Net Yaroze part 3
There is just so many Net Yaroze games out there, I don't think I can cover them all.
Some are generic and not worth covering. Some are so Japanese that I can't make sense of them.
I will try though. Oh my how I will try.
This page will cover the other Net Yaroze games released onto demo discs.
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Snowball Fight
Genre: Multiplayer Arcade
Programmer: James Rutherford
Released: March 1998 Edge competition version, 02/09/98 finished version
Snowball Fight is a multiplayer 1v1 snowball fight between two penguins.
This game was made for the Edge Yaroze Competition.
You can control either Percy or Paddy. Paddy looks like Pengu. Percy is red. I can't help thinking of green trains.
The goal is to reduce your opponent's health meter to zero.
To do that you must run into snow piles and hold X to accumulate a snowball.
Then you aim with L2 and R2 and fire with [].
There is no time limit. After the game is over you return to the start screen.
It can be pretty tricky to aim. Even if you use frame perfect twitches there are some angles you'll never throw in.
This is doubly so if you are frantically running around.
The bigger the snowball the more pain it delivers.
One strategy is just to spam little snowballs for chip damage.
Punish the enemy for daring to squat in a snow pile.
There are three maps to play on:
* Just a plain old iceberg - no hazards
* Two penguins and an island - the island is surrounded by icy cold water
* I spy troubled water - a bridge connects the two islands
Icy water doesn't change the slippery physics but it does hurt.
Kamikaze at your own risk.
The music in this game is pretty good.
The start screen music has a thundering piano tune. Is a penguin playing it? It's quite loud.
The in-game music is quite wintery. I like music like this.
This is a good little game.
I don't recall how it came in the Edge competition.
Where are they now?:
James Rutherford is now a Web Service Developer for hire.
Here is his website: https://www.creativenucleus.com/
Here is his twitter: https://twitter.com/jtruk
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INVS
Genre: Shooter
Programmed by: PalPalPalPal (Philippe-André Lorin)
Released: 2001
INVS is a space shooter in the spirit of Space Invaders and Galaga.
The premise is simple: you're a little blue shit fixed horizontally to the floor, and you must shoot all the ships to move onto the next level.
The enemy ships gather like in Space Invaders and swoop down shooting at you like in Galaga.
Every now and you get a bonus stage where you have to shoot at fast moving ships.
These give lovely amounts of points.
There is a good variety of ship to encounter.
The light blue ones (Peons) gather resources from the ground and turn into Dark Peons.
The white ones (Dark Peons) fire a fast lightning bolt. Kill these ASAP.
The green one (Gorrs) fly down and shoot at you.
The orange ones (Attas) also fly down and shoot at you.
The purple ones (KeeKees) bombard you like meteors.
The red cat ones (Prots) fire an electric beam to block you. They also meow.
The dark blue ones (SeeWees) fire 3 bullets at a time. Then they fly up and fire temporary walls to block your bullets.
The regular blue ones (Bubblers) swoop in to shoot bubbles which block your bullets. They are the highest scoring ship to kill.
Beating the game gives you the code to access Trance Mode: L1, R1, L1, R1, L1, R1.
This mode is harder and very trippy graphics.
Unfortunately to have to beat the game to make the code work.
This is a very fun arcadey game.
I would have loved to play this as a kid, but alas, my region of Official PlayStation Magazine moved onto the PS2 rather than stock PS1 demos. A shame.
Where are they now?:
I honestly don't know.
Check out his website's page about INVS: http://palpalpalpal.free.fr/Works/Videogames/Invs/
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Pssst
Genre: Arcade
Programmers: Steve Knock (with Gary Gould doing graphics)
Developed in: less than a month
Released: March 1998
Pssst is a Yaroze port of the classic 1983 ZX Spectrum game from Ultimate Play the Game.
The goal is to protect a flower as it grows from various things that want to eat it.
To do so you can grab cans of pesticide from niches in the wall.
To aid you are the spade and fertilizer.
They speed up the plant's growth. Undoubtedly a good thing.
Touching an insect or the plant dying costs you a life. 3 lives and game over.
The insects go from worms to weird Sonic ghost things.
The flower is smaller here than in the original Speccy game.
This is another Yaroze imagining of a childhood gem. There's not much to it.
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Sam the Boulderman
Genre: Puzzle
Programmer: James Hobden
Released: 1998
Sam the Boulderman is a Boulder Dash type game where you must collect mushrooms and avoid rocks.
Right off the bat there are some things that come to mind:
* the music is from Clone but loops instead of fading away from a few bars
* collecting a mushroom makes the monster death sound from Clone (wtf)
* a rock hitting a surface makes the gun fire noise from Clone
* Rocks 'n' Gems is a Boulder Dash style game that came first
Granted, the sound effects came from Sony, but they are used inappropriately.
Unlike Rocks 'n' Gems there is no time limit here.
Completing the level gets you a "WELL DONE DUDE" in font that reminds me of Mortal Kombat.
Holding the () button kills yourself. A game like this, with traps and no time limit, definitely needs a suicide button. So does life.
You don't always need it. If you get caught in a trap the game will detect this and auto-kill you. How handy.
The programmer has stated in the readme file that he didn't have enough time to finish all the levels but alluded to an update in enough interest is garnished.
He also spoke of releasing a level editor. Mite b kool.
This is a humble game. One of those 'baby's first step' projects that you probably shouldn't always share. Fun while it lasts.
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Yarozians
Genre: shooter
Programmer: John Wojcik Quietbloke
Released: 08/02/2001
Yarozians is a Space Invaders clone that does nothing special except ruin your ears.
Seriously. This game has you shooting these ships as they swoop down and shoot you, and this all makes noise.
This noise isn't diverted into sound channels or something to lessen the decibel level, no, these are all stacked on top of each other.
The resulting combined sound waves peak and make the eardrums bleed and weep.
The sound also glitches up to. The poop cherry on the shit sundae.
The gameplay is harder than regular Space Invaders.
Here they all dive down to shoot at you. You are forced to hide to the side and wait for them to reach the bottom and emerge at the top.
I'm not going to lie... this is one of the worse Yaroze games I've played.
It is a needlessly difficult rehash of a classic that offers nothing new, has deafening sound effects that glitch up, no music, all the high scores are 0 points, and the ships are all reskins.
I could of let this one slide if this was 1997. This was made in 2001.
By then you had many great Yaroze games to learn from. This is a rushed piss-poor effort. And it says 'Yarozians'. This isn't representative of Net Yaroze at all. More like 'Fagalaga'.
Where are they now:
Not sure, but you can use the Wayback Machine to see his website:
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Sphere
Genre: Arcade
Programmer: Peter Dollochan
Released: 1998
Sphere is a game where you roll a giant metal ball around a landscape hunting for flags. This game was created for the Edge competition.
This looks like a
programming student's project of a 3D game.
You play as the Death Star with turrents.
There is lots of popping-in due to the low draw distance.
How do you move in this game? D-pad? Hold X?
Nope. You hold []. Dumb.
There are three maps to play on:
* Map 1 - surface of Mars
* Map 2 - volcanic setting
* Map 3 - surface of the moon
All these maps play the exact same.
You know you're in trouble when you have difficulties selecting the map to play on.
The numbers are horizontal. Does that mean you push left and right to access them?
Nope, you push up and down. What the...!
There are other enemies on the barren landscape... that look just like you.
Seriously. The programmer used the same models, not even tweaking them.
I've never been able to destroy one, but can wreck you good.
When you die you get this spinning copper coin like 2D texture spinning on its X axis. Is this supposed to be the sprite on an explosion?
This game could be something more but it has been rushed for the competition.
That's always a bummer.
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Shroud
Genre: Arcade
Programmer: Ben James
Released: 09/07/2001
Shroud is a Yaroze version of the classic arcade game Defender, probably for its 20th anniversary..
This game has also been released under its original title: 'Defender'.
This goal is simple: simply amass as high score as you can.
You can accomplish this by saving the babes.
This is difficult. Of course this is because the arcade game was tricky dicky to keep you putting money in.
The pink Mutants and silver Brittles will kill you fast.
The Mutants swarm in like groupies and barge you.
The Brittles do the rape and run technique.
The controls take some time getting used to.
X accelerates you forward.
[] shoots.
() unleashes a smart bomb that destroys a smart bomb that destroys everything on sceen.
/\ is hyper space, propelling you forward a great distance.
I've never gotten more than a 1000-1100 points.
I always get murdered by everything and then sulk.
Ben James also made Psychon.
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Down
Genre: Platformer
Programmers: Team Parc (Andy Weissl did the coding)
Developed in: 6 weeks
Released: 12/10/1999
Down is a platformer where you have to constantly head downwards to avoid being skewered from spikes on the ceiling.
This concepts seems familiar. The readme file acknowledges that you may have seen similar games on the Spectrum.
You can't jump, which sucks because some platforms spawn too far away.
Sometimes you are forced to land on spikes, which hurt but can you slowly recover health from avoiding spikes.
This music has a nice bass line and synth sound but the goddamn piano instrument is too loud. Mute the sunnabitch!
The graphics look like the game was made in Game Maker.
That's funny because a PC port was made in Games Maker and released in 2010.
There was supposed to be another game mode called Up, where the goal is, you guessed it, to constantly head up to avoid a spiked floor.
They considered making it its own game. I don't think that ever happened.
Other people, namely David Johnston & Mike Goatly, have made an Up game.
This is the kind of game you would expect to see on phones and devices, one of those free games but charges microtransactions. Oh...
Where are they now?:
I think Andy Weissl is a software engineer now.
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Surf Game
Genre: Sports
Programmer: Mark Theyer
Released: 13/09/2001
Surf Game is a sports game where you can surface the wild blue sea.
Hold R1 or R2 for thrust and launch off them waves.
Hold the face buttons to lean in a certain direction.
Scoring is weird in this game.
I do tricks, like a spinning Superman, and I get no points.
I do nothing and go through a wave and I get points.
There is no music or sound effects in this game.
The game has them automatically off but even when you turn them on you hear nothing.
One thing I've noticed is that if you have the camera behind you and accelerate out to sea, no waves spawn.
But if you have the camera pointing straight down and do nothing, waves spawn. Free points.
This game has no end. It ends when you want it to end.
Where are they now?:
Mark Theyer was a Senior Software Engineer, Contract Software Developer, and Software Developer.
The most recent game he worked on was Cars Race-O-Rama for the Nintendo DS.
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Squeak
Genre: Puzzle
Programmer: Ben James
Released: 09/09/2001
Squeak is a version of Bejeweled. Simply match the fruit or veg to form at least 3.
You can play it with a time limit or no time limit.
At least they give us the option of having unlimited time.
The music is annoying. Luckily you can turn it off.
Moving the cursor makes a squeaky sound (I see what they did there).
It sounds like a monkey. It was dat fruit.
Match 3 or more of a kind makes a popping sound. Rubber fruit? RubberFruit?
I expected to see a Bejeweled game sooner or later. I'm surprised it took this long.
Ben James also made Psychon.
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Katapila
Genre: Platformer
Programmer: Ben James
Released: 6/30/2003
Katapila is a vertical scrolling platform where you must guide a yellow bouncy platformers up an infinite tower.
Much like Down, this game is of the infinite hallway variety - an durance test with the goal of getting points for dat sweet high score.
From what I've gathered the platform generation is random but fixed enough so that you can always reach one.
I don't think the platform placement gets trickier as you progress but I could be wrong.
I like this music.
Usually with Net Yaroze games I have to mute the game's music (if it has any) but it's quite nice here.
Official PlayStation Magazine UK must love Ben James because they keep using his games for their demo discs.
Ol' reliable he is.
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Arena
Genre: Arcade
Program: Tom Madams
Developed in: 4 months
Released: 16/02/1999
Arena is 3D arcade style game where you play a mech and must shoot down all the robots in the level to pass.
I've read on the internet that an alternative title for this game is 'Future Cop LAPD Lite'.
So this is as close to G-Police 3 as we'll get.
The opening intro has Commodore 64 style graphics. Could this indicate that this game is based on Arena 3000?
The robot you play as looks like the mech from MechWarrior or something from Star Wars.
The controls are iffy.
R2 fires your turret.
L2 sets off a bomb, destroying everything onscreen.
[] and () rotate the camera left and right.
The mech's gun heats up the more you fire. When the meter is full it becomes jammed, unable to fire until it let it cool down a bit.
The arena you spawn in is a fixed map, so with practice you'll know where everything is.
Arena A reminds me of Marble Madness.
Since there is no jumping or shielding you are constantly taking damage.
Sometimes enemies drop health but it might barely be enough to make up for what you took to get it.
This is a pretty alright experimentation of 3D game design.
A shame that the game is painful to listen to.
Where are they now?:
Tom Madams has done programming for The Getaway games and engineering for some Star Wars games.
Check out his blog at: https://imdoingitwrong.wordpress.com/
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Git
Genre: Puzzle
Programmer: Edward Cawley
Released: 1999/2000?
Git, short of Game Involving Triangles, is a competitive puzzle game that plays like Columns laced with LSD.
The aim of the game is match 4 matching triangles together.
You fire two at a time and can adjust what order to lob them at the pile.
The game starts up with a trippy intro involving an untexutred nuclear missile and an explosion.
The game screen is divided into four quarters.
Player One plays in the bottom quarter. Your opponents, NPC or human, play the other three.
Sometimes your assembled pieces rumble and a whole lot more triangles fling themselves onto the pile.
I think it's like your opponents punishing you, like in Tetris Attack.
There is no music but you can play music via music CD. Isn't that kind.
The sound effects get annoying after a while.
Where are they now?:
I think Edward Cawley works for a software company now.
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Samsaric Asymptotes
Genre: Shooter Shmup
Programmer: PalPalPalPal (Philippe-André Lorin)
Released: 2003
Samsaric Asymptote (what a name) is a space shooter that is bright and colourful, like the other game PalPalPalPal (what a name) made: INVS.
The first thing that springs to mind is the music on the title screen. That's the music from Terra Incognita!
The main menu has adjustments to speed and on/off settings for special and strobe. Too bad if you have epilepsy or motion sickness, you gotta do take it.
Your main weapon is a huge energy beam that changes colours rainbow style. Pretty.
Holding any shoulder button whilst holding X unleashes your secondary attack: spread shots! Now you're firing a shit-ton of bullets in every direction.
The graphics are simple but it works. It is mainly monochrome, save for your attacks.
Destroying the big ships drops a colourful square. An energy core?
The tally for the # you have is in the pause menu.
Collecting one changes the code in the bottom right of the pause menu.
There is no score. I don't think there are any levels or waves either.
Another one of those infinite endurance games.
The game quickly becomes a bullet hell.
You've got to be Asian-tier godlike at shmups to get far.
Cheat code:
L1 R1 R1 R1 L1 R1 R1 R1 for turbo mode. Probably. It's never activated for me.
Where are they now?:
I honestly don't know.
Check out his website's page about Samsaric Asymptotes: http://palpalpalpal.free.fr/Works/Videogames/SamsaricAsymptotes/
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Gas Girl
Genre: Platformer
Programmer: Yoshikawa Yasuharu
Released: 05/03/1998
Gas Girl is an interesting sidescrolling platformer game where you play as a chick that has to fart on aliens to progress. Yup, Japanese game.
This game was made to enter the Dengeki King contest.
This one of those games, along with Fatal Fantasy VII, where people learn just how 'out there' these games can get.
The game starts up with our hero sleeping in bed and an alien spying on her.
Then a gang of ghastly ghouls stare down at her. Does this mean that this is all a dream?
Then you're in a jungle section, not far removed from Indiana Jones or Uncharted.
The protagonist has nice breasts and dat ass but her face makes her look like a man in drag.
Her chin is large and not helped by the shading which makes it look like it possesses a 5 o'clock shadow.
X jumps and [] farts.
You can only fart as long as the grey meter on the right isn't full.
When it is full you must wait a bit for the meter to drop.
To extend your fart meter you must collect upside-down hearts, and because they are flesh coloured it makes them look like testicles.
You encounter various enemies:
* aliens. The classic grey kind with big heads and wide eyes. All they do is run back and forth. The goombas of the game.
* Snakes. They fire spiked balls at you in an arc that they can't seem to change.
* Traps - these silver Venus flytrap looking things simply spin in place and hurt you when you touch them. So they are basically spikes.
* spinning heads. These scalpless heads whose faces are captured mid orgasm can't be defeated via farts and must be propelled upward via farts to pass under.
* elite aliens - these green alien bastards are like regular aliens but they also fire spiked balls at you
* Caterpilla - it looks like a cross between a Geodude and a caterpillar. It constantly fires spiked balls to its sides
The problem with dealing with enemies is that they all have too many hit points.
It takes a while to kill them with farts. Collecting the fart-extending testicles is a must.
The animation in this game is beautiful. Everything is so fluid and smooth.
It is a giant contrast to the theme of the big-tittied drag queen farting on aliens.
The hit detection is a little off, but it's in your favour.
The snake's tend to fire through your head and it doesn't hurt you.
The spinning scalpless orgasm-face heads are the worst.
You have to fart and jump whilst farting to get to raise to a great enough height to pass underneath.
Touching them hurts a ton.
You encounter stars on your farty journey but I can't figure out what they do.
In the fourth level you encounter a 2x2 gorup of blocks.
I can't get passed them. They are positioned so that your farts have no effect on them.
Ah well.
What an odd game. A fluidly-animated 2D sidescroller where you are a big tittied man-face farting on aliens and scalpless bouncing heads with orgasm faces, collecting scrotums so you can fart more.
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Technical Demo X2
Genre: Shooter
Programmer: Aaron Gandaa (Steve Sheehy did the graphics)
Developed in: 2 weeks
Released: 1999 (06/05/1999?)
Technical Demo X2 is an aptly named tech demo, testing the Net Yaroze kit with a shooter game.
The game is a horizontally fixed rail shooter. It looks like 1942.
The game moves very fast. The one screen FPS counter tells us the speed: 50 frames per second! O lawdy!
Pausing the game brings up a debug menu as well. Now that is service.
In this menu you can:
* change weapons and weapon level
* turn enemies on and off
* turn the background on and off
* display more debug data on and pff, like frame counter
* turn enemy collision on and off
* turn weapon collision on and off
* turn boundary display on and off
* change special abilities
* turn stop motion on and off
* change attack patterns.
The readme file reveals the going-ons of the development.
Choice quotes:
* "Nothing happens when the time runs out, It was purely a test for my timer code."
* "The system of configuring your power works but the parameters are very wrong. So I've de-activated it. I'll fix it in next build."
* "And No, There isn't an NTSC version as I don't have an NTSC tv to test it on."
* "Collision Detection is messy as I haven't yet measured how big my models are and I need to workout how big my sprites are relative to my 3D models. So I just guessed all the Hsmax will remain wrong until you pause then unpause program."
* "The Attack Pattern Option does nothing at present it will do once I get the Variable system operational [I'll explain next build]"
Fascinating.
The guys working on this really wanted other people to help them develop this project.
If only that came to fruition. Could this game have been the next R-Type? Or maybe the next Silver Surfer?
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Tan Tank 2
Genre: Arcade
Programmers: Team Milky Way Spirit
Released: 18/4/1997
Tan Tank 2 is a 3D arcade style game where you drive a tank and must destroy all the other tanks to proceed.
There are two modes to play: Practice and Mission.
They are both the same concept but Mission has harder levels.
The controls take a big getting used to.
X fires your turret, which only lasts a second at a time.
() fires shells, which you have an unlimited supply of.
/\ fires homing rockets, which you have 8 to use per stage.
[] is the brakes.
L1 changes the camera angle from far to close and back.
R1 = brings up your shield, which uses health but can hurt enemy tanks.
L2 and R2 change the camera angle.
The sticking point of the controls is the gas, which becomes sticky.
When you press the Up button you keep moving. You have to hit Down or [] to stop.
Guess how you change the vertical camera angle? Shoulder buttons? Nope: Start to pause the game and then Up or Down. WTF.
Every enemy tank has a different colour to denote its type.
Every type of tank has a name, as seen by its health bar.
Since you can't strafe in a tank, the best way to destroy tanks is to spam attacks.
Spam rockets with () whilst shooting with X inbetween reload times.
You might as well fire rockets with /\ since they return every stage.
Every 5 stages or so the background changes and the music changes, like in Kula World.
I like this. It isn't just one level set and music. Gotta love this effort.
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Combat 3D
Genre: Arcade
Programmer: 'Majik-ZX' Andrew Langstaff
Released: 1998 (4/6/1998?)
Combat 3D is another classic game brought to the Yaroze, this time Combat for the Atari 2600. Almost 20 years ago it was released, goddamn.
This game is a 3D game where you drive a blue blob of a tank to shoot at a red blob of a tank. Vintage fun.
The blue tank is dubbed the 'Immortal Wombat'
The red tank is dubbed the 'Atari Warrior'.
lol puns
If you watch the computer-controlled tanks on the start screen then eventually they'll become jammed behind walls, unable or unaware of reversing.
The controls are weird.
X fires shoot-range bullets.
() fires a single homing long-range bullet. You can only fire when the current bullet is gone.
[] changes the perspective from third person to isometric (imagine the perspective of watching a football game from the stands).
/\ changes the perspective from third person to first person to classic overhead (like in the original Combat), and isometric
You get a radar so you can see the enemy's location.
That's helpful in third person or isometric perspective.
Only problem: both you and your opponent are green dots. Why not different?
When the 3D generation of consoles landed a lot of classic games got a 3D remake.
Whether by tribute or attempts to restart the franchise, most games did not make the leap to 3D successfully.
This game is one of them. The idea is nice but this game is just not good in 3D. Even if a well respected indie dev team made a modern version of combat in 3D it wouldn't be as cherished as the original.
Where are they now?:
Majik also made a ZX Spectrum 48k emulator for Net Yaroze that only played Hungry Horace with no sounds, saving, loading, or real tape support. Goddamn.
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Super Mansion
Genre: Adventure
Programmer: Tomokazu Sato
Released: 18/4/1997
Super Mansion, also known as Yakata Plus, is a 3D adventure game set in a mansion, and you must find clues and solve puzzles.
I wish I knew why; the text is in Japanese!
This game is a Yaroze port of the FM Towns Marty game demo Yakata, also created by Tomokazu Sato.
You walk through the mansion at a slowly loud rate. Imagine Silent Hill but on a $0 budget.
Every step you make produces loud footsteps. Quite annoying.
The camera is nauseating.
It is slow and floaty. It doesn't rotate as fast as you, so it always takes half a second for it to catch up. Hope you aren't prone to motion sickness!
It's even worse when you run with X. Hi ho and up she rises!
The procedure of the game is like Silent Hill/Resident Evil: you walk around, picking up notes that may not be relevant, picking up keys that you hope will be used soon so they don't stay in your inventory forever, and basically work out where to go and what to do.
So there are two locked doors and two keys to find.
How do you open the doors? Beats me. I can't figure out jack or shit.
This game needs an English translation.
The music is quite nice. It sure is repetitive but it produces the suspenseful atmosphere that this game needs.
I don't think I can handle much of this game. It's an interesting effort for a Yaroze game but it feels so hollow.
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That was a lot of games to cover but I've still got lots more.
Click here to head to the next page to see the rest of the Net Yaroze games released onto demo disks.
Click here to return to the previous page; part 1 of demo disk Net Yaroze games.
Click here to return to the first page; Net Yaroze games I played as a kid.
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