New York! New York! (Arcade)

The early arcade was filled with plenty of space shooters, and for every successful game in the genre like Space Invaders or Galaga you could expect tens of imitators. To help themselves stand out, these copycats would often at least try to include some new direction or element so that players would feel compelled to check them out over the more popular titles. For what seems to be one of their first titles ever, Sigma Enterprises would be dipping its toe into space shooters with New York! New York!, but to help it stand out from the crowd, the big draw of this particular game would be that they slapped the Statue of Liberty in the background and pretended this game was set in New York City.

With the very basic single sentence premise saying that you’re protecting New York from invading UFOs, New York! New York! throws you onto a screen that seems to be clearly meant for a run of the mill space shooter. Multicolor stars scroll down from the background, the flickering lights not caring that they’re visible between the outlines of the New York skyline that’s been shoved off to the left of the screen. While the skyscrapers and Statue of Liberty are drawn pretty decently for a 1980 arcade game, besides a point where some text appears beside the statue as if it is calling for help, this is just a background detail that doesn’t really mesh well with the starry black space the game takes place in. If you think I’m being unnecessarily harsh about this artistic touch, it’s quite clear that the New York theming wasn’t very important to the game at all since an alternate version was made to tie in with a then upcoming anime film known as Waga Seishun no Arcadia, or Arcadia of My Youth. The Statue of Liberty and any illusion that the setting matters is tossed aside so a big image of the space pirate Captain Harlock can fill that space instead, but his presence is just as arbitrary since this visual touch has no impact on the gameplay whatsoever.

New York! New York! has you controlling a small red and green gun that can only move left and right at the bottom of the screen. Flying in from almost any part of the screen’s borders will be small groupings of UFOs, the alien spacecrafts coming first in a wave of eleven ships. After flying around the screen a bit and firing their own lasers down at you, the group of UFOs fly off-screen before returning to repeat the process. Once that full group has been eliminated entirely, the next wave of eleven fly in and repeat the process, but once this set is completely wiped out, the mothership appears. Funnily enough, the mothership is actually just the letters U, F, and O crammed together, and besides being able to fire much faster than the other ships, its not actually harder to take out. If anything, the fact it’s one moving target means you can often quickly blast it and get back to the cycle of shooting down the waves of smaller spacecraft.

There are a couple quirks to how you fight the UFOs. Their thin yellow laser blasts can actually collide with your own comparably larger white laser blast, the white beam cancelled out but the yellow shot free to keep traveling. This means that even you’re firing up into the formation of approaching UFOs you can’t just time your shots to hit them all with ease. The first UFO arriving onscreen will be worth extra points if hit while its still white and the game is just a general high score chase where you have three lives to earn as many points as you can. Besides taking out the mothership and nailing that white UFO before it changes though, there’s not many special ways to earn points so its just a matter of endurance.

One way to take out all the spacecraft remaining in a current wave lies in the small black hole that appears in the middle of the UFOs as they swirl around in a loop, the player needing to shift the coloration of the gravity well by shooting it repeatedly until its strong enough to explode and take out all your enemies. However, with not only the potential of hitting the enemies but their laser blasts when you fire, its very unlikely you’ll hit this black hole enough before it disappears. It is more likely the black hole can be activated when there’s only two or three UFOs left in the pack, but at that point its utility as a screen wipe barely matters and it almost exists more as bait to position you in the most dangerous area of the enemy’s crossfire. Essentially, it is not worth the risk to try for it and its reward at the best of times is not very great either.

Besides some digitized voice samples that are hard to make out, that’s the long and short of New York! New York!’s main ideas and features. However, while this might sound a little generic and with a few ideas that didn’t turn out as strong as the developers likely hoped, the big issue with New York! New York! is actually how awfully slow the whole game turns out to be. Since the only time you can do anything is when the enemy UFOs are onscreen, you would think more time would be spent with them actually present. However, every wave of enemies is programmed to come on screen, do a few small loops, and then fly back off screen. After the whole wave has disappeared, the player is left to sit and wait for any lingering enemy lasers to go off-screen, then they need to wait a little longer for the enemy UFOs to fly in. If there’s only a few small spaceships slipping between your shots and making their way offscreen, these wait periods can be frustratingly slow, and with the action constantly stopping and leaving you with nothing to do, it’s hard to imagine this retaining anyone’s interest in an actual arcade. It’s so slow-going because of the time it takes for enemies to reappear, but coupled with the generally low difficulty if you play things safe, New York! New York! certainly won’t be matching the level of excitement a title with two exclamation points would imply.

THE VERDICT: New York! New York! is a test of your attention span. Enemy UFOs take their time appearing on screen and the wait for the action to resume between short waves means there’s hardly any time to even get excited about the game you’re playing. Ideas like the black hole are squandered due to its requirements for use being a bit too demanding, and actually shooting down the aliens isn’t very thrilling when your shots are more likely to be blocked than make contact. If you’re a crack shot the generic alien shooting might go a little smoother, but the down time makes up far too much of the experience and having an irrelevant little slice of New York City hanging out on the left is definitely not going to redeem the terrible gameplay.

And so, I give New York! New York! for arcade machines…

A TERRIBLE rating. The wait time between rounds is the real killer here in New York! New York!. The action isn’t very fast to begin with so you don’t need to cool down, and with only eleven enemies max appearing on screen, you’re not really scrambling to keep up either. However, with their lasers playing a defensive role as well as serving as their attack, you can’t take them out too quickly, meaning you’re usually left waiting a few seconds for them to return to try a rather generic an unexciting task once more. The mothership’s appearance, despite having its own delays, is refreshing because it’s so easy to wrap up and move on from whereas the waves of foes just throw out the same gameplay again and again, the only shift being the direction they come in from. The black hole could do with being more lenient in the amount of shots it takes to activate, but really just pumping up the speed of the game in general would do wonders for making it tolerable. Not only would less waiting benefit it immensely, but having to work more to dodge lasers would make things a bit more thrilling. Upping enemy speed might be taking it too far, but removing the constant downtime would at least make this a game you might actually be compelled to put in more than one quarter to play.

New York! New York!, even if it got the speed increase it desperately needs, is still lacking in the kind of solid ideas or mechanics that would make it stand out in an arcade crammed with other games where you shoot up at alien spaceships. Adding a terrestrial twist to it could have been interesting, but the New York City setting isn’t really a part of the experience and was happily discarded with ease when the developers saw a tie-in opportunity. Even if it had pulled off convincing the player they were fighting to defend The Big Apple though, the awful pacing makes it very unlikely anyone would care to protect New York City from this alien threat for very long.