Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy (Jaguar) - Guest Post

Ray gets Starwing to play... what do I get?

It's our third Jaguar game, and it's called Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy. If you can say that title without laughing, you're far better than I.

Have you ever used a Jaguar before? It's a fearsome thing. It's like a great, big, black pizza. And the controllers? Imagine, say, a Genesis pad. Then make it thicker. Then attach a bloody great big 12-key numeric keypad on the thing. And I somehow managed to lose one of these things, if you can believe that.

Right from the get-go, the very first thing the console does when you turn it on is roar at you. Because it's a JAGUAR. And then the entire screen fills with BRIGHT RED. But that's because you forgot to put the game in, silly.

It's Christmas 1993, and the only game you've got for your brand new, state-of-the-art 64-bit system is Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy. Who needs that stupid Starwing crap, with its crappy framerate and weedy music? You've done the math, and you've got a Jag.

LOOK.

3D.

It can do A CUBE. JUSTIFIED.

A screen-filling pre-rendered spaceship flies past the screen! Gosh! I'd like to see a Super NES do that!

This music isn't quite what I expected though. It's chirpy and tuneful at times but it mostly sounds like a Mega Drive got some of its instruments mixed up. (YouTube link)

Let's get started!

There's no difficulty select, but we do get a choice of starting level it seems.

There's... Osseous, the desert moon. Grottoneria, the craggy moon. Zephyria, the colourful nebula. Equilibriumite, the swamp moon. All the themed worlds one needs in a balanced diet.

All of them must be completed before I, the plenty courageous and stupidly named Corporal Trevor McFur of the Circle Reserves, can venture towards the central planet Cosmolite to retake it from the evil entity known as 'Odd-It'.

The cursor started on Osseous, so that's where I'll begin my adventure.

That's a lion. I'm taking my orders from a stock photo of a lion. Wearing a stock photo of a uniform. He's not animated, and there sure as hell aren't any voices. Couldn't you get an artist or something, Atari?

It does look sort of cool. They took a risk and it worked in this one case. It's much better than some stupid dog. But the other characters had better look just as cool.

Imagine would it would have looked like if they tried to render him. Think Star Crusader. Think this (external link).

So... just throwing it out there... this isn't going to be an exact rip-off of Starwing is it?

Not that I would have a huge problem with that. It would surely show that nasty Ray a thing or two about who's the coolest kid on this virtual street.

Wow! Look at that!

3D spiky craft, check! Coloured landscape, check! Music, check!

Oh, wait, that's Cybermorph. A different game.

Oh well, I'm sure Trevor McFur will be just as good.

The Nineties were Dark Times for the owner of the 16-bit micro. Horizontally scrolling, slow as treacle space shoot-'em-ups were very popular. Or, perhaps, somebody thought they were popular. So they made lots of them. Lots and lots and lots of them.

This is Trevor McFur.

There's no excuses. We didn't know better.

Now, you might be thinking that this looks identical to Interpose. That's because... it is.

3D pre-rendered spaceships take on 3D pre-rendered asteroids in 3D pre-rendered space. It's all smoothly presented, I suppose, but one would hope 20th century super-tech would be able to draw a dozen sprites at once like this.

Trevor's normal gun is incredibly lousy, but it does auto-fire, which is an immense relief. I've got a whole sack of un-named special abilities with cryptic icons which I daren't use in case I need them later on.

The same three or four enemy types keep coming back around. Sometimes there's a lot of them on screen, sometimes there isn't a lot. This stage isn't too difficult. It's just long. So looooong.

And there's no music. For some reason.

The first boss is... a confused looking dude with a goatee.

His floating mug emerges from the Vortex of Lens Flare to strike terror into my furry heart. Or I'm sure he would do if this wasn't a static, silent image.

I know messing around with your new webcam and the face distorting software that comes with it can be fun, but don't put yourself in as a boss in your console's flagship mascot game.

Ooh, nice. It's a big floaty robot death thing with a couple of smooth frames of shiny animation as it tips from side to side. It even makes a loud PAAAARP noise as it flies around. I was worried that we were going to have a big Zordon-from-Power-Rangers style floaty projected face to deal with. (Everyone knows the giant face is the last boss.)

Where are your minions, anyway? All I'm seeing is a bunch of front-facing missiles. They're probably all just off to one side of the screen trying to figure out where the hell the music's gone.

I'm in a bit of trouble here. My main gun (fully upgraded) is absolutely useless against the boss, and I don't have a lot of faith that my specials are going to be that effective either. Tapping the horrible rubbery unresponsive Option button, I've got some kind of triple yin-yang symbol, a shield, another type of shield, a magnet, a white square, a white rectangle, a cat. And a missile. I'll use that.

POW. The boss is erased from the universe in a screen-filling, absurdly blocky explosion. Okie doke.

The background starts scrolling rapidly as Trevor is swept off to space pastures new. There's a conspicuous lack of engine thrust effects, victory fanfare, 'Mission Accomplished', all that unimportant stuff.

Level 2: The desert moon of Osseous itself. That last level must have just been us getting to the place.

There's our Trevor, finally on-screen after quarter of an hour of pad murdering. He's a jaguar! He certainly looks a serious fellow. (Possibly mulling over how he's going to kill the next person who says his sense of humour is 'dangerously cheesy'.)

This isn't good. The enemies don't seem any more vicious than the last level, but I'm going through my special abilities like crazy just to stay alive. I think I'm just panicking.

This is the three yin-yang power. It fires straight forward, and then homes in on every enemy on the screen in turn until they're all dead. Pretty useful!

It really was like taking kibbles from a kitten. I'm dead. I was distracted by the giant purple floating robot scorpion thing.

GAME OVER. Dang.

PRESS FIRE TO CONTINUE. Undang!

I've got a score of zero, but I've kept my collection of nifty things so let's carry on.

There's a lot of very colourful things going on on-screen at once. There's foreground and background scrolling layers, but they're lacking in detail or structure and continually loop. There's not much chance that any other console of the time could do all this, but the Jaguar's power has been placed in the wrong hands and it has wrought something awful.

The Legendary Skull Creature of Osseous! Gee whiz, I'm stoked! Mega-stoked even!

This is McFur's wingman, Cutter. She's another stock photo ran though the old filteroo. She's a lynx though, so she gets a free pass.

What a devilish trick... if you make all your characters cats, I can't say a bad thing about 'em!

Is he... stuck? He looks like he's desperately begging for me to help him get out of the ground. His horns keep twitching. How horrible.

I'm not supposed to feel sorry for the end boss of a planet, especially not a Legendary Skull Creature!

His primary attack is to fire grey horizontal spikes at me very slowly. He also has what I'm assuming is his most feared and devastating special attack: feeble scribbly lines that move even slower than the spikes.

A medley of special crap I hadn't yet used settles his bacon. The image of Trevor pops up and reassures me EVERYTHING'S UNDER CONTROL, IT'S TIME TO SHOOT THROUGH A FEW HOOPS...

Don't look directly at this image, it'll make your eyes hurt. Definitely don't imagine it in motion, because then you'll need medical attention.

It's a bonus level. In the middle of the rings there are additional charges for your special abilities. As you fly, everything gets faster. It just doesn't work without sound effects. You need to make it so your game announces the powerups as you pick them up. Need.

General Patent pipes up again:

GOOD WORK CORPORAL! BUT IT'S ONLY THE BEGINNING! DO IT AGAIN AND THERE'S A PROMOTION IN IT FOR YOU. YOU WANTED MORE. YOU'VE GOT MORE. NOW DO IT!

But... I don't want more! Not of this, at least! This space level was boring the first time. It's even got the same enemies and graphics as last time. These stages are only three and a half minutes long. I had to check. It feels like so much longer.

Another wibbly-wobbly photograph of a developer appears to terrify me some more.

DESTRUCTION COMES IN ALL COLORS AND YOURS WILL BE PURPLE AND GOLD TODAY...

Half fortune cookie, half interior decorating advice!

That's a pretty detailed robot render you've got going on there. Sort of like an ornate, blackcurrant flavoured Helghast, perhaps.

His only attack is to raise his arm and fire out a single small fireball. If I go behind him, he can't do a thing to me, nor me to him. I don't have any powerful specials, so I mash the fire button and dodge like nothing.

GENERAL PATENT HERE, MCFUR-BALL, NOW QUIT FOOLING AROUND. YOU CAN STILL PULL KITTY LITTER DUTY! THAT IS IF ODD-IT'S NOT WEARING THAT PRETTY COAT OF YOURS. IT'S UP TO YOU AND CUTTER NOW! LUCK TO BOTH OF YOU -- PATENT OUT!

What an odd creature. It's as if somebody modelled the front of a lizard and the back of a lizard, and then realised they only gave it one pair of legs at the last minute. It could be a fold-the-paper draw-the-monster come to life.

I've lost track of which world this is. It's 'the one after the blinkin' tedious space level', which isn't narrowing it down. It has spiders. When you shoot them, they split into tiny spiders and run at you. Brrr.

TREVOR, IT'S CUTTER; ODD-IT HAS AWAKENED THE QUEZECOATL MONSTER FROM THE DEPTHS OF GROTTONERIA. BE CAREFUL... I'VE GOT YOUR BACK! CUTTER OUT.

Yay! Quezecoatl! Legendary feathered serpent Aztec god and part-time Final Fantasy Guardian Force and Shin Megami Tensei not-so-great Snake type.

This is gonna rock!

This is, without a doubt, the worst fucking dragon I've ever seen. It's got a fucking spring for a tail.

It doesn't even fly, it bounces and flops around like a beached fish. I use my kill-everything-on-the-screen special move and put the bugger out of its misery.

I only just noticed how frequently the enemies in these stages drop special power charges. I think the intent was that an experienced player could use these stages to refill their special powers so they stand a chance against the bosses. Dying resets the power of the main gun to zero, but you keep all your abilities, so I guess I should get myself familiar with 'em.

If I use my 'cat' icon special power, my wingman Cutter comes on-screen in her better-equipped, invincible ship for twenty seconds and then sods off again. Marginally useful. Probably lousy against bosses.

In addition, I've got an instant screen clearance bomb, a shrieking horizontal laser, a magnet that attracts all the enemies on screen and throws them aside, a protective drone that circles the ship, an invincibility shield, and a vertical wall that slides across the screen. Any one of the offensive powers takes off a full third of a boss' health gauge if they connect, so I could be more reckless with the goodies if I were careful. I know that doesn't make sense.

Another I-can't-believe-that-was-only-four-minutes passes. I wrote most of this while sitting in the corner of the screen watching everything glide by. The game is much less frantic if you stop firing and notice that hardly anything actively attacks you.

As this was made in 1993, he probably had to scan that picture with one of those bloody manual hand scanners (Wikipedia link). So much effort. With those hand scanners, this might have been the least crooked image he could get from the thing.

Animated rendered flapping robot bird wings. Now that's impressive.

I've got tons of powers left over now. I just need to get myself into the right position. One hit and I'm dead, but reappear almost instantly.

CUTTER, TREVOR HERE; I'M HEADED DOWN TO THE SURFACE OF ZEPHYRIA. YOU CAN TAG ALONG AND LET A REAL PRO SHOW YOU HOW IT'S DONE. MCFUR ROGER DODGER OVER AND OUT!

Do real pros really say things like 'roger dodger'?

What the heck is this supposed to be? The map said it was a nebula, but it's got crayon drawings and stencilled text all over it. That enemy down there looks like a chrome-plated cherub version Duke Nukem, and he's got an AK-47 crossbow that shoots flames. There's tiny dragons as well, and spinning metallic... somethings.

I've got to keep using my powers to stay alive. There's no telling what any of the enemies are going to do, because there's no telling what any of the enemies are!

That's a damned queztalcoatl.

He doesn't like my six saved up horizontal lasers one bit. BAZOOM.

More space *head slam* more space *head slam*. I don't *head slam* want any *head slam* more space.

There's no variation in these levels. Nothing speeds up, nothing slows down. In early 90s Japanese arcade shooters, the backgrounds are often finely-detailed, multi-layered works of art, with lots of pretty places to fly gracefully over. That is if you're not enjoying a roller-coaster ride as your auto-pilot takes you up the sides of cliffs and over and down ravines at Mach 1.

Trevor has Space, Space 2: Revenge of Space and Space 3: I Can't Believe It's Still Fucking Space.

The worst part of these levels is the mid-level lull where the foreground objects peter out as if there's a boss about to appear, but then the objects start to appear again. It's as if the level has restarted.

I don't think I've had a bad word to say about a single one of the space stage bosses. Now that I've seen all the space bosses together, they actually look like they belong together as a set. They all have their own weak points that you can hit in order to one or more break parts off, opening up enough space for you to fly in and execute your next special power. If there was some way to break out of the space stages and immediately skip to the stage boss, I'd feel like I was making proper progress.

Huh? What's this? When did this game grow illustrated backgrounds and sprites?

My pre-rendered ship looks so out of place here!

Mud man! Mud man throws poop at me and I'm dead.

This game doesn't have infinite continues, so it's game over here. This hasn't been one continuous playthrough from the first space stage until now: I've been starting a new game on each world. If I'm really lucky, in one run I can usually complete one space stage, a moon stage, the next space stage and then lose on the second moon boss. I don't know if the game adjusts its difficulty to increase as you clear more moon stages, but as it doesn't have music, I'm going to guess the game's not that sophisticated.

There's good in Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy, but there's not a lot of it. It's certainly all accidental. The way you have to conserve the powerups reminds me of the arcade game Gemini Wing. In both games, your main gun doesn't improve that much over the course of the game. Instead you can collect a limitless (if I recall) pile of powerups from the downed enemies, and you're free to use them when you want.

But Gemini Wing is beautiful, pleasant, well-paced and entertaining. And Trevor isn't.