Quartet (1986)

Preliminary: The gameplay videos of this were sooo good, and the music was just so great, and the Look cute, and I got super defensive cuz someone said it was a ripoff of Gauntlet which is so silly since Gauntlet is a rip-off of other games, and really it's just the 4-player connection blahblahblah. Let's see if this will be a great solo-or-with-3-other-friends game!

Look: 7/10 Great colors, creates a fully sci-fi setting. Has no extra umph or endearing quality tho.

Sound: 8/10 Great music, like really really really good music, tho the death sound effect got real annoying after a while

Play: 6/10 Unfortunately, the movement and mechanics are bit clunkier than expected, surely for what's expected of arcade games. Not bad tho, and comparable to its contemporary arcade game Rygar (which has many similarities). I want to playtest this with my brothers or my husband or something for the multiplayer experience!

Once you play it for a bit, it's clear the gameplay is severely lacking for an arcade game. Would be cool if you could land on enemies' heads, instead of having the annoying voice sound effect happen and you die :-p The duck and army crawl feature was cool, but overall very disappointing. When I play an arcade game, I expect the best of the best in terms of controls and advanced mechanics.

Feel: 7/10 Great power-ups, great music, but my god was this lacking some basic gameplay niceties. What's with 1986 action games going back on some of the fundamental action/platformer elements. Why can't you jump off a ladder? Why is the get-off-the-ladder super clunky like some 1982 microcomputer game... It's cool you can shoot while on a ladder, but the collision mask for the platforms makes that not as usable and fun as it should be. My usual love of arcade controls where you can quick turn back and forth for last minute dodges or shots was kinda there, but felt a bit clunky. The bosses didn't have much more strategy beyond shoot a lot of times, sometimes you had to jump to reach where they were at but that was about it. Oh and deal with their Ghosts N Goblins style sudden dashes. But a lot of the common enemies had similar mechanics like that, plus the annoying Ghosts N Goblins style sudden spawn (with an annoying player collision mask, which I bet was less annoying in a 4-player, put-in-as-many-coins-as-you-want setting).. not to mention the GnG style infinite re-spawning.

Attachment: 7/10 As a single player game, this is lacking. You can tell it was meant for multiplayer. Still, the Ghosts N Goblins influence on 1986 arcade games is gross and alarming for the upcoming games on my backlog. We went from super tight arcade controls to "this makes it harder by limiting your player's basic mechanics"--and I'm not a fan of that. This one is surely more fun and easier than Ghosts N Goblins, and that music... that music is amazing. But the influence Ghosts N Goblins had, and the clear rise of "hard game = better game" that we saw in the post-Manic Miner microcomputer platformer world, is not boding well.

I got to Stage 6 and called it quits. (There are over 30 stages I believe!) In the end, I'd rather play an arcade action game where you can shoot an enemy as you're near them and keep moving on than this one where you will die as you shoot and kill the enemy. I can't give too harsh a rating because I haven't played it how it was intended--multiplayer--but I don't see the gameplay faults disappearing from that. Plus, the music makes me have a soft spot for it that boosts the overall rating a bit. Who knows, maybe it'd be worth returning when I have 3 other people with me with infinite coins and see that it's more manageable and thus enjoyable (I do like that when you die, you lose your power-ups but they can be re-collected and you spawn right there, but again, none of this can compensate for the poor gameplay choices)

Completion: To Stage 6 Playtime: ~40 mins