Black Widow (Arcade)
When an insect gets stuck in a spider’s web, that is usually the entire battle between predator and prey already over. So long as it doesn’t struggle its way free, the spider need only wrap up the bug and dine on the spoils of its silky trap. In Black Widow though, it’s almost as if the tables have turned. The spider is now the one unable to leave the web, aggressive bugs flying over it and trying to end the arachnid personally. The spider is still a capable predator though, but no matter how good the player is at Atari’s 1983 arcade game, soon the prey will have their day.
Presented by way of vector graphics, a system that draws lines for its visuals and lets the black background be the interior space of any formed images, Black Widow achieves an interesting look for its battle between bugs, even if some of them end up requiring a lot more imagination to interpret as living things. Beetles, mosquitoes, and the playable spider all practically look like they’re made of neon, the web the action takes place on serving as a good contrast to their reds and yellows with its mostly light blue composition. Some of the bugs don’t really look like good translations of arthropod designs to simple shapes though, some like the thunderbug practically just triangles with wings, but for the most part they all stand out against the black back drop and the web to ensure the play isn’t hampered by the visual design.
Across the rounds of play, the web that you travel across will change in appearance. Its size is a constant, your spider easily able to walk across its strands and the empty space between them without trouble initially, but soon strands of it will begin to take on new colors. If a piece of the web is green, the bugs that enter your web are unable to pass through them, meaning it is possible to catch them by surprise if you choose to pop over the green line yourself. Red lines though will restrict your movement, the spider treating them like walls that become more and more abundant in the later levels. The free movement in Black Widow is especially important for fighting the tons of flying bugs who move around erratically, especially when more aggressive types enter the picture in the same levels that start dishing out red walls more often. Unfortunately this does mean later levels start to get a bit too restrictive for their own good, but there are plenty of rounds in this game to be won before the relationship between web structure and enemy types gets a little strained.
To deal with the invading insects, the black widow has an unusual skill. While one of the cabinet’s joysticks is used for the free and fast movement, your second one allows the spider to fire quick blasts of what must be webbing. The angle of the stick determines where you shoot it, meaning you can weave around the web and fire at anything no matter the position of it, your shots ignoring web walls but having a limit on how far they’ll fly. When your web shots manage to kill most kinds of bug, it will drop a dollar sign, this money symbol called a Grub Steak by the game. Collecting Grub Steaks is how you earn most of your points. A round will end once all bugs you can beat have been defeated, and every few rounds there will be a special bonus round where a formation of arrow-shaped Thunderbugs fly in, the player getting a huge score boost if they can destroy them all without being hit themselves so long as they do so before the bugs escape.
You’ve likely noticed the specification that only some bugs can be defeated, and that’s because Black Widow’s gameplay involves quite a few different enemy types that give the game both its built in variety and lead to its gradual increase in difficulty. Things start off mostly with mosquitoes and beetles, these bugs moving somewhat slowly as they approach you but speeding up in later rounds. These basic bugs are common in every round and serve as the easy pickings for producing Grub Steaks. There are rare giant bugs made of dollar signs that can provide an absurd amount of points too, the game gifting you a life every 20000 points and most of these giant dollar bugs providing more points than that so long as you snag them. Soon though hornets enter the picture, the devious creatures laying eggs on your Grub Steaks to turn them into either more hornets or one of the invulnerable enemy types. You do have one method for clearing away eggs if they’ve already been laid though, the spider able to push them off the edge of the web or down through the center hole to eliminate them.
The upper tier bugs are what add the sometimes bothersome complications to the later levels. Spoilers and Rocket Bugs are both impervious to your web shots, the Rocket Bugs even having their own shot type they try to nail you in the only case of enemies packing projectiles in this game. Defeating them is possible, but it relies on things often outside your control. A rocket from the bug named after them can kill other invulnerable enemies, as can Grenade Bugs, but the Grenade Bugs often fly towards you in a kamikaze like attack and their detonations will kill you as well. The Grenade Bug’s explosion can be triggered by your shots so you often want to trigger them before they’re anywhere near, but if you’re crowded by invincible bugs that are blocking your shots, soon you can end up against a red wall with bugs you can’t damage in your face. There is one last type of insect in your web though, and it’s the closest thing you have to an ally. The Bug Slayer is actually competing with you to grab Grub Steaks, but it’ll go for the other insects as well, this flying friend able to scarf down any type of bug. It can appear in most rounds except for the Thunderbug bonus rounds so it is a somewhat reliable means of dealing with persistent invincible foes, so long as it feels up to bailing you out. Luckily, a round will end if only invincible bugs are remaining, meaning the Bug Slayer isn’t absolutely required. But if it is slow to arrive, you will definitely feel its absence despite the game never getting absurd with the amount of invincible bugs on screen.
When the game begins and you’re passing through the easier rounds, the game has a nice speed to it and the chaos of the many bug types is enjoyable and manageable. When the web starts limiting your movement and more enemies you can’t deal with yourself enter the picture though it does feel like the game is trying to end your fun. Since this is a game that produces new rounds to play until you’ve run out of lives, this inevitably means the enjoyment factor tapers off near the end. Instead of scrambling about in a mutual battle for survival, you have to work your way around barriers as enemies you can’t touch chase you, the player meant to wait until things get cleaned up by outside forces or they can finally score a proper hit on the Grenade Bug that might take them down with it. The game gives you a few options on which round to start with on a screen with a very amusing disgruntled spider, meaning you can choose to play through the more breezy early stages for quick fun or see how well you can do against the tough later waves, and thankfully, there are plenty of stages in the build up to the rougher stuff to provide something in Black Widow worth spending some time on.
THE VERDICT: When you’re starting off in Black Widow, it’s a fast-paced battle of survival as you and the insects in your web are both scrambling about trying to end each other. However, when the web starts restricting your movement options and more and more invulnerable enemies appear that rely on circumstance or the AI controlled Bug Slayer to overcome, the game starts feeling slightly tedious and limited. The difficulty increase relies on reducing your interaction with the enemies on screen, but it isn’t such a harsh decline that you can’t squeak some enjoyment out of even a longer Black Widow session. You may not feel compelled to try and get to later rounds because of this, but Black Widow starts strong enough that it won’t leave a bad taste in your mouth.
And so, I give Black Widow for arcade machines…
An OKAY rating. Even as more annoying enemy types become more common, Black Widow does continue to throw around enough regular enemies that things don’t outright stagnate. You’ll still spend plenty of time trying to work around red strands of silk and deal with an abundance of exploding Grenade Bugs or bothersome invincible foes, but those harder later rounds aren’t the kind of run enders that make you despise the game you’re playing. Instead, they taint a game that had the potential to be good, mainly because it goes from a game where your shots and movement are emphasized to a game where you often find the least restrictive part of the web and try to hold it down and hope certain enemy types don’t encroach on your encampment. Black Widow’s early stages are simple fun and its later levels can have their moments, but it feels like it should have chosen explosive enemies as the new hazards for harder levels instead of mixing in the ones that rely on the Bug Slayer or simply finishing the round despite the presence of those invincible shot blockers.
Black Widow’s easier play isn’t strong enough to sustain a game on its own and the harder additions feel like they undermine what makes those early rounds fun. While there is still some enjoyment to be found no matter which round you’re on, you begin to feel the limits of the design eventually as you are restricted from interacting with certain bugs. Black Widow probably works best as an arcade game instead of a game with a home console port, it being the kind of game you might spend a few quarters on to get the feel for while not feeling compelled to revisit it or chase the high score due to the shape of its difficulty curve.