Booting up Virus (also known as Zarch on some, but not all, other formats) for the first time in decades revealed a sight that seemed more than a little out of place in a game released in the same year that gave the world Super Mario Bros. 3 and Gradius II. Solid 3D shapes cast real shadows as they pass over the undulating landscape below; a polygonal land of green earth and blue seas sporadically decorated with trees, animated radar dishes, and miscellaneous little buildings. If I thrust over this wraparound planet’s waters I’ll kick up chunky particle spray as tiny 3D fish leap out of the blue—and somehow this is all happening in an action game, not something using The Sentinel‘s stationary points of view.
So it’d be quite nice if I could spend more than a few seconds enjoying the stunning view in David Braben‘s (later responsible for the wonderful Frontier: Elite II and many other games) ambitious game. You see the thing is, if Virus is famous for anything beyond its incredible landscapes, it’s for having a pretty unique and deeply unforgiving control method.
The game’s sole method of propulsion is a single thruster attached to the underside of my green ship and, a bit like Stunt Car Racer (released the year after this), it’s simulated physics that determines how this craft moves and reacts to the world, rather than a predetermined mix of canned animations and designer’s rules. There is absolutely nothing to stop me tilting the ship right over, thruster pointing towards the sky, and then propelling myself straight into the floor. And so, as you may have already guessed, that happened. It happened a lot. And then I got slightly not-awful at the game and performed a wobbly take-off followed by some nervous thrusts… before introducing my ship to the ground at a fatal speed once more (which in Virus’ case, is almost any speed). And then I remembered that even if I did master flying around it wouldn’t be enough—I have to shoot at things too, speedy little things that don’t have to worry about making contact with the earth below, and the cute little stream of pellets that makes them explode fires out the front of my ship, so I have to tilt it around while still staying airborne if I want to have any hope of every hitting anything, and there are never, ever, enough homing missiles to help.
It sounds infuriating, right? And it kind of is. But it’s that special sort of friction you only get from games that want to push you further, that want you to master a particular technique and then crush them under your skilled boot with it. Some games expect you to draw complex maps, find the synergy between a dozen or more separate skills, or learn how to consistently execute complex special moves if you hope to make any progress. Virus expects—no, demands—you learn how to control its ship properly.
At a glance the Amiga’s tank of a mouse seems like it’s the most sensible input device: the right button activates the thruster, the left button fires your cannon, and the good old rolly-ball underneath determines which way your craft is pointing, and at what angle. On paper this is intuitive analogue control, wrapped up in a single common device: perfect. In practice this is so sensitive even the lightest touch can send your ship ploughing into the dirt.
Salvation comes in the unlikely form of the Amiga’s angled keyboard, even though the default key placements (A and Z to tilt the craft, < and > to rotate it, and a smattering of other controls elsewhere) are not exactly brilliant. But if you take a few moments to redefine the keys (this is an in-game option, not an emulator setting: I use WASD to tilt the ship, with fire and thrusters on < and > respectively) this less sensitive digital control method really shines, and you can start to see just how much fun it can be to tilt your ship almost horizontal to achieve maximum forward thrust, to save fuel by allowing your existing momentum to carry you along for a while, to blast away at an enemy and then engage your engine at the very last second, scraping the ground before soaring into the sky. Aerial moves become almost balletic, intricate twists and graceful spirals summoned at will.
How long this can go on for is determined by your remaining fuel supply, each tap of the thruster expending some of this precious resource. Luckily you can always get more—so long as you can make it back to the launchpad in time, and land on it safely too. Just to make everything that little bit more tense, getting hit by an enemy ship reduces the amount of fuel remaining too, so you can never quite be sure how much safe flying time you have left.
These enemies roam the map, the larger “seeders” and some other types spitting out red spores that infect the world around them. This creeping contagion is something you actually get to see spread in real-time, the land changing from pleasant greens to harsher reds and pinks as they go about their work. It’s important to halt their devastation as quickly as possible, partly because you need to destroy every enemy displayed on the convenient minimap to clear the stage, but also because the faster you do that, the more points you earn too—and more points means you’re just that little bit closer to earning another extra life. Virus being Virus, there’s another issue to contend with: being quick isn’t enough, you have to be accurate too, as every shot fired takes one point off your score—and yes, it can (and probably will, at first) go into negative values. To keep this simple routine feeling fresh the world map changes slightly at levels 5 and 10, leaving you with less land to protect—and that means it’s easier than ever for the enemies to infect everywhere. The manual also points out that the stage’s gravity increases on stages 3, 5, and 7, subtly adjusting just how much skill and effort it takes to keep the ship airborne.
Virus is weird and tricky and unapologetically unforgiving and I love it. And then I crash again and I hate it. But whatever my current mood, I’ve never forgotten it. To my mind it perfectly encapsulates ’80s computer gaming’s weird bleeding edge, so ambitious it was doing things we didn’t even think games could do and certainly didn’t have the experience or vocabulary to adequately appreciate or describe at the time. An essential experience? Yes, I think so.
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Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster 