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RetroMo: The TomyTronic Titles
Written by Philip Jones on Monday, July 24, 2006
Philip Jones explains to today's youngins just what exactly passed for "futuristic" back in the day, and severely dates himself in the process...
...Continued From Page 1 The four initial titles were Thundering Turbo, Planet Zeon, Shark Attack and Sky Attack. The games were simple, as LCD games tended to be. They look crude to us now but I remember as a child them being as close to reality as the latest current generation titles. The 3D effect was achieved by there being two different LCD panels, one image being fed to the left eyepiece, the other to the right. They were lit by an opaque window on the top of the unit. The color was given by a simple transparent overlay behind the LCD displays. The end result was the one of the most immersive and memorable handheld games of the early 1980's.
Thundering Turbo
Thundering Turbo is a traditional LCD racing game, instead of doing laps of a track or anything, the game keeps a score of how many cars you've overtaken, adding a point when you overtake, subtracting one when a car passes you. There are three lanes on the never-ending track, you have three lives, and you get to race through three races, each lasting around 100 seconds. All you have to do is overtake the other cars and try not to crash. Sounds simple, but back then, you could play for hours.
Planet Zeon
Planet Zeon is heavily influenced by some of the popular sci-fi film of the time, including Star Wars. The game is set in some kind of metal space trench and your spaceship is kinda X shaped. The aim of this one is to shoot the alien bad guys but at the same time keep an eye on your little fuel meter. Little fuel pods occasionally travel down the trench and you have to intercept them in order to carry on with your mission.
Sky Attack
Sky Attack is a counterpart to Planet Zeon, as if while your comrades are up in space, you're down on your planet's surface defending it in your little tank. Up in the sky there is an ever-encroaching alien armada and you move left and right, again in a possible 3 lanes. The alien craft march on towards you, intent on dropping their little explosive payloads right on top of your head. There's more evidence of movie design snitching in that in this game - your tank and the alien craft look remarkably similar to the designs of the movie Tron. I wasn't complaining though, as intellectual property theft wasn't something I was thinking about as I blasted those ships from the inky black future-sky.
Shark Attack
Shark Attack, as the name implies, was a game about being attacked by sharks, or it could be said you play the part of some maniacal shark attacker. Certainly if one man managed to butcher as many sharks as I did playing this game I'm sure some animal protection agencies would be quite concerned. In the game, the sharks started off at the bottom of the play area and swam into the distance, they would then do a little turn and start heading straight at you. Your little scuba man seemed to have replaced his traditional spear gun with some hi-tech laser weapon (of course). He would've had no chance against this many sharks with just a lil harpoon. As a child, this was one of the most satisfying of the Tomytronic series to me, as when you blasted a shark, they turned into satisfyingly meaty chunks of ex-shark and drifted back into the chasm.
posted September 8, 2006