Starquake: The Definitive Review
Platform Pinnacle?
There are games that, on arrival, manage to not only exploit the potential of a particular template to the fullest, but do it with a combination of technical prowess and sincere charm that elevates their status, and sometimes pushes it beyond the games that founded the genre in which it resides. Stephen Crow’s Starquake is one such example. Clearly drawing on Ultimate Play The Game’s Underwurlde, this beautifully crafted, side-view flick-screen platform adventure arrived within eighteen months of Underwurlde’s release, but built upon its design to such an extent that it left contemporaries like Odin’s Nodes of Yesod and Palace’s Sacred Armour of Antiriad far behind. What’s interesting here is that Crow had prior form; his previous release, Wizard’s Lair, was a clear tribute to Ultimate Play The Game’s seminal Atic Atac.1 But whereas Wizard’s Lair was an upgraded Atic Atac, Starquake was a complete remodelling of the Underwurlde proposition.
Starquake is set on a planet with an unstable core that threatens to implode and destroy the entire Universe. So the stakes are quite high, but this is par for the course in what’s a quite knowing, winking take on what was standard fare as far as videogame narratives went in 1985. The game itself involves the player controlling BLOB, a cutesy robot, and exploring the caves of the planet’s interior in order to find the core and repair it. The core is made up of components that are randomly selected at game start. The player’s task is to find identical components scattered throughout the planet's interior and replace the unstable core bit-by-bit. However, BLOB needs to keep up his stocks of life, laser ammunition and so on, which is done via pickups strewn across nearly every screen. What’s fascinating is how Starquake departs from Underwurlde in a way that Nodes of Yesod did not. For one instance, BLOB has a default mode where it scoots around the place, fires a little zappy laser to kill baddies and can deploy temporary platforms to ladder itself to out-of-reach platforms. This seems completely in line with the character capabilities of its stablemates, but Staquake offers BLOB an upgrade in a flying platform it can hop on to fly about the screens with complete freedom. You even get a new, bouncy laser shot into the bargain. However, when flitting around you can’t pick up core items, meaning you have to park the flying platform in a special parking tile if you want to pick stuff up and thereby complete the actual game. It’s a wonderful bit of sophisticated thinking that does away with the traditional frustrations of the genre (vertical climbing being a pain in the ass) but tempers it with a cost, and one that changes the gameplay from whizzy exploration to strategic thinking. You spot a core piece when flying and not only do you need to find the nearest parking place to hop off, you need to be able to trace your route to the piece and then return to the parking place safely. Fitting my criteria for progression, that a game should expand and complexify ideas of previous games, Starquake happily leapfrogs Underwurlde in terms of gameplay complexity while cutting away its greatest frustration. And this is without covering off neat touches like teleport stations across the map for fast-travel (including a very welcome shortcut to the core), some of the elevators that lead to areas you can only explore on foot, locked gates that need keys to pass and so on. There’s the bonus brilliance of the Cheops pyramids, where if you carry the right numbered items or an Access card, you can enter a shop and swap your inventory for a new one. This may be the only way to get all the core parts you need, so the Access cards are pretty valuable. It’s yet another layer on top the design it borrowed.
Alongside its mechanical wonders, Starquake has a lovely turn of phrase in its environment. There’s a real variation in areas in its subterranean maze, which are due to good map building on Crow’s part, but also some lovely pixelart texturing. There’s a particularly nifty take on molecular model kits that somehow always tessellates perfectly, for example. If you do click the hyperlink, be sure to note how clean the design is. Even the font for the score2 is nicely done. There’s a real pride in the work, a definite delight in the craft which again elevates Starquake beyond being a mere bandwagon jumper for quick bucks. Crow obviously put a great deal of love and attention into this, plausibly trying to make the best game he could. Watching the game in motion, it’s a smooth, fast and frantic affair that mixes moments of peak anxiety with screens that are surprisingly empty and serene. If you watch the hyperlinked video, you’ll get a decent view of everything talked about so far, but also the front end presentation. I always take this to be the mark of the true master; it’s one thing to have great gameplay with great great graphics and great ideas, but to be able to also present it with style and aplomb is where the mustard really gets cut. Hence, the front end is often the real signature of great work. For Starquake, Crow goes with a set of beautifully drawn border art, also aping the style of molecular model kits, but with a closed eye at each corner which, if the front end is left untouched for long enough, will see a corner randomly blink. It didn’t have to be there, yet there it is. Finally, if we go back to that screenshot, pay some attention to the enemy design. There’s a maturity of style in their character, some quality that’s more aligned with the professional artists of the kids’ comics of the era, of The Beano, Whizzer and Chips et al, which was surprisingly rare on the 8-bits. We associate that kind of professional standard with post-Bitmap Bros 16-bit home machines, yet here Stephen Crow bangs out enemies that wouldn’t be out of place on the weekly funnies. Certainly if you look at Everyone’s A Wally from the same year, you don’t see quite the same level of accomplishment, similarly with the supremely cartoonish Jack The Nipper. They’re off, maladroit, a bit naff. They’re closer to the doodles of schoolchildren. Of course, this is part of the era’s charm, much like the wonky airbrushed box art for companies that couldn’t afford Bob Wakelin, Steinar Lund or DJ Rowe. But for me, it makes Starquake stand out all the more as a lovely visual experience, as something in a limited palette with limited RAM that still shines so wonderfully today. Looking at UFO 50’s deliberately naive art may be able to ape the charm, but it ignores the beauty that the likes of Starquake pulled off, seemingly so effortlessly, and in under 48 kilobytes.
The ZX Spectrum, Amstrad and Commodore 64 played home to maze-like flick-screen platforming adventures as a near constant throughout the life of that group of machines. It was certainly a hardy perennial, with a new entry cropping up at least once a year. As such, it’s interesting that 1985 seems to be the peak for design complexity. Later on, we get a kind of return to primitivism in the stripped-down designs of Tomb Raider ancestor and Spelunky patron saint Rick Dangerous (1989) or the ersatz Manga-aping Switchblade (1989),3 that while more refined with a post-Mario and Metroid sensibility are nonetheless emptier designs. They are offering a certain focused sophistication, but one that jettisons much of the grander frameworks and considered designs of games like Starquake and Saboteur. These later games don’t seem to care too much for exploration, and that’s perhaps what I love so much about Starquake. The world it offers feels vast, but somehow knowable. The clever touch of placing teleport stations around the map gives you landmarks to seek, something to strive for alongside the formal challenge the game offers. That’s the beauty of complexification done right - it enriches the player behaviour, it gives you more to find. Likewise the resource management, necessary for survival, lifts the gameplay above the basics, especially when you might be balancing the urge to pick up a core item with restocking your platforms, weapons or health. Within the genre, Starquake ranks at the very top. Maybe not quite enough to encourage younger heads to take up its challenge, but I’m sure they’d get some pleasure from this pre-Metroid bit of history, for it ably demonstrates the best of that mid-80s gaming culture, being quintessentially British in its ingenuity, innate charm and confident execution. Stephen Crow should perhaps be applauded most for knowing where the limits lay, and pushing the boundary where it could be pushed. The game never oversteps, nor does it negligently miss its potential. There’s a sage discrimination at work, and it's reflected in Starquake’s refinement. By all means view it as a history piece, as some relic that’s worth visiting as a tourist. But you’ll never find the secret octopus unless you make yourself an invested resident.
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I mean, Wizard’s Lair has got a fucking lift in it. Yeah, an actual lift which takes you to different levels on the map. And a shop in the form of a scroll collectible. WTF.
A wonderful bit of quixotica from the 1980s is the seemingly blind acceptance that all games must have a score. Starquake has no real need for this, yet it has a lovely score readout with a nice Odometer-style animation. Presumably a hangover from the arcade, where the score was everything and highscore table bragging was the biggest reward, it's always amusing how scoring persisted on the home machines. They’re like some vestigial coccyx that was never selected out of the genome.
Interestingly, both from Core Design. Rick Dangerous and Starquake, saw a graphically-upgraded 16-bit versions, marking them out as transitional fossils from an epoch where the affordances of faster CPUs and spangly graphics, along with much more RAM, didn't necessarily lead to an explosion in game design complexity. It's interesting how much of it was about the audio-visual upgrade, or keeping the 8-bit zeitgeist alive for gamers that had graduated to the Amiga and ST. Insanely, Starquake even got a PC version, which can be played here!