as a government
funded experiment in mind control in 1981, this game has been
elevated to legendary status as the biggest Video Game Urban Legend
of all time. So move over Ben, because we're talking about the
bizarre Tempest clone Polybius!
 | |
| Seems innocent enough. |
Okay, for those who might not know, Polybius is an urban legend about
a rare arcade game released in 1981 by the obscure company
Sinneslöschen (German for “sense Delete” according to Google
translate, very subtle). This game was supposedly very popular, with
with people lining up down the street just to play it, it became so
popular that people were literally at each other's throats for a shot
at the game as fist fights broke out over who could play next.
However, players who did engage in the strange puzzle game reported
strange things, such as hearing a woman crying, or seeing grotesque
faces out of the corner of their eyes. Players would also have
nightmares, experience nausea, headaches, blackouts, or even develop
amnesia. A few were even driven to suicide. Others stopped playing
games altogether and at least one became an anti-video game activist
(Of course no source ever says who that was). According to the arcade
owners at the time, strange men wearing black suits would often come
to collect “records” from the game.
They never took any
money, but simply data on gameplay. It's because of these men in
black that many belive that Polybius an experiment using subliminal
messages and psychedelia conducted by a vague yet menacing government
agency. The game remains a mystery to this day as around one month
after it's release, all of the cabinets suddenly disappeared
overnight. Not even the owners knew where they went. They all simply
vanished one day. That is, until one cabinet reappeared briefly in an
arcade in 1998, but just as soon as it had appeared, it soon
disappeared. And while many have tried to recreate the original game,
nobody has ever found the original ROM.
Spooky stuff man!
With the history out of the way, we can move on to the gameplay and
let me tell you guys, a good ripoff of the original game is not easy
to find. For the record, I would like to state that I DID at LEAST
make an effort to find the original ROM online. I was unsucessful,
obviously, but I did settle for a good ripoff. I tried three
different variations of the game, all were fundamentally the same,
but the last one I found actually seemed... Better? I don't know, it
seemed more official, like someone spent more than just a weekend on
it. I'll do my best to explain it.
The game is a vector
SMUP game with puzzle elements. Basically, you play as the most
advanced vector space ship I've ever seen in 1981, your goal being to
lower the shields in the center “mothership?” to zero to advance
to the next level. You do this by shooting shapes that have numbers
floating around them. See, the mothership has numbers rotating around
it, if you hit a shape that has a number that either matches, or is
devisible by the number floating around the mothership, then the
mothership's shields will decrease by that number. For example, if
the mothership has a sheild number of 6, and you shoot a shape shot
out with a 3 on it, then the mothership's sheild will decrease by 3.
If you hit a shape that is not devisible or matching the mothership
number, then the sheilds will increase, same goes if you get hit by a
number shape. You must also dodge enemies and avoid enemy fire. When
the mothership's sheilds drop to zero, you move on to the next level.
The controls in this
game are like nothing I've ever had to deal with. See, your ship
stays on the right side of the screen. No matter what. You move the
joystick up to move forward, despite the fact that you're on the
right side of the screen facing left. Move the stock down to turn
around and move backwards. Yep, you don't move backwards like in
centipede or Phoenix, you actually can face backwards.
You tilt the joystick left and right to not move you, but rotate the
entire screen clockwise or counter clockwise pivoting on the center
of the mothers ship. Yeah, these controls are strange and feel
completely foreign and unnatural, and it's not like this is 1976
where all games had some sort of weird controls, no, games by now all
had grown to some sort of standard. That's not all that's weird about
this game. The music is just electric whines and noise pulsating to a
rythem. It almost seems like the heartbeat of some strange
electronic machine. Oh and you thought the colors for scramble were
bad? Some of the later levels have strange psychedelic colors
swirling in a weird spiral constantly shifting from one headache
inducingly bright color to the next, the whole thing is very
hypnotizing, but I wouldn't be surprised if people went into
epileptic seizures at the sight of this game. Speaking of graphics,
the graphics in this game are strange as well. As in, not bad,
the opposite really. What's strange about them is the amount of
vector lines that this game produces. Most games from this era use
very simple shapes with very few vector lines. Even more advanced
games such as battlezone had fairly simple graphics. This game on the
other hand, has vectors like I've never seen before. If this game
truely came out in '81, how did they pull this off? Did arcade
cabinets have that kind of Ram? This was back when the commodore 64
reined supreme, and 64 kilobytes of ram was something to brag about.
Combined with colors that exceed 16bits, i just don't see this game
being possible in the given time frame.
The question though is not "is this
game possible" the question for this series is "is this
game good?"
Well the controls are bizarre, the
puzzles, confusing, the sound is headache inducing, the colors
obnoxious, strange, unexplained messages flash in the background for
only a fraction of a second, one time I could have sworn I briefly
saw an image of a man's face in the background(no I'm not trying to
be creepy, that really happens). And I cannot stop playing.
Have any of you played Angry Birds? Of
course you have, everybody has, the game is addicting. Is Angry Birds
a good game? No, it's mediocre at best, but the game is just so
addicting that even the snobbiest of gamers have a hard time putting
it down. Yeah, it's kind of like that, only worse. Imagine Angry
Birds addiction level on steroids (or should I say lsd). I had to
tear myself away from playing this game for an hour (most arcade
games I only play for 15min max). It's just this version too. I got
sick of the other two versions after just a few minutes, but this
one, I don't know what it is, I just can't stop playing. So yeah, if
you can find the right version, and are not prone to motion
sickness or epilepsy, i highly suggest this game as you'll be playing
it for hours. In fact, I'm gonna fire it up for another round or two.
Gotta kill that mother ship.
Next up: The Hobbit
