#18: Cybernoid: The Fighting Machine (Hewson, Commodore 64, 1988)

Overall, games commercially successful enough to trouble AAA tend towards the middle of the narrative-skill spectrum, but there’s a lot of variation within that tendency. We’ll eventually encounter some games more towards the narrative end, but at this point in history we’re firmly towards the skill end; everything so far has had some narrative elements, but they’ve frequently been a sideshow. 

There are reasons why so many games lean more on skill than narrative at this point in history, and it’s not just out of tradition. Memory limitations made it difficult to make expansive games, and without easy ways to implement saves, players might have to sit through one all in one session. The popular idea of the length of playtime a game offers being a virtue has long proved a difficult one to shift, and the easy way to provide length in the ‘80s was through difficulty and repetition. Get something wrong, go back and do it again. It’s also why high scores were the norm, even when already seeming somewhat vestigial in something like Super Mario Bros.. A number could show your improvement (or otherwise) in starkly simple terms.

Leaving aside the actively shoddy Predator, Cybernoid is the most alienating game to date from my modern perspective. It has a narrative about space pirates stealing stuff and your quest to retrieve it, but that’s mostly outside the game itself and irrelevant. In genre terms, it’s a shoot-‘em-up, which means you control a ship flying around the screen, shooting straight ahead (and eventually in other directions) at enemies. It was a popular enough genre back then to get its own construction kit, which I remember reading reviews and instructions for in magazines. Later on, it developed into being rather niche, particularly in Japan, with difficulty to the forefront in games with screens full of enemy fire, the ‘bullet curtain’ or ‘Bullet Hell’. Cybernoid, by comparison, offers Bullet Purgatory. It’s incredibly difficult, but in a boring way.