by an enemy craft or bullet flying towards you from off-screen and with the other ships flying at a slower pace, they’re easier to avoid. On the Amiga version, you moved much slower than the other ships and at times it was impossible to avoid being hit no matter how good a player you were and you saw the Game Over screen all too often.

Overall

First time I played Sidewinder back in 1990 I was hooked – probably because it was the first game I owned for the Amiga if I’m honest. As an arcade shoot-em-up, it’s certainly not the best example of the genre, but the Atari ST manages to do reasonably well in providing a game that’s not only fun in short bursts, but delivers something that’s better than the original. Without a doubt, this is the best version of the game to play.

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