The background: I had a high-school buddy (this would be around 83 or so) who hung out on those BBS modem networks, before this newfangled Internet doohickey was widely used.
He had downloaded a game which we played on an Atari 800XL. He said (and I have no reason to doubt him) that this was an unreleased game from LucasArts, or at any rate from people associated with Lucas.
The game was a first person shooter in which one seemed to be driving a tank, although you never actually saw any part of it: the entire screen was the windshield of the tank. You were on this green field reaching to a blue horizon, with large pylons scattered around that you could hide behind.
You would be attacked by these shimmering parallelograms that approached you; if you didn’t shoot them before they reached you, you blew up. Some would approach slow–the easy ones–and some would barrel up so fast that by the time you heard them (they all made distinctive noises), it would almost be too late.
After destroying all the parallelograms on a level, a gate would open that you passed through into a short lightning fast round in which you were shooting through a void trying to avoid these planetlike spheres; if you were able to dodge all, you passed into another gate that deposited you into another more difficult green pylon field. The game continued alternating between increasingly difficult pylon fields and voids.
Does this ring a bell with anybody? Was it ever released? Is there a version of it playable on a modern Mac (legal suggestions only please, so as not to cause a Mod to scowl at us)?
Ballblazer, and all those games, leaked out in beta format, which is to say, unfinished and in a raw form. Maybe that’s what your friend had a copy of?
No, it isn’t Ballblazer or Rescue on Fractalus. I have/had both of those games but I also had the game that Hoops describes. It was definitely a different game. Let me see what I can track down.
It’s “Encounter!” from Synapse Software, and it was released. Not as advanced graphics as Ballblazer, but at a glance similar looking. A Battlezone-like game but with it’s own charms.
There were three types of enemies. Normal attackers were yellow. Rammers were a glowing (Atari-style) red-orange. Blue enemies sat still but shot bullets rapid-fire. Mind you, this game’s ‘bullets’ were more like giant puffballs. Destroying the rammers meant going in reverse gear while aiming and hoping you don’t hit a pylon.
Oh yeah, AFAIK only one enemy at a time. You’d see them warp in, the best time to destroy them.
At the end of each level a black gateway opens up. Enter it and you must steer through dozens of oncoming puffballs to advance- ouch. (not like Star Raiders’ hyperwarp it was tough).
Play a long time (5 levels?) and you get a night scene. Remember when just a change in the background color gave you a feeling of accomplishment?
I was doing a vanity search, embarassingly enough, and I found that this thread had continued after I stopped checking it, thinking it dead. Jeff Lodoen and GuanoLad nailed it; Encounter it is.
Cool game; now that I know the name, I’ll scour the emulator sites for some leads. Thanks y’all.
