#0031 Gorf

… I don't want to review this game. I really don't. There are so many other games out there that deserve to be in this book besides this one. Alright, here it goes. Today, on 1K1VGYMPBYD, we look at Gorf (Galactic Orbiting Robot Force), a 1981 Shoot 'em Up developed by the famous Dave Nutting Associates. Six bucks says you can't name a single game they made besides this without looking it up. It is pretty much known only for it's use of it's terrible synthesized speech. As to why this atrocity made the 1001 list and not Sinistar, I'll never know.

Okay, in this game you play as the ship from Galaxian. Your job is to defend the earth from alien invaders, just like we've been doing for the last four years now. You must fight your way through five distinct levels, Astro Battles, Laser Attack, Galaxians, Space Warp and Flag ship, the boss. which is cool I guess since no other games had done this other than Phoenix, and Donkey Kong. The other thing that must be mentioned is the voice. Unfortunately all the emulators I could find all had a problem with this synthesized voice, as it was absent from all versions I tried. But I did manage to find video containing the voice, to put it simply, I wasn't missing much, the voice just shouts little catch phrases when you beat a level, kill a bad guy and when you die. Hardly anything to write home about. Besides that, the only other inclusion is how the laser fires. You can technically fire as many times as you want, but every time you press the fire button, the previous laser you fired disappears from the screen, meaning that if you want your laser to go all the way to the top of the screen, you must sit and wait for that laser to get to the top of the screen, which is a terrible idea since one of the most important parts of shoot em ups is the ability to look where you're going to fire, line it up, fire and look for the next shot, as soon as you fire that shot, you shouldn’t even have to watch the shot, just worry about where your next one goes. But in Gorf, you have to watch your shot to make sure it made it to it's target before you fire another shot. Terrible idea choice. Other than that, it's your standard Space Invaders clone like we've seen a million times.

So how is the game? By my tone you should already know the answer. This game, is horrible. Easily the worst I've played so far on this list, and probably the first I'd argue doesn't belong here. I've talked about Space Invaders clones in the past, games like Phoenix and Galaga that are “like Space Invaders but...”, never on this list have I played an actual space invaders ripoff. Like, right down to the sprites and sounds. It just boggles my mind how they could pull this off and not get sued. Oh but they don't stop at Space Invaders, oh no. Why not go the whole nine yards and include a watered down port of Galaxian.

Yeah, in this level you fight Galaxains, it is also a clone, but a worse type than the Space Invaders thing. See, the problem is, when you deliberately and shamelessly rip off a hit arcade game such as Galaxian, you invite people to compare them. This might be a little better if they proved that since 1979 the graphics scene on the Arcade front have improved, but they don't, in fact, the graphics actually look worse! Several of the animations for the Galaxians such as being killed are severely watered down from their original sprites and they look terrible.

This was honestly the first game on the list that I did not want to play even 15 minutes. The controls were so bad, and the firing mechanic so broken, that it was near unplayable.

That's not really what I'm mad about though, sure the game controls suck and they're blatant plagiarists, but at least they admitted that they're just being talentless hacks by not hiding the fact that they just ripped off two of the biggest classics in shoot em ups by using the exact sprites. I'll at least give them that, they made shit, but at least they're standing by their shit. No the problem is, this game represents everything that was wrong with the gaming industry back in the early 80's. Games like this, ripping off other more talented game designers just to cash in on this video game craze. The saturation of the market with clones and overall crappy products made the whole industry bloated until the point came where the whole video game bubble popped. Taking video game giants such as Mattel and especially Atari with it. This game could have been good, it could have been something different, or at the very least added something to the genre. But no, they were content riding the coattails of Taito and Namco. Do not even bother with this game, the graphics are mediocre at best, the colors are obnoxious and even distracting in the first level, controls are borderline broken, and offers absolutely nothing that we haven't seen in other games done way better. Maybe I'll do Sinistar just to make up for this mistake of a game.

Next Up: Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, I'm actually looking forward to this.