Canyon Bomber (Atari 2600)

A somewhat ill-advised approach to making an Atari 2600 game is trying to port over an arcade game. The console’s limited power leads to many concessions, but while more infamous examples like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man exist to prove the issues, some games just really weren’t asking for a port in the first place. Canyon Bomber is a translation of a fairly dull arcade title by the same name, and while it did take some steps to try and alleviate the tedium of the original title, the formula still seems doomed to failure without a significant overhaul.

Canyon Bomber’s name is a surprisingly apt way of describing the gameplay. A huge canyon filled with colored rocks occupies 6 of the 8 available game types, the color indicating how much a rock layer is worth when part of it is destroyed by a player. Depending on the mode, a single human can play against the computer, another human, or essentially play on their own, the goal being to get the most points by bombing as many of the colored rocks in the canyon before meeting one of the ending conditions. One mode will limit the players ability to bomb, a meter depleting if the player manages to miss the rocks entirely and hits the canyon wall. The unlimited bombs mode is a race to 1000 points where the player or players can end up clearing the whole canyon and start on a fresh one before it ends, but you can’t play that mode competitively against a computer controlled enemy. To bomb the canyon, all you have to do is press the button to release a bomb in a diagonal drop, the bomb slicing through the rocks with ease but not able to penetrate the entire pile until it’s diminished in size.

 

The issue with this gameplay style is your control during play. You and your opponent will fly onto screen from the edges, but you have no control over your flight path or your speed. You just fly by at a predetermined pace in various flying vehicles and drop bombs to clear the canyon. Because you have no control over your flight, there’s no reason to really strategize about where to drop your bombs, especially since the computer won’t wait for you and a player who starts blindly bombing is guaranteed tons of points early on. Precision bombing can be required in the late game, but by then it’s likely whoever bombed more crazily at the start will already have enough of a lead not to have to worry about the clean-up phase. Depending on which mode you choose, the rocks you haven’t hit will either fall to fill in the canyon or float in place until they are destroyed, but it hardly effects the way you bomb them as there is still no time to plan your mode of attack. The point values on different rocks become meaningless when you can’t really find the time to try and angle for them, it mostly playing into the snowballing of whoever is more lucky in their initial frantic bomb dropping. You can cancel a bomb drop by pressing the button again before it lands, so you can’t go too wild with it, but this also means you can easily avoid the failure condition of the more structured competitive modes. What Canyon Bomber boils down to is a shift between mindless bombing to slowly waiting for the moment to drop the bomb and hit the remaining few rocks left after that bombing spree.

There are, however, two remaining modes in Canyon Bomber, a player vs. game and a player vs. player mode for something called Sea Bomber. While rife with its own issues, Sea Bomber does seem to be the game with more potential for enjoyment, partly because the need to bomb tactically is a must. In Sea Bomber, you are still in charge of a shifting series of flying vehicles that move on their own, but your bombs and targets function a little differently. Rather than a canyon, you are now flying above the ocean, many different submarines moving through the different layers underwater. Using depth charges you need to hit these vessels, with the point discrepancy between them making more sense now that it is a much more deliberate task. You still drop with a press of a button and can do the bomb cancelling trick, but you have to tell the game where you wish to detonate the charge by moving a depth meter up and down.

 

Sea Bomber is a more interesting game to play than Canyon Bomber, but its ideas, while potentially mildly fun, are sabotaged a little by the odd relationship between your shots and the depth line. Just because the line and bomb collide doesn’t mean you’re going to see your depth charge explode, and even if it does seemingly hit in the right place to detonate a sub, there can be issues with it properly detecting that the vessel is hit. Even odder, sometimes your shots just seem to blow up a submarine even when it’s not at the depth your line is at. This lack of reliable execution only helps compound the still present issues with having to wait on your vehicles to fly across the screen or the computer player’s knack for getting the mechanics to always work in its favor. It feels constrained by the design decisions that were carried over from Canyon Bomber, and thus Sea Bomber fails to realize the minor bit of potential its more focused and strategic design had.

THE VERDICT: Canyon Bomber’s design philosophy is flawed from the ground up. No control over the flying vehicles means that any level of strategy must give way to frantically trying to outdo your opposition in earning more points first, and every issue with the canyon bombing task evolves from that. Planning strategic drops is a losing game, but the mode that could have made up for this, Sea Bomber, faces issues with collision detection that aren’t helped by that minimal control over the way the game plays out. With a fellow human you may squeeze a small bit of enjoyment from the flawed-in-execution Sea Bomber, but Canyon Bomber is a write-off that dominates most of the cartridge and imposes its bad ideas on the smaller game.

 

And so, I give Canyon Bomber for the Atari 2600…

A TERRIBLE rating. If Canyon Bomber punished mindless bombing runs more or limited your ammo on the whole, the automatic flight would not be as big of a bugbear, but with the game’s current design, Canyon Bomber and Sea Bomber both will eventually boil down to waiting games. Canyon Bomber goes from hectic to deliberate but with only small windows you can do anything useful during, and Sea Bomber will have your few chances to bomb submarines on a pass sabotaged by the game misreading the relationship between your line and your depth charges. You can almost acclimate to Sea Bomber’s issues, but it still doesn’t add much life to the base gameplay, things mostly revolving around a routine set by the game.

 

Canyon Bomber on the whole is a mix of being too permissive and not permissive enough, always swinging towards the side that would greater hurt the current situation. Changing what is and isn’t restricted would be the only hope for this game to invigorate a design that seems heavily flawed conceptually.