Scramble

Konami's Scramble makes an extremely strong initial impression, as the earliest horizontal scrolling shooter on my backlog, and the first shooting game to feature a linear progression through set level terrain. Up to this point we've seen Space Invaders derivatives from the east, and Spacewar! derivatives from the west. While there's a sizable stylistic gap between the two approaches, they've shared one major component: everything has been single-screen and score-attack based, either wrapping player movement around to the opposite end of the screen when the edge is breached, or else simply restricting movement from reaching the edge in the first place. The likes of Galaxian have developed the scoring system and enemy behavior, while Asteroids has made strides in creating a sense of authentically occupied space, but both have remained largely static gameplay experiences, even with their increased mechanical dynamism. In contrast, Scramble presents the player with a defined end goal. The attract mode asks, "How Far Can You Invade Our Scramble System?"

The game consists of a single persistent level, split into 6 regions, each of which provides a checkpoint at the beginning and a unique test of skill throughout. The player's ship, aside from being able to move in 8 directions (up to a limited distance forward on the auto-scrolling screen) can also fire two different weapons: a regular bullet which fires rapidly in a horizontal line to the front, and a somewhat slower bomb which pitches forward and down at a naturalistic arc, and which the player can only have two of on screen at a time. The differing utilities of these weapon systems are immediately obvious; many targets reside on the planet's surface below, often tucked into little nooks and crannies or behind bits of terrain. If you want to hit them consistently, your first task will be to develop a keen sense for the trajectory of your bombs, and get used to angling them over peaks with as little clearance as possible.

And you do want to hit them, because much like Rally-X before it, this game has a fuel gauge to concern yourself with. Run out, and your ship will slowly descend into a disastrous crash landing on the rocky ground below. Because you can't control how quickly you clear stages like in Rally-X, you're instead tasked with collecting fuel to refill your gauge regularly as you progress, which is done by destroying fuel tanks which appear exclusively on the lower terrain of the stage. Some of these are located on flat plateaus where a player skilled at precise movement can position themselves low enough to hit them with their primary gun, but many are placed so as to be only reachable by the descending arc of a bomb, and many more are placed in conjunction with airborne enemies such that while you technically could swoop down and shoot them directly, to do so would be unwise.

The effect this has on the game is vital to creating the intended play experience. Many segments of this game prove much easier to survive if you focus entirely on dodging incoming danger, paying no mind to the available targets at the bottom of the screen. However, this is simply not an option. A full tank of fuel is enough to barely get you through one of the shorter regions of the stage, and not enough to make it through the longer ones. If you want to survive, you must target fuel tanks, splitting your attention between the dangers in front of you and the tantalizing rewards below.

In addition to fuel tanks, the terrain under the player features other fixed buildings which offer large point payouts of varied specific amounts, which ties into what is quickly becoming a staple feature of the arcade, a free life awarded when the 10,000 point threshold is reached. The game is, as you might expect, quite challenging, so if you wish to reach the end you'll also want to prioritize hitting these in order to get that extra bit of leeway for messing up along the way.

Beyond the tempting targets lined up against the ground, the game of course also places substantial opposition in front of the player. Many upward-facing rockets line the terrain, and some of them will take off and fly into the player's path at set moments. There's no way of telling a dormant rocket from an active one until it takes off, so you have to keep your wits about you while flying past them, and in some instances it would behoove you to simply learn which rockets are safe and which aren't. These three (four if you count dormant and non-dormant rockets separately, which the game actually does for scoring purposes) elements make for an immediately compelling gameplay experience in the first section, combined with the naturalistic variability in the terrain they're arranged upon, and as we move forward each new zone we enter brings new challenges to test different aspects of our skill with the game.

In section 2, the player enters a cave which has occasional targets on the ground, but no active rockets shooting up off the surface. Instead, there are already-active enemy ships in the center of the screen, oscillating rapidly across the available airspace. The player must either shoot these down (requiring no small measure of precision given how fast they're moving) or dodge around them, taking care not to crash into either the ceiling or the floor of the cave, all while taking out enough fuel tanks on the way to stay in the air. Section 3 forgoes aerial targets for cannon fire entirely, tasking the player with dodging a series of invincible fireballs firing horizontally from right to left, while continuing to keep up the ground bombardment for fuel and points. Section 4 shifts from natural terrain to man-made brick structures, into which are set unnaturally small nooks and crannies for the returning active rockets to hide in and fire out of, pressuring the player on both their precision bombing and their ability to dodge laterally around threats from below.

Once this zone is cleared, the player actually stops needing to worry about fuel anymore; section 5 features narrow corridors through a large brick structure, with fuel tanks appearing exclusively in direct line of the player's path through the level, requiring you to take them out quickly with your main gun in order to pass through. This is, of course, trivially easy for anyone who's made it through zone 4. The real challenge here is one of precise movement with precious little leeway for mistakes. The passages that are used to navigate this structure are narrow when moving forward, and take large 90-degree turns upward and downward at various times, often at intervals so long as to require the player to move forward to the limit of their allowance in preparation for them, then immediately begin pulling back and downward or upward at a 45-degree angle the opening is cleared in order to reach the next passage before the automatic scrolling pushes them against a wall. Two-thirds of the way through the game, it's taking a turn into what will eventually become the subgenre of platform shmups, scrolling shooters which emphasize precision movement around dangerous terrain.

In comparison to the challenge and excitement of this zone, the final "Base" section is a bit of a letdown. The narrow passage opens up into a skyline of brick towers, the tallest of which has "Konami" written across the top, and the final "boss," such as it is, is a stationary ground-bound target situated in a deep gully between tall towers. It doesn't fire at you, all it does is sit there and be a pretty hard target. The zone loops until you either hit it, or run out of fuel and die.

I assume that with enough precision, it is possible to hit this guy with a bomb from a position that will let you escape unscathed after doing so. After a few attempts, I was running low on patience and had plenty of extra lives, so I just dived down toward him and shot him with my main gun, in so doing putting myself too deep in the gully to escape before the automatic scrolling crushed me against the nearest tower. Upon destroying the boss, the game cut to a congratulations screen informing me that I had performed my duties, and wishing me luck on my next mission, before restarting the stage from the beginning. As far as I can tell there are no differences on the second loop, other than the fact that you've already gotten the 1up at 10,000 points and won't be afforded another one.

Here we once again see the ways that linear games with endings at this point in time were pushing up against their limits. The game is fun and interesting the whole way through until that anticlimactic final zone, but once you've done it once, I can't say there's a whole lot of longevity. Technically I suppose you could keep getting better and run through many loops consecutively, racking up high scores and learning the exact right way to take out the boss without dying in the process, but… I can't say I see much point in that, all told. It takes a game whose core strength is its novelty and variety throughout its runtime, the way it constantly presents you with new challenges that test you in unique ways, and turns it into a repetitive assembly line for constructing high scores. I'd argue that the single-screen games are better for this kind of score-chasing, because they are what they present themselves as from the start. You don't get the awkward gear shift from linear progression to tiresome repetition, the game is just you and some mechanics in a room for as long as you want to dance with them.

Nonetheless, I feel no hesitancy whatsoever to call Scramble a great game. It's dynamic, interesting, and just plain fun, and anyone with an interest in video game history owes it to themselves to take a look at this predecessor to the likes of Gradius. With a successful run clocking in at around 5 minutes, it's a bite-sized little morsel, but the mechanics are extremely finely-tuned to push and pull the player into interesting and exciting modes of play, with a level of challenge high enough that it took me around 4 hours altogether to build enough skill and familiarity to beat the game. I can't say it leaves the best last impression, but it's a wonderful little game up until that point.