How to Survive in the Video-Game Jungle

In this era of mediocre dangers, truly great risk comes as a matter of course only to criminals, lovers and revolutionaries. The rest of us have to search for it.

The wealthy can afford extravagant dangers: race cars, hang gliders, cocaine. But there are cheaper ways to be a hero. Thanks to the microchip and the major American manufacturers of video games. anyone with a measly quarter can purchase entry into his very own dangerous world. Learning to survive in that world, however, may cost many quarters. Which is to say that in some ways, even imaginary worlds are a lot like the real one.

Take the world of the Pac-Man, for instance. Like a lot of Americans, Pac-Man eats on the run and loves his dessert. He doesn't bother anybody and doesn't want anybody bothering him--but there are four ghosts who relentlessly pursue him through the maze of his life, trying to gobble him up. During 1981. Americans spent $8,000,000 per week to play Pac-Man. That's $8,000,000 in quarters, mind you, which means that over a 52-week period. U.S. citizens made more than a billion and a half conscious decisions to leave this world and enter the world of a cartoon character who looks like a yellow dot with a mouth.

This tells you five important things. One is that if you've never played Pac-Man, someone you know has. Another is that if you haven't. the odds are you will. The third is that when you do. you're going to feel like a wimp when your friends (your girlfriend, even) can at least get to the second peach. The fourth is that playing Pac-Man well is obviously more difficult than it looks, or it wouldn't have been played by so many people for so long. The fifth is that to get past the wimp stage by trial and error will cost you a fistful of dollars--changed into quarters, of course.

Unless you know the patterns. And that's where we come in. Later, we'll give you tips on how to beat three of the most currently popular video games: Pac-Man, Centipede and Defender.

If you've never played those games, it could cost you $20 or more (that's 80 quarters to you. chum) just to get your score up to 10,000 on all of them. But with a few tips. you can cut your learning time--and expense--in half. You can also amaze your buddies, dazzle your girl and win friends. Do not, however, try to win money. This will be a rookie course.

But before you begin, you'd better know what you're up against. First of all, there's the manufacturer. He isn't exactly your enemy, you understand. he wants you to like his game enough to try it again after you've risked your first quarter--and be challenged by it enough to keep playing it hundreds of times. By no means, though, does he want you to beat the game. The manufacturer keeps score by what people in the coin-operated-game industry call game life, which is the length of time a game continues to earn enough money to justify its space in an arcade, tavern or shopping center. When people figure out a game, they get bored with it; when that happens, the game "dies" and, profitwise, there's nothing deader than a dead game.

Another thing the manufacturer doesn't want is an otherwise challenging game with a hidden flaw that allows a player to keep raping the machine for more time without using much skill. (Atari's classic Asteroids contained just such a flaw, which resulted in almost daily headlines about some compulsive wretch in one city or another spending a day and a half playing Asteroids nonstop.) Ideally for the manufacturer, as well as for video-game operators and distributors, a game will last between one minute (for beginners) and five minutes (for experienced players), or an average of about two and a half minutes. Therefore, no matter what your score, if you can play any coin-operated video game for longer than two and a half minutes, you've beaten it from the standpoint of the people who want your quarters.

The second thing you're up against is the machine itself, beginning with the game's software--its computer program. That's the brain of the game, and it's stored inside the cabinet on silicon chips about the size of a piece of Dentyne gum. The chips and a standard circuit board contain the most fiendish thoughts of professional video-game addicts, many of whom have degrees in computer technology from places like UCLA, Stanford and Tokyo University. These people are paid by the manufacturers to sit around all day, trying to think up games that won't just entertain you but will beat you many, many times before you start beating them. Furthermore, these computer whizzes try to design games that'll obsess you so much that you can't stop playing, even if you're beating the machine. So if you can play it for several minutes and walk away from it after five or six games, you've foiled both the program and the programmer. (Of course, the machine has other ways of beating you--literally: See box at right.)

Finally, there's the psychological factor: If the theme of the game doesn't appeal to you, you're not going to give it your best effort, so you experiment to find out which kind of game best satisfies your own peculiar fantasies. There are five basic types of video games: driving games; cannon-base games such as Space Invaders and Centipede; rotating-center-cannon games such as Asteroids: side-projected-rocket games such as Defender, Super Cobra and Scramble; and maze games such as Pac-Man, Berzerk and Crazy Climber. Obviously, there's a vast psychological "thrill gap" between the maze character Pac-Man, whose primary skills are those of running and eating, and the all-powerful pilot of the Defender spaceship, who can fly his rocket in either direction, pick up men and put them down, shoot, bomb and move at will into another dimension. While both games offer unique challenges, most people will find that, after playing each game a few times, they'll have a definite preference for one or the other.

The three games we're going to help you learn to play were chosen for two reasons: They're the most popular games of their types right now; and each offers a psychological satisfaction distinctly different from the two others. That means you'll have a better chance of finding one you want to learn to play well than if we'd chosen three side-projected-rocket games or three maze games.

Now that you know what you're up against, have your quarters ready, loosen your tie (and your wrists) and get set to learn the laws of survival in three dangerous worlds.

Pac-Man

Pac-Man was created by the Japanese, so right away you know you're up against an inscrutable opponent. The game was licensed by Midway Manufacturing Company in August of 1980, and more than 100,000 have been sold in the U.S.

A large part of the game's sustained sales can be attributed to its popularity among women. Until Pac-Man came along, video games were almost exclusively played by men. But, as Stan Jarocki, Midway's director of marketing, says, "Pac-Man is cute, not violent."

Presumably, women like cute. "It caught on with women unlike any other machine I've seen," says Sue England, owner of Silver Sue's electronic-game room, one of the largest and best-known game rooms in Chicago. "In the evening, it's not unusual for four or five women, just off work, to go out for a drink, then come to the game room for some Pac-Man."

It hasn't taken men very long to catch on to that pattern; a young man we know who has tried every method known to man of picking up girls swears by the game. "These days," he says, "you don't need a line. All you have to do is ask a lady if she'd like to play a little Pac-Man. That gets you together, gives you something to laugh about, without an awkward introduction. I can't say I love the game, but for me, playing it has been, shall we say, a social necessity."

Pac-Man is a maze game, the aim of which is to get the little yellow dot you control with a single lever to eat all the smaller dots (ten points each) without getting eaten by the four hungry ghosts, Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde. When the Pac-Man eats a 50-point energy dot (there's one in each corner of the playing area), he gets to eat the four ghosts if he can catch them. Points double for each ghost devoured, the first one worth 200 and the last one scoring 1600.

Each of the pursuing ghosts has a different personality, which will influence the flow of the game. The blue one (Inky) is often called Bashful, because he tends to avoid direct confrontation. He's likely to veer away just as it looks as though he's caught the Pac-Man. The red one (Blinky) is nicknamed Speedy, because he's the fastest ghost and the only one who can outrun the Pac-Man.

The pink one (Pinky, of course) is nicknamed Shadow, because, unlike the blue ghost, he's always headed for the Pac-Man, no matter how the Pac-Man maneuvers. The orange ghost (Clyde) is sometimes called Poky, because he's the slowest.

Each time the Pac-Man swallows up all the dots in the maze, he gets to pause and then face a brand-new "board." Each successive board offers extra bonus points but is generally harder than the last--the ghosts pick up speed as the game goes along.

The player gets extra bonus points for eating the series for targets that appear periodically in the center of the maze. The center targets begin with different fruits (cherries, strawberry, peaches, apples, limes), then get rather bizarre with the appearance of something that resembles a bowl of pudding, though some people think it's a flower, a torch, a starship or Galaxian, the main squadron leader from the Midway game. We like pudding better, since the others are indigestible. Then come bells, followed by keys. The values of these center targets, key components in racking up points, are as follows:

Board 1: Cherries, 100 points

Board 2: Strawberry, 300 points

Board 3: Peach, 500 points

Board 4: Peach, 500 points

Board 5: Apple, 700 points

Board 6: Apple, 700 points

Board 7: Lime, 1000 points

Board 8: Lime, 1000 points

Board 9: Pudding, 2000 points

Board 10: Pudding, 2000 points

Board 11: Bell, 3000 points

Board 12: Bell, 3000 points

Board 13: Key, 5000 points

Each prize appears on the screen twice during each board (though all boards after number 12 offer keys), so that it's possible to get double the bonus points allotted to each prize--for instance, your could get 10,000 points on board 13, just by eating the two keys.

But getting lots of points doesn't necessarily prolong your play in Pac-Man. Clearing the maze does. That's because you get one extra Pac-Man at 10,000 points, and that's all. Since you're allotted a maximum of four of the little lemonheads per game, no matter how many points you score, your first objective is to keep each Pac-Man "alive" as long as possible.

One excellent player we know offers the following strategy: "Forget about getting points through the first three mazes. If you can eat a few ghosts, fine. If you can eat the bonus fruits, fine. But don't get caught. Keep moving, even if it (continued on page 228)Video-Game Jungle(continued from page 170) means passing up bonus points."

That's good advice for at least two reasons. For one, most beginning Pac-Man players get knocked out (or eaten, as the case may be) before the end of the third board. For another, if you can get past the third board (the fifth on some machines), you can beat the game for ten to 13 more boards simply by moving your Pac-Man in a regular pattern (we'll give you the pattern in a minute). On the first three boards, however, the movements of the four ghosts aren't predictable, so pattern following is a useless--and dangerous--affair.

Although we can't give you a pattern that'll guarantee your getting through the first three boards, we can amplify our expert's suggestions. First, you should clear out the dots along the bottom of the maze as soon as you can. Then work toward eliminating all the dots in the center and top of the maze, leaving only those near your power capsules in each corner of the board. You may have some success beginning the first three boards with the same pattern we'll give you to solve boards four to 13, but be warned: It won't work all the way through. At some points, you have to play free style.

But assuming that you make it through the first three boards (as we said, on some machines it will take until the fifth for the pattern to work perfectly), you're ready for the pattern:

Since Pac-Man will cross his own tracks occasionally, we've divided the pattern into three phases. In the first leg, Pac-Man exits through the tunnel on the right of the board (just before Speedy, the red ghost, comes down for him) and re-enters from the left tunnel, continuing to eat dots up the left side of the board. He then comes down through the center of the maze and gobbles up the first bonus prize.

The pattern continues with Pac-Man heading for the bottom of the board, eliminating all the dots on the right.

The pattern finishes with Pac-Man sweeping through the maze again for his second bonus prize, then consuming his last two energy dots--and perhaps eating a few ghosts before he consumes those last few dots.

This isn't the only pattern for beating Pac-Man, but it's one of the safest. And as you can see, it's not simple. It'll probably take several games to master it. But, as most Pac-Man players will tell you, part of the challenge of the game, even with a pattern, is that it requires exacting and prolonged concentration. A single deviation, a second's hesitation in the wrong place, and your goose is cooked--and eaten.

Centipede

If Pac-Man and maze games in general don't grab you, maybe you're the kind of person who likes to shoot things. That being the case, you'll probably like Atari, Inc.'s, most popular new game, Centipede.

Walk into any local arcade or tavern and you'll know right away if it has one, because Centipede produces a combination of sounds resembling wind chimes in the middle of a B-52 attack. You won't hear the wind chimes right away, but you will hear the B-52 sound. That's caused by the falling flea. The tinkling is made by the dancing spider. Then, every few minutes, you'll hear what sounds like machine-gun fire. That's the mushrooms getting themselves back together. We'll explain.

When the game begins, you'll see a playing field of randomly placed mushrooms. Then, with a thumping sound (much like a heartbeat), a centipede will begin creeping across the field, starting from the top center of the screen. It will walk from side to side, gradually working its way to the bottom. When the centipede runs into either a mushroom or the left or right boundary of the screen, it reverses direction.

The object of the game--the equivalent of Pac-Man's eating all the dots--is to shoot all the segments of the centipede before it reaches the bottom of the screen. When you do, you get a new centipede at the top, which constitutes a new round.

Your bottom cannon (in the form of a snake's head) moves back and forth by means of a track ball on the right side of the machine. On the left side, there's a button you push to fire. If you hold the button down, you can fire continuously. Your cannon (or snake, if you will) can move up and down, but only within the bottom fifth of the screen.

If you hit the centipede, it breaks up into smaller ones, each with a head. The segment of the centipede you shoot leaves a mushroom in its place. When any centipede reaches the bottom of the screen, it travels across once and then starts back up again (if, of course, it doesn't collide with your shooter). When a whole centipede (one that you've managed to miss entirely on its way (continued on page 232) down) reaches the bottom, it releases its tail section--which changes into a new solitary head. As the game progresses, not only will tails make new heads when centipedes reach the bottom but more new heads will suddenly come out of the sides of the screen and begin traveling back and forth across the bottom--making it pretty hard to shoot and dodge them at the same time.

As though that weren't tough enough, about every three seconds, a spider leaps out from the side of the screen and jumps up and down with the intention of squashing your shooter. The spider also has an appetite for mushrooms, which it eliminates as it hops.

A destroyed mushroom counts for one point, and it takes four hits to wipe out a mushroom. Partially destroyed mushrooms, however, score five points. Centipede body parts count for ten points each and the speedy and elusive single centipede heads are worth 100 points each. Spiders are worth 300, 600 or 900 points, depending on how close they are to you when you shoot them. The spider shot less than an inch above you scores the most.

On the first wave--the first centipede, that is--mushrooms and spiders are all you have to deal with. But on the second wave, you'll be bombarded by falling fleas (though there is an exception to this rule, as we shall see). Fleas--which count 200 points when hit--come down the screen in a straight line, leaving a row of mushrooms behind them. The only problem is that you have to hit a flea twice to kill it; if you hit it only once, it speeds up, soon pouncing on your hapless shooter.

Finally, there's the scorpion. Making its first appearance in the fourth wave, it enters from either side of the screen and travels slowly across--though faster as the game progresses--and any mushroom it touches becomes "poisoned." Those mushrooms cause any centipede that collides with them to take a dive straight toward the bottom of the screen, rather than continue snaking back and forth as it usually does. If shot, a scorpion is worth 1000 points, the highest value of any single target in the game.

What makes Centipede an appealing game is that it's not hard to score 10,000 or even 20,000 points without much practice. If you just shoot away at the centipede, make sure you get the extra heads and avoid being squished by the spider or the flea. you can easily delude yourself into thinking you're playing a great game. You're not. Great games on Centipede begin after 60,000 points. That's when everything--spider, flea, scorpion, centipedes and centipede heads--begin zipping across the screen at top speed. Then the game is no longer cute; it becomes a sort of Little Miss Muffet on acid.

There are two ways to rack up genuinely high scores, but before we give them to you, you should know you're getting this information from unimpeachable sources: Eric Ginner, 19, and Ok-Soo Han, 25, respectively the official men's and women's world-champion Centipede players. They won those titles last October at the coin-operated-game industry's first national video-game tournament, held in Chicago.

According to tournament rules, each player had only three minutes to score as many points as he could. "In tournament play," says Han. who racked up 53,220 points, "you take risks you never take when you're just playing for a high score without time pressure."

Ginner, who scored 52,341 points, puts it more bluntly: "Nobody should play the game the way we had to play to win."

Han and Ginner conveniently represent two approaches to the game. Han: "If you want to play Centipede for a long time, don't take chances. Avoid the spider and be very careful shooting the flea. The only secret to beating the game is to shoot everything that comes down that's shootable. If you want to rack up a higher score, shoot away the mushrooms on the bottom of the screen, which will bring out the falling flea, which you can shoot for extra points."

Ginner: "If you want to play Centipede for a long time, shoot away all the mushrooms on the screen early in the game, which prevents the flea from coming out at all and doesn't give the scorpion a chance to poison mushrooms until very late in the game."

They're both right. There are two methods to playing the game; Han's is the one preferred by most good Centipede players. Ginner's is trickier but is extremely effective. Ginner and second-place winner Samir Mehta, both habitués of the Time Zone arcade in Mountain View, California, alternated holding the all-time high score on Centipede for months using the no-mush-rooms-at-the-top method.

That method requires a bit more skill, but if you can master it. you'll probably get higher scores than by any other. What's tricky about it is that you have to count your shots very carefully (it takes four hits on a mushroom to erase it from the screen, remember).

Ginner begins (above) by shooting away all the mushrooms up the left side of the screen--counting each shot, so that he uses only four per mushroom. He's fast enough to clear the whole left half of the screen and begin on the right side by the time the centipede reaches the bottom fifth of the screen. Then he sprays the centipede with shots in one or two quick sweeps, leaving a small cluster of mushrooms.

The flea comes out only when there are fewer than five mushrooms at the bottom of the screen, so Ginner leaves a clump of mushrooms there. That means he has some tricky shooting to do, popping the mushrooms on the top of the screen from between the ones on the bottom. After that, he shoots away a few mushrooms at the bottom (always leaving at least five) and then increases their number again by spraying the second centipede as it passes along the bottom.

Eventually, single centipede heads begin to come out along with the main centipede. These heads are troublesome when they reach the bottom of the screen, where they speed up. Ginner takes them out right away. The head (or heads) usually precede the main centipede's arrival on the left, and Ginner hits it with a carefully timed shot, turning it into a mushroom.

He waits for the centipede to head back across the screen, then shoots away that one remaining mushroom.

The only problem with Ginner's method is that it slows the game down so much that if you're used to fast play, you're likely to doze off between centipedes.

On the other hand, if you're looking for speed, excitement, thrills and chills. Centipede may not be the game for you, anyway. Defender probably is.

Defender

The world of Defender is to the world of Pac-Man as Darth Vader is to Porky Pig. Joseph Dillon, sales director for Williams Electronics, says. "Frankly, Defender is the most sophisticated piece of machinery on the market right now." He's probably right. It's the first widely distributed machine to use multiple screens and to provide you with a reversible spaceship. What makes it particularly unusual is the computer program, which gives the enemies an uncanny range of behavior bordering on random. And it makes the best damn explosions you've ever seen on a video screen. When hit, each object breaks into 128 pieces of blazing color.

"After you've played a lot of other video games and you're looking for the ultimate test of your skills," says Dillon, "Defender is the Matterhorn of video games. Out in the arcades, the question used to be, 'What's your highest score on Space Invaders?' Two years later, it was. 'What's your highest score on Asteroids?' But now the question is. 'What's your highest score on Defender?'"

Defender is the cutting edge. There are some game players who refuse to play it after their first try. But the ones who play it long enough to get past the first enemy wave are hooked. After a while, they play other games only it all the Defenders are occupied--and more often than not, they prefer to watch another Defender player, particularly if he's any good.

Ace is good. He goes into Silver Sue's pinball and video-game arcade on Chicago's North Side at least five times a week for two or three hours, and he goes to play Defender. If all the Defenders are occupied, he usually volunteers to help Sue fix any broken games. He learned to fix video games by fixing Defender on a day when one of Sue's five Defenders wasn't working and the four others were occupied. Ace is a mechanic by trade, so fixing video games and pinball machines is a piece of cake for him. In return. Sue gives him free games. She knows he won't need many, since he can usually stay on one game for 30 minutes--which translates to something like 800,000 points, give or take a few thousand. It's the mental equivalent of standing astride two enraged Brahma bulls for approximately the same length of time.

Ace isn't his real name, of course, but, as one player puts it. "Nobody knows anybody's full name; the best players know one another by their initials." His real name is John McCue, and he's 23 years old. But ace is what he punches into the all-time-high-score column of every Defender he's ever played. "Defender is a macho game." says McCue, and you see that immediately in his stance: feet planted wide apart, knees bent slightly, arms outstretched at the hip as though he were firing two Colt A5s.

Other Defender players view him with respect. if not awe, Sue, who sees hundreds of players take on Defender every week, says, "Ace is absolutely the best. He's frightening. He does things that I've never seen anybody else do on that machine."

But before you can understand what Ace does to the machine, you've got to understand what the machine is trying to do to Ace. The general scheme of the game is this: There are ten men stranded on a distant planet and your job (in your rocket ship, naturally) is to protect them from an alien invasion. The aliens first send little green satellites called landers, which float down from the strato-sphere with the purpose of pouncing on your men. taking them off the planet and eating them. When a lander reaches the upper edge of the stralosphere (the top of the screen) with your man. it ingests him and immediately turns into a mutant. The difference between a mutant and a lander is that landers don't chase your rocket (though they fire a fusillade of shots as they go for one of your men) but mutants do. Not only do mutants chase you, they're very difficult to hit, because they refuse to attack you head on. They like to come in from above or below your rocket, and then, with a wriggling motion that's been described as "utterly obscene." they quite bluntly jump all over your ass. Mutants also fire shots at you, particularly when there aren't any landers left on the screen.

Obviously, the best way to save your ten men is to shoot all the landers before they can descend to the ground. But if you can't do that (and not many can), you still have a chance to save them by shooting a lander as it's ascending with one of your men. Of course, then the man will drop through space, and if you can intercept him with your rocket before he hits the ground, you "catch" him. With a little luck. you then return him safely to the planet.

However, shooting the landers and saving, or recapturing, your men is made a lot more difficult by the number of other alien enemies that increasingly clog your flying space. Aside from the landers and mutants, there are bombers. little purple squares that move diagonally from the top of the screen to the bottom and back up again, leaving mines--white crosshatches that are easy to overlook until you hit one and blow yourself into 128 pieces. Then there are baiters, extremely fast, green flying saucers that shoot bullets like crazy, fly in zigzag patterns and have the ability to disappear on the bottom of the screen and reappear on top and vice versa, making it hard as hell to know where they're going to attack. There are pods, bright, shimmering violet diamonds that just sort of float up and down across the screen. And there are swarmers, which is what pods break up into when you hit them. Each pod usually yields five to eight swarmers, and each swarmer moves with constant speed as it approaches you, all the while spewing out shots.

The good news is that you're not entirely without advantages in this war. First, your rocket is the fastest object on the screen except for the baiters, which can overtake you even when you're flying at top speed. Your rocket fires with pinpoint accuracy each time you hit the fire button, and by firing with a staccato rhythm, you can virtually fill the screen with a white hail of shots, eliminating anything that comes into your line of fire. Your arsenal also includes something called smart bombs, which, when set off by pushing the right thumb button, wipe out everything on the playing screen except you and your men. Push another button, marked hyperspace, and everything on the screen will disappear and reappear with your rocket in a different (and, you hope, more advantageous) position. Sometimes the position in which you come out gets you killed instantly, but sometimes you get a better vantage point from which to defend yourself. It's just a chance you have to take.

You also have a scanner screen, a small rectangular viewer directly above your playing area. The scanner shows you what's coming onto the playing screen from both in front of and behind you, and it also shows you your rocket's relationship to enemy objects. It lets you anticipate what's coming into your line of fire next, so that you can plan a bit of strategy before the moment of truth (or a mutant) is upon you.

As you begin each new wave, however, there are more enemies added, and the landers descend toward your men faster--the result being that (if you aren't quick) by the fourth wave, you can be faced with a flying armada of close to 100 nasty objects. That's why, for the beginner, making it past the fourth wave is nearly impossible. Before then, the landers have usually taken all your men while you've been trying to shoot and maneuver your way through the rest of the junk on the screen. When the landers take your last man, the planet blows up and every enemy lander on the screen turns into a mutant. And that, as any Defender player will tell you, is a horrifying sight to behold. Should you make it through the fourth wave, though, on the fifth wave (and every fifth wave thereafter), you get back all ten of your men, rejuvenating your planet, so to speak.

Now that you understand the game (you do understand the game. don't you?), you're ready for Ace's tips on beating Defender. "Your first objective," he says, "is to stay alive. That means you've got to try to get to 10,000 points. For every 10,000 points, you get a new rocket and a new smart bomb. It's always a race between the enemies and your next 10,000 points."

To win that race, says Ace, you'll need to know the following things, wave by wave.

First wave: "Always move from left to right. Although your rocket is reversible, most beginners just waste time by going back to shoot landers they've passed. Don't worry. On the first wave, you have nothing but landers (15 of them) and they're moving pretty slowly. Just travel around, carefully picking them off. (However, if you take too long to clear the first wave, wicked little baiters will come to punish you for your ineptness.) You should have time to shoot a couple of landers while they're taking your men. For each man you intercept, you score 500 points, and each time you return him to the planet, you get another 500. If you're not very good at catching the men, just shoot all the landers as quickly as possible. That should earn you about 3250 points. (You score 150 points for each lander and get 100 for each man remaining on the planet.) If you can catch a couple of men, you'll get maybe 5500 points on the first wave."

Second wave: "Again, moving from left to right is the general rule, though as the wave begins, you may have a couple of landers right behind you, off the playing screen but visible on your scanner to your left. You can reverse and take them out quickly, which prevents them from picking up any men before you can get back to them, then keep moving clockwise. I recommend flying constantly and shooting constantly. The quicker you get around the planet, the better your chances of getting through the wave alive. You have 20 landers on the second wave and every wave thereafter, so you'll have to be more aggressive in going to them and shooting them before they get your men. On the second wave, you'll also face three bombers and one pod. Don't worry about them until last. Get the landers first. The best way to shoot the bombers is to fly over or under them, avoiding their trail of mines; then you get in front of them, reverse and shoot them face on. To get rid of your pod, shoot it and then smart-bomb the swarmers that come out of it immediately. That could take you over 10,000 points (for a new rocket and smart bomb)."

Third wave: "Beginning with the third wave, and for every wave after that, you'll have three or more pods on the screen as soon as it starts. If they aren't directly in front of you, you'll see them kind of glimmering just ahead of you on your scanner. You should try to get them bunched together, then smart-bomb them. Depending on how many you have, you'll score between 3000 and 6000 points all at once, as well as the point value of any other enemy objects near them. Often, however, the pods will leave anywhere from ten to two dozen swarmers that will reappear on the screen later on. The swarmers usually bunch up. so if you don't think you can shoot them (they're the smallest objects on the screen), wait until you fly into a crowd of them and smart-bomb them. too. That way, you clear your flying area so you have more room to get to your landers and catch men you can save. You also get four bombers on the third wage, and the trails of mines they leage begin to become hazards when you're flying at top speed. Don't go out of your way to shoot them: but as they come into your line of fire, it's a good idea to take them out rather than wait until you've gotten all the landers. Besides, unless you're pretty good at saving men, you're going to lose a couple on the second wave, anyway, and that means you'll have to shoot the mutants.

"There are two main ways to shoot mutants. They like to attack along the top of the screen; so if you fly your ship up to the top and fire rapidly while moving the ship up and down slightly, the mutants will usually run into one of your shots. If you're trying to shoot them in the middle of the screen, you won't be able to hit them dead on. The best thing is to fly ahead of them an inch or so, then reverse and fire quickly. When you reverse, it doesn't give them time to get out of the way. On any wave, if you take too long clearing the screen, the baiters will begin to come out. They're very hard to outfly, particularly if you have more than one coming at you. Your best bet is to shoot them down just as they appear. Usually, when they materialize, they'll fly directly in front of your rocket for a minute, then begin circling around you. But before they materialize, you'll hear a hissing sound. When you hear that, look at your scanner. It will show the baiter, though you may not see it yet. Determine whether it's coming from behind or in front of you, then face that direction and pause. As soon as it materializes. line up with it on the scanner and shoot."

Fourth wave: "On the fourth wave, you'll get 20 landers, four pods and nine bombers. The pods will usually be bunched together. Blow them up right away, then go for your landers. On the fourth wave, the bombers become a real problem, because they move up and down across the screen faster and they leave more mines behind. You'll have to shoot some of them or you'll keep running into the mines. Your first objective, of course, is always to shoot the landers. But if you see a bomber close by--even if it's behind you--it's often worth taking a little extra time to shoot it. When the bombers are gone, it's so much easier to fight the lander's and mutants."

•

If you follow Ace's advice to the letter, you should make it to the fifth wave and accumulate between 45,000 and 55,000 points. But in order to do that. you're going to have to learn to shoot with deadly accuracy--and to shoot mutants without panicking. To develop your skills, McCue recommends two modes of practice. The first is to play with the main viewing screen covered with paper, so that you have to line up all your shots on the scanner. If that sounds hard, listen to his second favorite way to practice: "I start out the game by shooting all my men. which means I get nothing but mutants for four waves. If you can get to the fifth wave shooting nothing but mutants, you'll have learned just about every maneuver there is in the game. You'll have to use your smart bombs wisely, learn to navigate through swarmers and know how to use hyperspace to your best advantage."

You should also be aware that the machine has a few little quirks due to its computer program. Its inventor, Eugene Jarvis (see page 168), says it's those quirks that give the machine character.

"For one thing," says Jarvis. "there's the matter of smart-bombing the pods. Actually, the way I designed the game, there aren't supposed to be any swarmers left, but there usually are. I like to think they're just stunned. Second, if you reverse quickly as the swarmers go past you, you can follow them. They'll keep going in the same direction, rather than come back at you as they're supposed to, and you can just pick them off. Third, due to some arithmetic function of the machine, there are two invisible lines in this universe--one for mutants and one for swarmers, where if they're coming toward you and you cross the line, they suddenly fly away from you. Then, finally, there's the biggest computer foul-up, which is that if you should hit 1,000,000 points, it suddenly starts giving you a man for each object you hit. You can get as many as 100 men. It also gives you a whole lot of rockets and smart bombs, enough to let you play almost indefinitely."

Getting to 1,000,000? For most of us, getting to 50,000 is enough of a kick. To get 50,000, you'll have to play about six minutes, which means, of course, that you've beaten the game.

You'll also get the satisfaction of having defended an entire planet from death and destruction. If that isn't worth a quarter, nothing is.

"A second's hesitation in the wrong place, and your goose is cooked--and eaten"