Re: [stella] Looping

Subject: Re: [stella] Looping
From: Rob <kudla@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 08:09:12 -0400
At 01:01 PM 8/6/00 -0700, Glenn Saunders wrote:
>Actually, the game this most closely resembles from the arcades would be 
>LOOPING, a fairly obscure title that I remember quite fondly, where the 
>gameplay is like Scramble with the forced forward movement only with a 
>rotating plane rather than one that can move X and Y.

I loved Looping too.  It's so obscure it's never been emulated, but there's
a decent version for the Colecovision out there if anyone wants to try it
(the first game I ever bought for the CV, in fact, back in '82.)

Briefly, you're a plane whose only controls are nose up, nose down and
fire.  Gunmen in hot air balloons are attacking your airstrip and you need
to shoot them down.  Once you tire of doing that, you go through a gate and
fly through a network of pipes accompanied by classical music, ending up at
a wall where you have to shoot away a barrier and then I think it's just a
big balloon or something you need to hit once (or was it a goal you had to
fly into? at any rate, the challenge was shooting all the stuff away
without crashing your plane.)  It's called Looping because it's controlled
broadly like a real plane, meaning for example when you pull back your
plane's nose goes up and you end up upside down.

>I definitely think Looping would be an awesome port for the 2600, and 
>making the ribbon a plane would both look better and be more doable on the 
>2600.

It seems like it'd be possible to me too, though the "flying through pipes"
section would have to be a little different and you'd have to watch out for
flicker when you started generating balloons.  The horizontal scrolling
part of it was actually fairly short, so maybe somehow one could adapt
Thomas' algorithm for it (but I'd guess you'd need to make it a
Supercharger game, or at least one with RAM on the cart, to make it similar
to the arcade game.)

There's a section where you have to shoot pieces out of a gate before
flying through it; you could probably just use playfield graphics for it,
but the CV version made all the balloon sprites disappear when it came on
the screen so I'm guessing it was recycling sprites.

Rob

kudla@xxxxxxxxx ... http://kudla.org/raindog ... Rob


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