Crystal Quest

Players: 2 About: Mac shooter Courtesy of: Novalogic Back in: 1991 Originally on: Mac Also on: Apple IIGS, Amiga, GameBoy, Palm, Windows, iPhone, Xbox Live.

British developer Patrick Buckland (Carmageddon) wrote the original mouse-controlled Crystal Quest for the Apple Macintosh in 1987, the system's first color game, based on his previous shareware version entitled Crystal Raider. It's still celebrated today as one of the system's most successful titles, and many ports have since then appeared, including this GameBoy version published by Data East and developed by Novalogic.
In a nutshell, Crystal Quest could be considered a primitive Geometry Wars. Individual, single-screen playing fields must be cleared of crystals by collecting them before advancing to the next stage, shooting down constantly-spawning alien forces in the process with a saucer-shaped fighter. The player can move around at will to avoid being harmed by foes, shots, and mines. But the game's claim to fame were the then advanced inertia-simulating controls, which worked great with a computer mouse for guiding the ship yet forced players to deal with an undesirable shooting scheme.

American cover

Firing is done by awkwardly "hurling" bullets towards the enemy using the moving saucer's momentum and direction. This means that if the player's ship is stationary while you press the fire button, the bullet's sprite will appear but not move, disappearing after some time. To effectively eliminate the competition, one must already be in motion and heading towards the enemy to give projectiles the proper velocity and direction to reach them. Take that, Robotron controls.

Even though the original Crystal Quest's pride and joy were its new-found game physics, its quirky targeting and firing was always less than ideal and obviously much more imprecise than traditional shooters'. An issue this GameBoy port also has to deal with in addition to the lack of the proper pointing device that was originally intended to control it.
Although not completely game-breaking, most early and less intensive stages of the game can still be enjoyed with a little bit of patience. Still, other titles that later mimicked this formula while leaving out the impractical physics (like the aforementioned Geometry Wars) render Buckland's game completely obsolete.
Finally, a stock of screen-clearing bombs helps during tight situations, 2-player mode is possible by taking turns, and visuals are effective yet faithfully humble while music is inexplicably missing during play.

Ports to the Apple IIGS, Mac Plus, Amiga, Palm, and more recently Windows Vista, iPhone, and Xbox Live Arcade also exist; the latter dropping its classic controls in favor of more precise dual-stick or touch-screen configurations. A sequel by the name of Crystal Crazy was also released during the 90's.

Dropzone

Players: 1 About: Atari shooter Courtesy of: Eurocom Back in: 1992 Originally on: Atari 800 Also on: C64, NES, GameBoy, GameBoy Color, Game Gear.

You may recognize British programmer Archer MacLean as the man behind the classic Atari 800 title International Karate, its sequel International Karate +, or more recently the Mercury Meltdown multiplatform series. Known for producing his first games entirely on his own under the company name of Arena Graphics as well as writing all the code, graphics, and sound for 13 ports to other platforms all by himself, MacLean is yet another one of those brilliant British programmers/hackers from the early days of Assembler and BASIC who is nowadays considered a local videogame superstar. As a self-professed admirer of Williams legend Eugene Jarvis (the mind behind Robotron) and shoot'em-up lover, MacLean developed Dropzone on his own Atari 800 while taking inspiration from successful arcade shooters of the time like Scramble and Defender, trying to match their quality on a home platform, and pushing the console's hardware to its limits. It soon became his first commercial title after he struck a deal with a publisher, turning into an instant hit in the U.K. between 1984 and 1985.

Dropzone puts players in the shoes (or space boots) and over-sensitive jet pack of an astronaut who's job consists of defending scientists stationed in a base located in one of Jupiter's moons. Much like in Defender, each stage is a self-contained, enclosed environment; the player manually scrolling left or right in an infinite loop depending on which direction he guides the astronaut. A small radar at the bottom of the screen is paramount in keeping track of misbehaving alien forces as well as the strangely ball-shaped humans that must be protected.

American cover

Despite its unmistakable and shameless Defender flavor, Dropzone's success wasn't completely due to its parasitic relationship to Jarvis' game. MacLean worked very hard in improving the formula by adding what at the time were beautifully-sounding and looking multi-colored explosions, small animation details for the astronaut, impressive sound effects (yet no music), and a ranking system in which the computer commented on the player's performance. He also deepened the game's mechanics by requiring that roaming humanoids not only be rescued but also returned to base ala Choplifter, as well as greatly expanded over standard shoot'em-up weaponry with a completely crazy firing rate, screen-clearing bombs, and an invisibility cloak. His passion for details and deliberate frenetic pace made his game a classic on computers and consoles of the time despite its extreme difficulty, and continued to be ported over and over on multiple 2D-friendly platforms all the way to the GameBoy Color; later spawning its only sequel by the name of Super Dropzone on the SNES, Playstation, and GameBoy Advance.

MacLean's vehemence for coding some of his earliest games' ports by himself ("From experience I found that if I wanted the job done to my standards I simply had to do it myself" he mentions in an interview) might come across as arrogance, but I don't think that's the case. He seems to have really cared about his creations and wanted to keep the quality standards up across all platforms so that everybody could get the most out of his games regardless of the system they were using.
This GameBoy version, however, was handled by Eurocom Developments because it was released no less than 8 years after the original. It's very faithful in every way except for the fact that the GameBoy's resolution shrinks the field of vision to nearly half the original size, resulting in constant cheap deaths by lightning-fast, unpredictable enemies and shots one just doesn't have enough time to dodge. No adjustments to speed or controls seem to have been made to prevent this issue from clashing with everything Dropzone is known for: quick reflexes and hypersonic scrolling. Quite a shame.

A re-edition for GameBoy Color released in 1999 and programmed by Awesome Developments is, as you might have expected, just a technically updated option for the slightly upgraded portable. If nothing else, a convenient option to select the color of the background and minor graphical modifications make it slightly superior.
A huge, fancily animated character sprite was included in Codemasters' Game Gear port even though portable screens aren't getting any bigger. This version is actually based on an unreleased port to the Master System that features upgraded, more detailed graphics (therefore the modified size of the player's sprite), but the difference in screen resolution between both consoles wasn't taken into account and guiding the portable astronaut safely through the skies is harder than flying a blimp through anti-air fire. Even stranger perhaps is the fact that someone decided that including a full chip-tune rendition of Bach's "Toccata And Fugue In D-Minor" during the game's title screen was a good idea, even if there still isn't any music during play.
The C64, NES, and original versions are obviously the more accomplished. Stick with those.

- Interview with Archer MacLean from the digital book "Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers", originally published in 1997.