Game of the Week – September 2, 2009

Approximately every week, I plan to take a look at a Game of the Week from the PAPA collection. For no particular reason other than that I think it’s obscure and interesting, I’m starting with Stern’s Lost Tomb, which was released in 1983 on the Scramble hardware platform.

Let’s not be shy about this – Lost Tomb is a bitch. You have 8-way joysticks to move and shoot, and although I would never say Robotron is easy, Lost Tomb makes Robotron seem easy – because at least at first, Robotron is playable. Lost Tomb is frustrating at every turn. It comes from a time when games were really brutally, unforgivingly hard, and the players liked it that way. If you wanted your quarter to last longer, you’d better play pinball instead (which incidentally, is what happened to me at a tender age).

On each level, you have a short timer and lots of things running towards you that will kill you. To help you out of a jam, you can use the “Whip” button, which blots out everything around you in a small spiral pattern – which enemies can sneak right past and kill you anyway. It’s not exactly a Smart Bomb. On the plus side, you can shoot enemies on the other sides of walls if they are close enough. And when you survive a room, you get to an “outside” room where you can try to get to another room before a bunch of vampire bats eat you. And then some rooms are throne rooms, where you are even more likely to die immediately.

When I tried the game again today, I thought perhaps it would seem easier now that I’m older. Not so. Or perhaps I wouldn’t remember it so fondly. Well, that may be so. It turns out I’m having difficulty understanding why I ever felt fondly towards it. I will grant that it has a clever sense of humor. It will offer to sell you 99 of the oh-so-effective Whips for an extra quarter. If you finish it (mind you, this is just based on what I’ve read online; I can’t get past the third screen), it rewards you with “Our profound thanks for playing this game” – and then starts you over.

But difficult or not, I do have a fondness for a long list of relatively obscure early video games. I certainly don’t have all the ones I would like to, so keep an eye on the PAPA cafeteria area in future years…

Credit to the Killer List of Video Games for the screenshot and other information.