Spider Fighter (Atari 2600)
Activision is sort of the king of quality Atari 2600 titles, although that’s partly because they were the first third party developer and had a lot to prove to earn their place in the gaming industry. Spider Fighter might not be a standout title in their Atari catalog, but it does carry the same spark of smart design that the better known titles like Pitfall had, ensuring that it serves as a fun experience despite the limitations of early video game consoles.
Spider Fighter, like so many Atari titles, has a very indicative title. Piloting a “bug blaster” that looks a bit like your typical Atari spacefighter, you can slide your weapon around the bottom of the screen and fire up at a group of bugs who are trying to pilfer fruit from your orchard. At least, that’s what the concept of the game is, as the fruits are actually almost inconsequential to the affair. The bugs technically will try to get the fruits, but they spend quite a bit of time buzzing around the screen firing at you before they even consider going for one, and if they do grab one, they must slowly carry them from the right side of the screen to the left. At best, the fruits are good bait for a problem enemy who just won’t get in the path of your pesticide shots. However, the game seems to think they’re at risk, since completing a level with all three fruits still safely on screen will net you an extra life. Although this at first may seem to make the game a bit too easy, Spider Fighter’s structure seems to go hand in hand with the steady feed of life, its shortcomings softened by the life flow and the gameplay made far more sustainable because of the promise of earning an extra chance to keep going.
The bugs in Spider Fighter come in waves, the speed and aggressiveness of the bugs determined by which particular fruits you’re defending that round. Each wave starts with a spiders nest zooming across the screen, firing on you and dropping other enemies the longer it lasts. The little pods and green spiders run interference for the nest to keep it around longer, but if you blast the nest while any of the other bugs are on screen, they’ll shift into the quickest and most aggressive type: the yellow stingers. While stingers can be dropped normally as well, when the nest is gone, the stingers will get a huge speed boost and fire more frequently at you, meaning there is a bit of strategy in trying to clear out the other bugs before taking down the nest that spawns them. Once a screen is completely empty of arachnids though, you face the next wave, with four needing to be cleared to earn you that extra life and move you to the next orchard. Things amp up pretty steadily, allowing you to get a feel for how the bugs move and your shots fly, but once you get to the banana orchard, things get appropriately bananas, with spiders zipping across the screen and your own shots achieving rapid fire to match.
However, the speed scaling sort of plays into Spider Fighter’s shortcomings. Things can get very hectic even in the early stages, and while you can get the dodging down fairly well eventually, it’s likely you’ll still get blindsided by an unexpected shot despite your best efforts. The generous life system eases the potential annoyance there, but the one area where Spider Fighter still seems unforgiving is that the nest can place an enemy in the immediate space above your bug blaster. Even if you get down the dodging and shooting, these enemies are too close to give you the proper time to react to any potential fire, and since you need to be beneath them to shoot them, you’re risking your life trying to squeak in there and take them down. If an enemy hatches into a stinger on that level you’re in for more pain, but if you do a sacrifice run, the game will still let your shot kill the creature even if it kills you as well. It’s definitely not a perfect situation and you can sometimes walk away from that difficult moment unscathed, but it makes for a situation where skill steps aside to let luck take a bit too much control of your potential success.
Like many Atari games, the goal in the end is to earn as many points as you can before you lose, and despite the life system, it can come more quickly than you’d expect. There are little tricks to learn though that can increase your chances of success and the rhythm of play and bug movement follows patterns you can learn and exploit. It’s definitely not a hard game to come back to and get a little bit of enjoyment from even if you’ll be seeing pretty much the same things throughout the entire game. It’s a game that plays into the drive for high scores pretty well and can evoke that feeling of knowing you can do better so long as you give it one more go. The speed, while also causing some of the problems, also means it comes in fast-paced portions where it’s not too hard to get to where you were before and it rarely feels like you have a mountain to climb when it comes to beating your previous score. It may mean you’ll eventually hit your skill wall, but it definitely doesn’t drag out the process of getting there.
THE VERDICT: What you see is all you get with Spider Fighter, but this small package is pretty solid. Other than a few issues with bug placement, Spider Fighter provides an easy to enter and fun to repeat task of shooting down spiders with a bit of strategy thrown in despite its rather manic escalating pace.
And so, I give Spider Fighter for Atari 2600…
A GOOD rating. For a bit of bug blasting fun, Spider Fighter isn’t a bad choice. The fruit orchard set-up hardly comes into play, but it does mean Spider Fighter doles out lives enough that you have room for error, allowing the game to ease the issues with its bottom row bugs a bit. It’s a fairly fun time-waster that is easy to come back to to try and do better in, and that’s a fairly decent shape for an Atari game to take. If it can hook you with its simple shooting fun, Spider Fighter offers just enough challenge to sustain its few parts.
Turning a simple concept into a fun little game, Activision proves that even a few shortcomings won’t completely diminish the strength of its Atari 2600 design approach.