#25 – MagMax
This simple shooter does not crank up the fun to the max as the name might
suggest.
Basic title screen but it does the job.
To Beat: Defeat the Dragon after Level 4
To Complete: Complete 3 loops
My Goal: Complete the game
What I Did: Completed 3 loops
Played: 8/20/16, 8/25/16
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
Playing games at random like I am doing for this blog means that progression
is going to be terribly unpredictable. Ikari Warriors and MagMax couldn’t be
any more different in terms of time spent beating the game. While I am
thankful that MagMax was a very welcome breather in terms of pushing
toward the overall goal, the game itself was not all that interesting.
MagMax was released in the arcades in Japan in 1985. All versions were
developed by Nihon Bussan. The arcade version was also published by the
developer under the brand Nichibutsu. The NES port was released on the
Famicom in March 1986. The US version was published by FCI and was not
released until October 1988, nearly two and a half years apart from the
Famicom release. The game also received ports to the ZX Spectrum,
Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC all in 1987.
MagMax is a side scrolling shooter. The story goes that aliens conquered the
Earth and put the super-computer beast Babylon over the humans. The
people fight back by creating a mech named MagMax that is their only hope
to take back Earth.
It’s pretty slow going starting out.
The game has two somewhat interesting gimmicks going for it. The first
feature is that as you play you collect and merge the different parts of
MagMax to create a fully powered robot. You start off with a basic spaceship
that eventually becomes the midsection of MagMax. You can attach the head
and legs separately as you come across them. Each segment has its own gun
adding more shots to the fray. There is also a wave beam gun that attaches
to the head providing even more firepower. You are completely MagMax
whenever all four pieces are put together.
The other feature is that there are two separate fields of play and you are
able to switch between them periodically. The game starts on the surface
and from time to time there will be warp holes that show up. You can choose
to descend down the hole and continue play underground. Similarly there are
warp holes underground that bring you back up to the surface. The surface
has different enemies and obstacles than the underground. The other
difference between the fields is in visual perspective. The surface is sort of
halfway between side view and top down view while the underground is
purely side view. No matter which side you choose, play always scrolls to the
right.
The gray warp hole carries you to the underground.
When only the basic starting ship, it only takes one hit to lose a life.
However, as you merge with the other parts of MagMax, both the head and
the legs can be destroyed separately which lets you take a bullet and
survive. You lose your extra firepower but you stay alive which is a fair
tradeoff. It gives you a bit of a cushion to survive until finding other
replacement parts to build back up to full strength. It should be noted that
the wave beam gun gets destroyed along with the head if that part is lost.
The difference in perspective means that each field plays a little bit
differently. On the surface, the full MagMax stands taller than all the
enemies, so the bullets fire slightly downward and move forward across the
ground. The enemies also fire across the ground, so the player hitbox is
merely the bottom part of the MagMax. Bullets that appear to hit the top of
MagMax actually travel behind it due to the perspective. The wave beam gun
on the surface is a constant beam that drags along the ground in front of the
player. This can be used to destroy enemies that are otherwise immune to
standard shots.
Having to point the beam downward seems like bad robot design.
The underground perspective plays by different rules than the surface. The
most visible change is that having multiple parts attached gives the MagMax
three distinct vertical levels of shooting the standard beam. In effect this is
akin to a spread shot. The downside is that the hitbox is the exact size of the
MagMax so when fully powered up the hitbox is three times larger than with
the bare ship or on the surface. The wave beam gun underground provides a
fireball that blasts across the screen cutting through all enemies in its path.
There are many different types of enemies to deal with. They are your typical
nondescript robot ships for the most part all with different attack patterns.
The surface tends to have more stationary targets, many of which are only
vulnerable to the wave beam gun. The underground tends to have more
waves of moving enemies that can be destroyed with any weapon. A few
elements in the game have unique properties. There is an enemy type that
fires a spread of cannonballs when it’s destroyed that can also defeat other
surrounding enemies for bonus points. Underground there are stalactites that
will fall to the ground when shot. If an enemy is hit by one of these on the
way down it is destroyed for bonus points.
You start the game with two lives and you can earn more from points. There
is an extra life at 30,000 points and another awarded at every 50,000 points
beyond that. It does take some time to accumulate enough points to rack up
lives but each one is worth it.
Lots of swarming enemies underground to blow away!
There are four levels in MagMax that blend seamlessly into the next during
play. They are the forest, desert, sea, and automated city. At the end of the
second and fourth levels you get to square off against Babylon himself. The
battle is exactly the same both times and you will come across him on both
the surface and underground. After the fight in the fourth stage there is a
little bit further to go and then the game loops back to the beginning.
Consider the game beaten when this loop point is reached.
This game was another new one for me. I didn’t have much trouble with it at
all. In fact I beat the game on my very first try. I kept playing and ended up
dying for good early on in the second loop. Even though I beat the game I
wanted to take it a step further by playing an entire loop on the surface
followed by another full loop underground. That way I get to experience the
full content of the game. My second attempt was all I needed to complete
that goal.
Having completed all of the surface followed by all of the underground, I can
safely say that going underground is significantly more difficult than above.
Almost all of the difficulty underground can be attributed to the larger hitbox
of MagMax. When fully powered up, the spread firepower is excellent but
with the large hitbox it doesn’t last very long. The enemies underground
seem to swarm me more. I think MagMax moves slower underground but
that may just be me. I did notice that having the legs increases the
movement speed and I think that is more important to survival then having
the head and wave beam gun. Overall the easiest way to beat the game is to
stay above ground as much as possible.
You get a large swath of bullets but you are also a very tall target.
A few days after beating MagMax I did a bit more research and found out
that there is a small change even deeper into the game that I should see for
myself. After completing three full loops of the game on one credit, the word
“MEIGETSU” appears for a little while above the score counter. It is unclear
exactly what this means or is supposed to indicate. It seems to translate to
something like “harvest moon” or “great moon,” but I have no clue how that
applies to MagMax at all. Either way, I went back and beat three loops so I
could see the text. I did notice that the game got harder in the second and
third loops, so it is possible that this message indicates that the difficulty is
maxed out. I didn’t play a fourth loop to see if I could tell the difference.
Anyway, now I think I have seen everything there is to see in MagMax.
The NES port of MagMax is really faithful to the arcade version. It looks and
plays just about the same. From what I can tell there are only two noticeable
differences. The surface view has a neat parallax scrolling effect in the
arcade version where the bottom of the screen scrolls by a bit faster than the
top of the screen. This effect is not present in the NES port. In the arcade
version Babylon moves around a bit so his attacks are harder to dodge than
in the NES version where the boss is stationary.
There is a neat minor Easter egg that I noticed right away when booting up
MagMax for the first time. The default high score is set to 65,020 which is
clearly a nod to the 6502 processor that the NES runs. I think that reference
would have been lost on everyone when the game first came out.
The big bad boss Babylon!
I thought it was a bit difficult to pin an appropriate difficulty rating on
MagMax. My decision of 3/10 was the first thing I thought off and I decided to
make it stick. The game is very short clocking in at around 10 minutes. There
are no continues and only a few lives, but the MagMax pieces doubling as an
extra hit goes a long way toward extending each life. By staying on the
surface and getting some practice it should not take very many attempts to
complete one loop. It is not a cakewalk necessarily, but it is easy enough that
3/10 works I think.
It would be easy to cut MagMax some slack if it were released in the US
much closer to the Famicom release. It’s not a great game for 1986 though it
is acceptable, but the more than two year delay before the US release does
not distinguish this game at all from its contemporaries. I know I would be
disappointed if I got this game new in 1988. The good thing is now the game
is both common and cheap, and it is much harder to be disappointed when
both the acquisition cost and amount of time one would reasonably get out
of it is so low. Overall this game is not special and it is fine to skip.
#25 – MagMax
