The Odyssey² Today: UFO! (Odyssey²)

The endless loop is a common feature of early video games where play will continue until the player loses or turns the game off. This feature helped to make up for the low amount of content these games had, urging the player to get a high score by lasting as long as they can, but it had a few common issues. Some games would up the difficulty as the loop progresses, eventually making the player hit a barrier of sorts where they were essentially guaranteed to die. The games that didn’t cut off the player or scale the difficulty instead faced the issue of revealing how repetitive the gameplay elements are, the player’s interest fading as the challenge became more about the time investment than playing the game. UFO! for the Odyssey² (also known as Satellite Attack for its Philips Videopac release) is a game with an endless loop, but it avoids both pitfalls by instead emphasizing the constant sense of danger that comes with trying to make one life last as long as possible.

Flying what looks itself like a flying saucer, the player controls a star ship in a busy asteroid field, the aim being to collect point by either taking out the rocks or the deadly UFOs that will fly onto screen occasionally. At first, this might just sound like the game Asteroids, but UFO! has one mechanic that not only makes it stand out but helps drive the entire experience. Your spaceship has a blue force field around it, and the management of that barrier is what most of the game’s elements center around. If an object makes contact with the force field, whether it be asteroid or an enemy craft, they will be destroyed and your ship will be safe, the player even getting a few points for the destruction. However, the shield needs some time to recover, your ship is slower afterwards, and you are unable to fire your weapon until the force field has recovered. The time to recharge it is fairly short, but the screen is often packed with hazards, meaning that any time your shield is down, you are in peril, and expert flight is required to constantly balance losing your shield and protecting the ship during those down periods.

 

This isn’t all your shield is used for though. While its primary purpose is certainly to protect your fragile craft from instant annihilation, it also powers your main weapon. To fire at incoming asteroids or passing UFOs, you must first angle your weapon correctly, a finicky process that is admittedly a bit of a shortcoming of the game. A single white dot in your barrier indicates where you will be firing from, and to get it facing where you want to fire you have to move in that direction and wait for the dot to rotate around your shield. The laser will deplete your shield after a few shots, making it so you can’t just fire absentmindedly and once again playing into that constant feeling that you’re always in danger of being vulnerable at a bad time. Your laser is pretty short range as well, meaning it’s not an entirely reliable means of offense or defense, but it’s not your only way of protecting yourself. Since your shield destroys anything it comes in contact with, ramming incoming asteroids or UFOs is a viable attack option, although the UFOs are a riskier prospect since they may fire back at you with some fairly powerful and fast lasers. Even though the laser is the harder weapon to use reliably, it’s possible for a player to get a pretty good score by going all in on either laser defense or ramming attacks, and a mix just makes your more versatile if you can figure out how to balance them well.

This shield mechanic is what helps UFO! avoid the tedium of a seemingly infinite game loop. The enemy spaceships are deadly, able to kill you in an instant if you aren’t careful. Having your shield as a barrier against their first strike helps alleviate the fact that your enemies can appear on screen without warning, and it makes the use of your shield and weapon more strategic as you always have to be ready in case an intelligent enemy comes into play. Breaking asteroids for points will make up the bulk of your activities, but it’s not totally without its risks. Whether you’re charging in or blasting them, your shield will inevitably be down at some point, and not all the rocks aimlessly drift about. If two asteroids make contact they’ll turn into what the game calls “magnetic asteroids”, meaning they will start spinning towards you no matter where you fly to. The game area can become a little cramped as more asteroids enter the fray, making the magnetic asteroids a constant small worry you must manage. Luckily, you even have a recourse for too many rocks being on screen, as when one is destroyed, it shoots out small bits of shrapnel that can break other asteroids, potentially getting a chain reaction going. On its own, you can become accustomed to how to deal with magnetic asteroids, but every now and then an enemy fighter flies in and complicates things. Avoiding the lasers and trying to shoot down the fighter for a score boost help make the asteroids more lethal, although it can be wiser to just flee from the UFOs and hope they leave the screen or crash into an asteroid themselves.

 

Racking up points breaking small rocks would be fairly dry if not for the shield making you have to put a bit more thought into it. You’re constantly flirting with danger as at any moment you might put yourself in a pickle where death is a laser shot away. Survival is much more interesting when there’s no easy way to ensure it, and earning points in UFO! is completely contingent on you taking constant risks.  You’re never in so much danger that you’ll be endlessly anxious, but when the enemy UFO flies on screen it can make for a tense experience if you’ve been too casual with depleting your force field. Many games have the risk-reward relationship between putting yourself in more danger to earn more points, but UFO! makes things about managing a valuable resource, your failures tied mostly to how prepared you are when the small shake-ups occur.

THE VERDICT: UFO! has found a way to make the endless loop work fairly well. The player must constantly consider whether or not to risk the strength of their force field to rack up points by ramming rocks or blasting spaceships, the threat of having the barrier down at a bad time always present due to the partially random introduction of hazards. Earning a high score and continuing play are tied to smart use of the force field’s energy, but the laser’s unusual mechanics hamper some of the potential thrill.

 

And so, I give UFO! for the Magnavox Odyssey²…

A GOOD rating. UFO!’s gameplay is never slow and always a tad tense, the player having to gauge when it’s best to break rocks and when it’s best to anticipate an incoming UFO so that they have the shield strength needed to survive. It is undeniably similar to Asteroids but the force field mechanic helps it stand out as a variation rather than a rip-off, the two games requiring a very different approach to play. The weapon in UFO! can be acclimated to but it still feels like it could have done with being more precise, the laser already having enough limitations that it doesn’t need to control oddly to make the player careful about its overuse. Having the ramming attack ensures that you don’t have to rely on it anyway, and it balances well with the idea of sacrificing personal safety for more points.

 

UFO! is an easy game to come back to because the repetition is lessened by the ever present need to be watchful, your inevitable death dependent not on a difficulty barrier or waning interest but on your intelligent management of your force field’s precious power.