So far in UFO 50 we’ve seen two very different takes on the platformer, including a classic microcomputer-style “arcade adventure” and an auto-scrolling arcade game, plus a surprisingly deep but simple to understand deckbuilding strategy game. What’s next?
Well, it’s time to tackle that mainstay of early ’80s video games, the maze chase game! Paint Chase blends ideas from Namco’s Pac-Man and Rally-X with a touch of underappreciated Atari 8-bit classic Preppie! II to create something fun and challenging that, like everything else in the compilation, puts an original twist on an established formula.
Just four games into UFO 50 and we’ve already seen an incredibly diverse array of different gaming experiences… and there’s plenty more where that came from. But for now, let’s take a closer look at Paint Chase after the jump.
In the alternate gaming history of UFO 50, Paint Chase was composed in 1983 by Gerry Smolski, who had previously contributed to both Ninpek and Bug Hunter. Smolski was primarily known as a hardware specialist, but Paint Chase was the first game for the LX platform where he took a leading role in game design, nicely proving his abilities with a solid, fun little experience.
In Paint Chase, you take on the role of a blue racing car that, for reasons never really explained other than “that’s what the game is about”, has to paint a bunch of mazes blue. The game is introduced with a charming little cutscene showing the car heading to the “Paint Racing Competition” and finding a huge queue of competitors ahead of him.
This begins a pattern for the game as a whole; each group of stages is introduced with a cutscene that usually includes the poor old blue car suffering some sort of comedic mishap and uttering some Q*Bert-style censored expletives in the form of a speech bubble. The cutscenes after the initial introduction serve a dual purpose: as well as being a reward for making a certain amount of progress, they also introduce new hazards that you’ll be encountering in the next few stages.
The basic gameplay in Paint Chase involves driving the car around the maze-like stages, painting every square you pass over blue. Opposing you are a series of pink enemies that emerge from specific blocks in the maze, with the relevant blocks flashing just before the enemies appear, allowing you to strategise on the fly.
The pink enemies, of course, paint the maze pink, including any areas you’ve already painted blue, and your goal in each stage is to have covered a specific amount of the maze in blue when the timer expires. This means you’ll need to proactively take control of the situation, finding a good balance between claiming new territory and dealing with the pink enemies.
Thankfully, for the most part, dealing with enemies is a simple matter of crashing into them. Early in the game, all enemies can be defeated in this way, which causes them to disappear until the next enemy spawn cycle. Later on, you face some enemies that have to be hit from the sides or back to eliminate them, others that cannot be defeated if you’re going too fast and even some that fire projectiles at you.
There’s no way to “die” in Paint Chase, mind; if you make a mistake such as crashing head-on into an enemy with spikes on their front, ploughing into a spiky obstacle or being hit by a hazard, your car will simply crumple for a moment before magically fixing itself and proceeding on its way. This wastes a few seconds, however, and can often make a surprising amount of difference to your progress in a level.
The enemies start off with very simple behaviour, trundling around the maze painting as they go, but as you proceed through the levels you’ll start to encounter more and more different types of enemy.
For example, aircraft-type enemies will fly slowly around for a bit, then start flashing. After a moment, they will begin firing paint in four directions, painting complete rows and columns (or at least until their paint hits a wall) from their current position.
Grenade-type enemies will explode after a short period of flashing, coating almost an entire quadrant of the maze in pink. These are very dangerous to your efforts, particularly on stages with a high pass threshold, so should be dealt with promptly.
Slug-type enemies appear in pairs, one of which moves off quickly and the other of which slithers around slowly. Dealing with them both as soon as possible is important to keep your control of the play area under control.
Part of succeeding in Paint Chase is determining the best way in which to deal with all these enemies — and how to prioritise your targets when multiple enemies are on screen. Although the game doesn’t specifically highlight which enemies are the most dangerous, you’ll very quickly come to learn which ones you should take out first!
Thankfully, as well as your ability to eliminate enemies by crashing into them, there are also various helpful features in the mazes.
Boost pads accelerate you if you pass over them in the direction they’re pointing. If you crash into an enemy while at the “boost” speed, you’ll cause them to explode. This offers no real benefit most of the time, but there are certain enemies and obstacles best dealt with in this way; however, to counterbalance this, later in the game there are enemies that will cause you to crash if you hit them while under the effect of a boost pad.
Some levels offer power-ups such as the ability to fire paint like the aircraft enemies, a spike projectile weapon that allows you to take out enemies from a distance, a drone that will paint areas of the maze independently of you, and even a brief period of time stoppage for everything except you. This latter option can be very powerful if you take good advantage of it, particularly when there are a lot of enemies on screen.
Scoring in Paint Chase is very simple. Each level has a percentage threshold you need to cover in your colour to pass, and every percentage point you get over that scores you a point. That’s the only means of scoring points, and certain point milestones can earn you extra lives, so it’s in your interests to try and stock up a bit before the trickier later stages.
For the most part, Paint Chase is pretty easy, making it a game that would be great for young players. However, the last set of five stages feature a noticeable difficulty spike, making it a fairly stiff challenge to actually clear the game and achieve its gold trophy in UFO 50. There’s no continue option, either, meaning if you mess up in these last few stages — and you almost certainly will on your first attempt or two — it’s right back to the beginning for you. Frustrating by modern standards, sure, but absolutely par for the course in games from 1983, many of which were still taking heavy cues from arcade games.
Perhaps a slightly more gentle difficulty curve as the game progressed would have been nice, though it already does a good job of gradually introducing game elements to the player at a good pace, so it’s difficult to know exactly what it could do differently to make things feel a little more gradual.
Plus, look at it this way: as a standalone release in 1983, rather than part of a 50-game compilation, Paint Chase would have had to stand up to repeated plays, and shouldn’t have been beatable in a single sitting, otherwise anyone purchasing it would have complained about it having no longevity, particularly with its simple scoring system. So instead of complaining about it being “unfair”, get practicing and you’ll beat it before long!
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