It’s time to dive into another small Atari 2600 game that has been released on the Atari VCS. The game was available to download for free on the VCS game store, although I’m not sure if this was just at the time I found it or it will continue to be free going forth.
I’ll be honest, I expect this game to remain free, as there’s not a ton to it, which although can be typical of many Atari 2600 games, does feel especially true in the case of Torpedo Torpor.
If you want to get more into the world of the game, I would encourage you to check out the instructions from the menu of the game. They sure do give a lot of back story and explanation with a two-page short story to set the scene.
The game is from Zetotronics and K.R.A.Z Productions.
The information for the game on the VCS Store suggests it’s a one player game only, although it’s write up does list it as a co-op shooter. I’ve not bothered to check if you can play with two players on the VCS or not, and truth be told, I’m not likely to in future.
The game was originally released in 2021, and I assume through Atari Age going by the manual, but it’s always nice to see some of these home brew style retro Atari games get official releases on Atari hardware.
Gameplay wise, it kinda plays like a lot of the Space Invaders type games from the era. Actually, it reminded me of Yars Revenge with its side on view rather than Space Invaders in which enemies attack from top to bottom. Like Yars, this game sees you to the left of the screen, and you can move up and down on a fixed vertical line just as you can move in a fixed horizontal line in Space Invaders. Like in Yars, enemies are to your right.
There are essentially two types of enemies in the game, although technically there may be more based on their different colours. There are the mother ships, which kinda look like asteroids slowly floating towards you. Then every so often they will launch small and faster fighter ships towards you.
The way you fight either the fighter ships or the mother ships are entirely separate and add to this game what makes it unique. If you press the joystick/DPad right, you will shoot a short range langer and this is how you kill the fighter ships. If you press fire you will shoot a controllable homing missile, and these are what can destroy the mother ships.
The two types of ammo which take out different types of enemies remind me of old shoot em up games like Twin Bee where you could shoot bullets to kill enemies coming right at you or drop missiles to enemies on the ground. Effectively this is how this game works, but all the enemies come at you from the right with no sense of depth that some are higher up than others like in Twin Bee.
The game is easy enough to get used to, but I do think the two ammo gameplay is both its strength and its weakness.
As soon as you shoot a homing missile at a mother ship your actual space craft sits still and you can no longer control it until you press the fire button again to detonate the missile. Oh, and I guess the ability to choose when to detonate the missiles does make this a little like Missile Command as well.
But not being able to control your own ship whilst controlling the missiles means you’re continually having to switch your brain from controlling ship to controlling missile mode. I didn’t spend hours playing this game, so imagine you may get used to it fully, but I didn’t. It wasn’t so bad to control, but never quite felt natural.
The challenge comes in that when you are guiding your homing missile to hit the mother ships, the mother ships will have launched a speedy fighter ship to attack.
You can fire bother lazers to kill the fighter ships as you are guiding a homing missile, but the issue with this you have to make sure you are lined up ready to shoot any incoming fighter ships as once you’re controlling the homing missiles you can’t move your actual ship anymore.
This does mean you spend a lot of time giving up on the homing missiles and detonating them early so you can reposition and take out the fighter ships.
I shouldn’t complain about this too much as not be able to move whilst you aim is exactly what the first half of the Resident Evil games had you do, although this obviously wasn’t anywhere near as fun as a Resident Evil game.
Speaking of Resident Evil, you have about five lives in the game and the only way you know this is from the colour of the onscreen force field which you are protecting. I don’t think you lose a life if an enemy collides with you, which is something that took me a while to realise, and actually means you can leave some shots until the last minute as you only seem to lose a life if an enemy gets past you to collide with the force field. It changes colour form green to yellow to red (I think) and once its gone red it’s the end of the current game.
The game is randomised for when enemies appear, and the hardware limitations means you’ll never have more than two fighter ships coming at you at once. The instructions mention various game modes which if this was on an actual Atari cart would be changed by the switches on the Atari 2600 or 7800, but I didn’t seen how you could change modes on this version.
The game is very simple, and is as basic as the earliest Atari 2600 games presentation wise. I do think the gameplay has some charm to it, and although a little more fiddly than many games from the 2600 era, the way they’ve incorporated two types of fire buttons onto a one fire button controlled game deserves credit.
As a free game on the VCS this was a nice distraction I can see myself coming back to very occasionally, and if you aim to get this on cart which I imagine may have been available at some point, it certainly is one for home brew collectors and old school enthusiasts.
What would you rate this game?
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