Sinistar
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| Sinistar | |
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| Developer(s) | Williams Electronics |
| Publisher(s) | Williams Electronics |
| Designer(s) | Noah Falstein and John Newcomer |
| Release date(s) | 1982 |
| Genre(s) | Multi-directional shooter |
| Mode(s) | Up to 2 players, alternating turns |
| Platform(s) | Arcade |
| Input | Joystick |
| Arcade cabinet | Standard and sit-down |
| Arcade display | Raster, standard resolution (used 240 × 292) (Vertical) |
Sinistar is an arcade game released by Williams in 1982. It belongs to a class of video games from the 1980s called "twitch games". Other "twitch games" include Tempest, Defender, and Robotron: 2084. Sinistar's voice was supplied by John Doremus.
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[edit] Description
The player pilots a lone fighter ship through a quadrant of the galaxy, initially blasting away at drifting planetoids to "mine" Sinisite Crystals from them, which, when harvested, create Sinibombs. Sinibombs are the only weapon capable of damaging Sinistar. The fighter's bomb bay can hold 20 Sinibombs.
The player creates Sinibombs by shooting at the drifting planetoids (which resemble clouds) and catching the crystals released. Each shot makes a planetoid shake, and if too many shots are fired at a planetoid at too fast of a firing rate, it will cause the planetoid to explode and no crystals will be released. At the same time, a planetoid must shake a certain amount to actually release any crystals. It normally takes between 3 to 6 shots (depending on the size of the planetoid) to release between 1 and 10 crystals. Additional crystals also be obtained from the same planetoid, as long as the number of shots and firing rate do not cause it to explode.
At the same time that the player is trying to get crystals, the "worker" ships are also trying to take the crystals. They use these crystals to create Sinistar, the skeletal-looking Boss who is trying to destroy you. At the same time that all of this is going on, other ships (called "warrior ships") are trying to shoot the player's ship, and the warriors can also been seen shooting at planetoids to mine crystals when they aren't trying to attack the player or guard the Sinistar.
If the player's ship is destroyed before the Sinistar is formed, the game shows how far along the worker ships are in building the Sinistar. The workers must harvest 20 crystals before the Sinistar is completely formed. Once it is completely formed, a digitized voice says "Beware, I live". While he is trying to collide with the player's ship in order to eat it, he says further things. His seven sayings are "Roar!", "Beware, I live!", "I am Sinistar!", "Run! Run! Run!", "Beware, coward!", "I hunger!" and "Run, coward!" (which sounds a lot like Ron Howard, leading the developers to dub the game "Opie-star"). If the Sinistar succeeds in colliding with the player's ship, the ship spins out of control and then the Sinistar eats the ship, which also causes the ship to explode.
A total of 13 Sinibombs are required to destroy a fully built Sinistar (12 Sinibombs for each piece plus one additional Sinibomb for the entire face). Each Sinibomb attempts to target and hit the Sinistar, but each Sinibomb can also be intercepted by a collision with a worker, warrior, warrior shot, or a planetoid. If the player's ship is shot by a warrior or eaten by the Sinistar, the status screen will show the number of Sinibombs remaining and the number of Sinistar pieces remaining.
There are four zones that repeat over and over again. You move from one zone to the next after you have defeated the Sinistar. These zones are Worker Zone, Warrior Zone, Planetoid Zone, and Void Zone. The first three zones have more workers, warriors and planetoids, respectively. The Void Zone is especially difficult because it has almost no planetoids. A partially destoyed Sinistar can also be rebuilt, starting with the Worker Zone and continuing for all subsequent zones.
[edit] Difficulty
There are many, many things that make Sinistar difficult. First of all, there is the challenge of getting the Sinibombs. What often happened is that either the player would be killed before Sinistar was even formed, or conversely, Sinistar would become live and you would only have 10 Sinibombs when 13 were needed to kill Sinistar. Once Sinistar became active, it became almost impossible to get more Sinibombs since Sinistar moved much faster than the player could.
[edit] 255 Lives Bug
Sinistar contains a well-known bug that grants the player many lives. It happens only if you are down to 1 ship left. If when the Sinistar is about to eat you, a warrior ship shoots you and kills you, something strange happens. When it happens, the warrior shot takes you down to 0 lives and then Sinistar eating you takes you down to -1 lives. -1 in 8 bit two's complement notation is 11111111, or 255 if interpreted as an unsigned value. So when you go down to -1 lives, the game resets you to 255 lives. 255 is the largest number allowed in the 8 bit system. When the Sinistar goes to eat you, the warriors stop shooting, so your only chance for this bug to occur is if one of their previous shots hits you.
[edit] Legacy
Because the game came out relatively close to the video game crash of 1983, it became a somewhat hard game to find. It was really only the Internet that raised the game above cult status, so a sequel was not released until 1999. It was called Sinistar: Unleashed and it was released for the PC. For similar reasons, Sinistar also was not widely ported. It is available as part of Midway Arcade Treasures, which was released for the PC, Xbox, GameCube and PS2 in 2003, and part of Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play for the PlayStation Portable, in late 2005.
Sinistar represented a number of firsts in game design. It was the first game to use stereo sound (in the sitdown version), with two independent front and back sound boards for this purpose. In addition, Sinistar was the first game to use digitized speech as successfully as it did. It was also the first to use the 49-way, custom-designed optical joystick that Williams had produced specifically for this game.
In July 2000, Midway licensed Sinistar, along with other Williams Electronics games, to Macromedia Shockwave for use in an online applet to demonstrate the power of the shockwave web content platform, entitled Shockwave Arcade Collection. The conversion was created by Digital Eclipse. It is currently freely available to be played within the shockwave web applet.
Like most arcade games of the era, unofficial clones were made for home computers. One of the best was Peter Johnson's Deathstar for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron which was published by Superior Software in 1984. The quality of the clone is not too surprising as it was originally developed as an official port to be released by Atarisoft but they decided to abandon the BBC platform while a number of games were still in development.
Xenostar, a public domain tribute to Sinistar, was created and released for the Amiga computer in 1994.
The theme music to the game was sampled in 2005 on 'Grand Ol' Party Crash' by Cage featuring Jello Biafra and DJ Shadow.
The game is featured in the the music video for Sheena Easton's "Almost Over You", where a Defender arcade game is thrown out of a second story window.
The sound bites "Beware, I live" and the roaring sound are used in the trailer of the movie We Are The Strange
The line "Run, coward!" was named the fourth best game line ever in the January 2002 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly.
In the animated television series "South Park", the town's video arcade is called the "Sinistarcade".
[edit] External links
- Tyler's Sinistar Page, another Sinistar site
- Sinistar at the Killer List of Videogames
- The Philosophical Revelations of Sinistar
- The Sinistar Shockwave Applet
