Part 14: ManxomeBromide - Eagles and Gators

Let's Play Eagles & Gators!
Compute! Gazette, September 1986, Issue 39, Vol. 4, No. 9

Summary

This is a two player action game. One player is the Eagles, the other, the Gators. They oscillate back and forth between the edge of the screen and the split between sky and ground. One of them is the "active" creature for each player, and if you push the fire button when you're close to the sky/ground border, you clamp onto it. (This also unclamps the other player's creature if their creature in that lane was already clamped.) The side that has more clamped creatures advances the sky-ground boundary towards the other guy's side, and if you push them off the screen, you win the game.

So it's kind of a cross between a rhythm game and tug-of-war.

I recruited TooMuchAbstraction to be my opponent for this game.

CLICK IMAGE FOR VIDEO


The Good

• It's a cute game idea. The way errant inputs set you back encourages caution, but the steamroll mechanic encourages urgency.
• Nice use of splitscreen tricks.
• It's about time we got some wacky sounds that weren't BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP.

The Bad

• Netplay for action games is kind of hilariously awful and laggy, which messed up the capture a bit
• Hard to work out input windows for grabbing the border

The Weird


Because I totally think of Chuckles the Bumble when I think of futuristic vehicular duelling. It's like he has a lot of experience with cannons or something.

The Verdict

Pretty neat! It's hard to see this one getting a modern incarnation, though; modern expectations of pointing devices make this sort of setup seem pointlessly obtuse.