26. Gryzor



Your old pal Hank is a simple, straight-forward fella. He enjoys going about his daily routine, appreciates the mundane aspects of existence, you know?

And let me tell you: what could be more routine than a classic 80s arcade game ruined by a careless, inept port, under the watchful eye of a developer famous for it's careless, inept ports? We'll practically be in heaven with this one. Pull up a chair and pick up the second joystick, buddy. I'll need more help than you might think!

You might know Gryzor as Probotector if you're one of those robot-loving Japanese, or Contra if you're a honest, red-blooded, alien-bug-hunting American such as myself. Konami's 1987 arcade smash hit was one of a series of efforts that elevated a modest jukebox rental and repair company into the upper pantheon of home gaming over the course of the decade. Unfortunately for us overly-enthusiastic basement dwellers, Konami was less intent on completing the home computer ports of its coin-up behemoths in-house, and chose not to do any of the work in this instance. Instead, British development company Ocean have stepped in to do just what Ocean does best: shovel another pile of digital dirt onto the Commodore 64 platform and its hapless user base.

They must've known what they were signing up for, right? With a game such as this one, why wouldn't expectations be sky-high? They couldn't mess *this* one up, could they?

Behold: this damned thing.

Let's start with the most immediately pungent flavor in the soup: graphics. As is apparent to any who have experienced the full wrath of Konami's quarter-munching juggernaut, the arcade original showcased (relatively) high-resolution color graphics that weren't going to be reproduced faithfully on any 8-bit console. Despite this, there's no way to perceive this title as anything other than a visual swing-and-a-miss, or maybe even one of those swings where you do a full 360 and fall down onto the seat of your pants. Yes, C64 Gryzor is pig-ugly. The NES version looks nicer, the Amstrad CPC version looks nicer. the MSX2 version looks nicer, even the Tandy Coco 3 port looks nicer (that one came a little later, but let's not let this context get in the way of my very important point). The bleached-out color palette lacks the warmth of the Commodore's competitors, and the game seems intent on not displaying anything close to a full playfield. Side-scrolling levels feature a score display with a solid black border taking up the top 20% of the screen. The 3rd-person-perspective levels fare even worse, with easily 50%-60% of available graphical real estate chewed up by HUD and wallpaper. The player sprite looks like something ripped straight off an Atari 2600 cart. Everything Gryzor presents to the eye smacks of a dispassionate rush-job.



The title screen stinks. This may feel like a low blow, but I don't care. It's a telling indicator of the complete lack of effort on Ocean's part to make the game even moderately presentable.

Sound-wise.. this ain't good. For music, we have one tune: the base theme. You thought you'd get a classic Contra jungle theme? Ha. No, the base theme plays, over and over, through every level. When you shoot your weapon (which happens quite frequently, if you're familiar with this genre), the music cuts out for a half-second. Hope you like it. Oh, also, the shooting effects sound terrible too. Joke's on you.

And the gameplay! Hoo boy - well, it sure is fast, at least. Bullets fly at you in volume, often from an inch away, well before you have any chance of reacting to them.Your average play session will last about 15-20 seconds, in all likelihood. Enemy soldiers charging forward at breakneck pace, turrets practically popping up out of nowhere, exploding bridges.. there's just too much to contend with.



But yet, I persevere. All this sounds very frustrating, but it's not too far removed from all the other, positive ContraGryzorProbotector experiences I've held so dear throughout my life. No, I'll work through this with dogged determination, shooting, tumbling, and jumping my way through these pixelated jungles.

Wait, how do you jump, anyway?

Oh yeah, the space bar.

Wait, what?

But I have a joystick in my hands.

Alas, it's the space bar. That's just how we do business in Gryzor County. Hit it with your forehead, hit it with your big toe, do squats onto it with your ass, do you whatever you need to do, buddy. I'm sure you'll figure it out.

I guess you could also hook up a second joystick and find someone to press the port-2 fire button to jump for you. I had suggested exactly that at the beginning of this review, in fact, if you were perceptive enough to take the hint.

Of course, I'm not being serious about that last bit. Asking a video game to do that sort of thing would be preposterous. I'd be ashamed if I were a developer and thought this was an acceptable solution.

Now that our grievances have been aired, let's take a moment to step back and contemplate the greater significance of this situation. All of this digital misery does not exist in a self-contained vacuum. Gryzor, in itself, is certainly a crappy time, but the underlying truth of Gryzor enshrines it as but only one in a series of Perpetual Crappy Times. All these F-tier 5 1/4" throwing stars feature in a tale that would continuously repeat itself to the end of the C64's lifespan, disappointing many a less-informed customer on Christmas mornings, good-report-card days, saved-up-enough-allowance days, and countless other occasions in a young gamer's life. Behold, The Low-Effort Port: a vital element of the Commodore experience, as it was, is, and ever shall be remembered.

I still usually find something positive to point out in even the most dire of software releases, but I don't think I can give Gryzor any Es for Effort this time around. No one disputes the fact that the arcade original was a considerable technical achievement in its day, and many 80s computers and consoles simply weren't up to the task of re-capturing its jungle-warfare-meets-H.R. Giger aesthetics. However, this statement excuses nothing. Given the C64's hardware limitations, there was no conceivable way this game could even control arcade-perfectly, let alone hold a candle in the graphics, sound, or content departments, and yet Ocean saw fit to take our money and run. This all adds up to an inadequate release that is unfit of carrying the Gryzor banner, buried by technical limitations and an asinine control scheme. Feel free to fire it up in an emulator as a historical curiosity, but I would probably have preferred to play a good game instead.

But - I will say it wouldn't have been so bad if there was only some sort of adapter that you could use to enable multiple fire buttons by connecting a multi-button joystick to both ports.

Wouldn't it be nice?

This site is copyright 2023 Hank Wesley Chorkin. If you don't like it, you can get out!

Back