Kid Chaos (Amiga) - Part 1 - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, I've captured guest poster mecha-neko and teleported him to the distant past of 1994 to play a game about a caveman in the future. It's classic Amiga platformer Kid Chaos.

Hello everyone! It's time to dig up something really prehistoric!

Developer:

Magnetic Fields

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Release Date:

1994

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Systems:

Amiga 500, Amiga CD32

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This is Kid Chaos. The apex of Amiga platform action. The one where it all comes together. Years of technological experimentation, observation and innovation have led to this moment.

The title screen alone is lush as heck. The Amiga hardware can select 32 colours at once and this image displays 110 of them. The clouds all drift past at different speeds and everything, but you'll have to take my word for that as the .gif would be huge! It's like something you'd see on an AGA machine, but this is an A500 game.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, read on!

Kid Chaos (Amiga) - Guest PostPart 1 - Part 2

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The developers announce themselves with a thunderous and dramatic sampled orchestra fanfare, booming out of the darkness then retreating into an ominous swell as the letters fly in from behind the camera. It's very classy.

It is, of course (well, maybe not), a phrase from Wagner's Götterdämmerung; a scarcely-interesting fact that I only found out after forcing a friend to watch the film Highlander 2: The Quickening with me (the director's cut, I'm not a monster). When I heard the musical phrase during the opera scene, I leapt out of my seat yelling 'It's the Magnetic Fields fanfare from Kid Chaos!', as any sane person would. Who says video games can't be culturally enriching?

My suspicious mind shamefully thought MF obviously recorded the music off the telly when the film was on because they thought it sounded cool and that's exactly what an Amiga programmer in the nineties would have done. But no, MF's recording of the fanfare predates Highlander 2, so they probably recorded it off the telly from something else.

TRANSPORTED FROM
THE STONE AGE
BY EVIL SCIENTISTS
FROM THE FUTURE
KID CHAOS MUST BATTLE
HIS WAY THROUGH THE
ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENT
CENTRE TO REACH THE
TIME MACHINE THAT CAN
RETURN HIM TO HIS HOME
I never knew Kid Chaos had a plot when I was younger since I was too impatient to leave games on long enough for them to appear. Or perhaps the music wasn't as cool as Exodus 3010's intro. There's no animated cutscenes in Kid Chaos, just that text. Kid will sadly not be accosted by any brummie wizards today.

For reasons unknown, Evil Scientists From The Future have abducted Kid from his own time and placed him in a series of strange, constructed habitats (in the name of some kind of evil science, presumably). They've given him some colourful modern clothes and left him to his own devices. Being the cultured lad that he is, Chaos decides to smash up everything he can see. If he was able to read the game manual, he'd know that all the scenery is secretly part of the mechanisms that keep the place running, so, fortuitously, if he smashes enough stuff the place will give up and let him escape! Go, Kid, go!

I couldn't show you all the layers of parallax scrolling the title screen has, so the game's helped me out here by providing this little preview of it to pass the lengthy (50 second) loading time between the menu and the game proper.

Every phase of Kid Chaos has different kind of relentless rave music, sometimes thumping, something bumping, always sounding like a boot pounding on your head.

What the heck are all these words about, huh? I'm from the Stone Age! I'm not here to read things, I'm here to smash things. Get outta here with all those numbers. Who's giving me this briefing anyway?

The first level is titled 'The Green Hilltops'... In case you didn't catch it in the intro, Kid Chaos is a Sonic!

The game really blasts into life with its menacing rave tune and sound effects - yes, music and sound effects simultaneously. Amazing technology that only the best Amiga games attempt. The Fields even let you jump with the Fire button in the options menu, the maniacs.

It's hard to express in words how fantastically slick Kid Chaos is when it gets going. Gorgeous 50 frames per second, giant, full-screen, all-directional scrolling action. The PAL Amiga runs at 50Hz, and games look buttery-lovely when they're able to stick to it (Superfrog, Wiz 'n' Liz), and somewhat crunchy-to-eye-bleeding when they don't (Ruff 'n' Tumble, Trolls, Bob's Bad Day). I said something very similar about Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad, but that game's a hyperstimulating plastic hellscape compared to the classy fine details of Kid Chaos.

All the effects mean that .gifs and videos will be expensive as hell, but when I find an excuse to use one I think you'll see it's worth it. Unless you're using Chrome which refuses to play .gifs at 50Hz on this computer because it's an idiot.

Enough tech-waffle, let's meet the Kid! What can Kid do? He can jump!

Eat club, White Rabbit! Or should I say, the late White Rabbit! A ha ha!

When you press Jump, Kid bounds into a floaty whirling somersault that explodes anything it touches. I did say the game was a Sonic.

Here we go. We gotta smash as many flowers as we can before the time runs out.

Heavens is he slow. Kid accelerates slowly and brakes slowly so by the time you've seen something interesting you've blasted past it. The counter on the left shows how many flowers have to be destroyed before I can complete the level, so there's no good reason to run past flowers without destroying them. Kid bounces upwards a little when he hits a flower, so clusters like this have to be taken one at a time and it takes an age.

What else can Kid do? Um. Nothing, really. His special abilities stretch to running, jumping and spinning about. That's the entire game. Writing about platform games is hard.

Blerk. The rabbits exact revenge. The slightest touch and Kid is hurled away.

Believe it or not, Kid can't hit things with his club on ground level like Chuck Rock Jr. can. Just can't do it. You might think he can roll or something, but, well... you'll see.

I hit a spring and Kid is propelled into the air to nosh on some delicious health-restoring anti-gravity apple halves, pips and all. Where will we end up? Who can say! Moving fast means your game is fun! Becoming completely vulnerable and uncontrollable when you hit a tiny level gimmick and fly over the top of critical level objectives is fun!

Wait.

Son of a frickin' thing. Okay, so blindly running about and, you know, having fun is not what Kid Chaos is all about. How is this guy supposed to attack?

If you can give Kid's leaden feet enough of a run-up you can his special 'Whizz' power, turning him into a tornado of destruction which lets you bust through enemies and certain secret walls. It's so difficult to pull it off that you'd be tempted to think you needed to find a power-up first, like Mr. Nutz' flight.

Totally unrelated fact: there was this cartoon called Taz-Mania that was kind of popular around this time.

Inside the secret passage was a reverse controls power-up. Look how thrilled Kid is.

You'll have to get used to seeing Kid suspended upside down in mid air in my pics. Running on the ground is a death sentence thanks to bunnies and bees and everything else, but Kid just can't Whizz easily on demand. It's less clear than Mario's twiddly feet when you can loose a Whizz, and most of the time it's just not worth it. Your choice: creep or somersault. Running is a trick for chumps.

Even when you think the level designers want you to Whizz, it doesn't work. In this shot, I've managed to expertly slice through a patch of flowers and yet leave most of the damn things intact.

Why does the Amiga have so many collect 'em ups anyway? Why can't it be enough to simply traverse a place? Back we go to get the rest...

It's nice of the game to tell you with text and a sound when you're able to leave. It doesn't tell you where the exit is though, but my cat-sense is telling me it's somewhere to the right in this gigantic level.

The sagging bridge here is a nice effect. They didn't have to have done that, but they did.

Please. Please. I've done the flowers. Let me go.

When is this level ever going to end? It's so big.

Done. It's done.

There's no victory fanfare when you walk through the door, it just slams shut and the music fades off. Boosh.

This font feels awfully familiar to me. (Not because I've played Kid Chaos before, silly.) Magnetic Fields did the Lotus stripy-road racing game trilogy on the Amiga, and I'd swear that they had the same font. 'Cause I'm a huge nerd, you know I'm going to have to check this.

Here's the interface fonts from Kid Chaos, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 and Lotus III: The Ultimate Challenge. (Yes, they kept rearranging the title just to be really confusing.)

They're... different!

Lotus 1 is wider, and Kid Chaos and Lotuses 2 and 3 are the same width except for Kid Chaos' wider M. Kid Chaos and Lotus 1 have pointed inner legs of their wide Ms. Lotus 3 isn't anti-aliased and has a symmetrical V and a shorter E middle. I wonder if MF artist Andrew Morris found drawing little fonts to be as relaxing I do.

Anyway. Master Chaos walks through the door and finds himself confronted with some -RESULTS-.

From The People Who Have Probably Played The Chaos Engine, except these numbers are nice and legible. The -RESULTS- screen music is strange. It's ominous and mechanical. It really doesn't feel like a victory at all.

I can live with only having completed 55% of The Green Hilltops. There's no force on Earth that would make me want to go back and forth over those hills trying to get Kid to land in exactly the right place to hit every single flower - it seems there's plenty of spares. And if the reward is just points, then I think I got plenty of points for being fast.

Pressing Fire on this screen skips the stats entirely. There's no way to speed them up if you'd like to read the summary faster. Great.

Oops. Hang on. Computer wants some attention.

Kid Chaos is an epic four-floppy game. As disk swap screens go I'm giving this a five out of ten. It's alright: that's clearly an illustration of a floppy disk, but nobody's posing with it, or taking a bite out of it. Except me every time a bloody rabbit hits me, obviously.

Section Two: The Underwater Tunnels - Scale the platforms, travel through tunnels and over the swings avoiding spikes and pirahna infested waters.

Here we go! Okay, wait a minute, this is neither underwater nor a tunnel. It looks like Section One all over again. The music could be the same too, but it's not. It's like the Part 2 of the same song. Which is neat, increasing in intensity as we go along and such (like Apidya!!). But it's not much of a song. It's an energetic but indistinct rave thing.

Hey! I had a spinning star in the corner of the screen earlier! That was my LIFE TOKEN! So I've got to collect all three pieces of the extra life in the same level to get anything from it rather than being able to gather them over time whenever I can like the EXTRA letters in Rod-Land? Bogus.

Blerk! The danged seagull pooped out a blob that's the exact same colour as the wall.

EXACT. SAME. COLOUR.

You can barely see the let's call them eggs when you're standing still. Kid moves so slowly off the mark that walking under him is going to get me hit for sure.

Kid has a fancy odometer numeric health gauge, most likely because the programmer felt like showing off. There's no special MOTHER mechanics behind it, it's just a display. Touching the seagull briefly just before cost me 40 Health because that's how much the DAMAGE FACTOR on the BRIEFING said it'd cost. Yep, that means the value of Kid's health arbitrarily changes from level to level because... the developers really liked Rareware's Grabbed By The Ghoulies?

I've gone mad with power and now I'm paying for it. Sure, it's fun to use Kid's momentum when you've got some and bounce all over the place, but what's it gotten me? I have to go back to hit those flowers now, and the ramp physics flung me in exactly the wrong place when I tried to go back.

But hey look how swish it all is. Whoosh.

You'll need nerves of steel to complete this next task: jumping up a small series of steps without falling into the abyss below.

Kid moves like a cannonball. Have you ever tried to throw a cannonball onto a shelf and have it stay there?

If you mess up a jump, this is what's waiting for you below:

A staircase of backwards propelling springs that launch you into a spike pit. If you barely scratch one, even while clearly attempting to pull in the other direction, get ready for a pokey bath.

I think this gimmick is excessively mean for level two. But hey, look, there's some flowers down here, which means if I hadn't fallen down here I'd have missed out on 100% and now I get to enjoy carefully bouncing Kid over each one in turn without clipping the death springs.

Kid's lesser known superpower is to naturally regain health at one point a second, so if you get thrown into spikes too many times, get ready to sit on the spot for a minute thinking about what you've done.

Oh but there's a health power-up at the top of the stairs which makes up for all this. No, wait, it doesn't. It's still terrible.

Hark! I have found a half-pipe! Because this is a Sonic and Sonic has half-pipes because he's a crazy ball of danger and Kid Chaos has half-pipes because... I have no freakin' idea. You can never get enough speed to launch off them to get anywhere because Kid has no way to charge up a run like a cartoon stampeding bull or anything like that.

Half-pipes in KC are horrible impediments since you never have enough speed to crest them, and jumping over them is near impossible because you crash into the vertical slope and fall down again. Don't think of trying to jump from the ramp itself: This is Sonic, not Tony Hawk. Jumping there will send you flying left, back down the stairs, back onto the springs, back into the spikes.

And when you DO get up the ramp there's a friggin' BUNNY.

And when you DO get past the bunny there's MORE BACKWARDS SPRINGS.

I've found a shield power-up container! Now I'm invulnerable for ten seconds! Hurrah!

I think it's lame that Kid doesn't get any sparkles or bibbly-bobbly sound effects or music or colour changes while he's invulnerable. Where's his heroic/dangerous theme? Though speaking of colour changes, I'll point this out here since I doubt anybody else cared enough to pay attention to this detail: Kid's sprite is darkened in underground passages but he's also lit up by fluorescent striplights and windows in the backdrop. He also only has a visible earring when running in one direction. Good job, game programmer guy.

I feel bad for blowing up these innocent rodents. Why you gotta be so mean, Kid? Sure, they're probably all part of this artificial system that's got you imprisoned, but they're so cute. It's only the flowers that are locking the door.

Well here I am above ground again (I swear I'm further along, here), braking to a halt so I can methodically crush all the flowers and

WHAT THE HELL!

I was in attack mode, clearly in attack mode, and the seagull dropped one to the right of me that knocked me out of the spin and hurt me for 40 HP! What was I supposed to do against that?

Brace yourself for excitement! Are you braced? We're in a tunnel! It's all rampy! We're going fast! We have no way to exploit this to our advantage because Kid is utterly vulnerable on the slightest incline and in enclosed spaces. But 'whoosh', look, running!

Kid Chaos has everything. It's got swingy platforms. And if you thought that trying to get Kid to land on a small motionless platform was fun, wait until you try to land on one of these. Or three of them. Consecutively.

What? Am I supposed to just accept that Kid's club whirl is going to pass uselessly through the bad guys when he feels like it? Get lost, game.

Nice tree though.

I have zero flowers left to destroy! I'm freeeeee!

LEVEL COMPLETED

I reached the door, hoorah. I only scored 042%. I may never recover from such an ego wounding.

The game doesn't have any stats screen or world map or level select like, say, Yoshi's Island. Why it bothers telling you your percentage when there's nothing you can do about it, I don't know. The game might give me some options once I've gotten out of world one.

Section Three: The Underground Caverns - Overground, underground and back overground, encountering new hazards, but can you find the garden's secret?

Two 'The Underground 'Blank'' levels in a row? Oh, excuse me. I slipped up, the first one is The Underwater Tunnels.

I don't want to be a picky panda here, but level three looks like level one. And it feels like level one. And level two. There was water in level two, I just didn't take any pictures of it. It was blue and made you move slow.

I'm having to sort my Kid Chaos screenshots based on my score. Forgive me if I get them mixed up. Which level is the one where Kid stomps down a diagonal hill and you have to use both hands on the joystick to get him to screech to a halt and excruciatingly climb to the top? All of them.

"Yo, Mr. Chaos." says the rat "If you're going fast enough to Whizz, what are you going to do about the spikes... ooops. Nevermind."

You're lucky you're so cute and near impossible to hit, rat.

The DAMAGE FACTOR has increased to 50 on this level so you can take two hits back to back before you have to go make a cup of tea before being allowed to continue playing.

Having played the 'downwards ramp leading to a pit of spikes' card, the level designer decides to mix it up... by playing it again. This time with platforms that slide in and out of the wall.

Don't be so quick to want to be out of the underground, though. Back on the surface, there's more horrible half-pipes, sudden bunnies and yesssss another staircase of backwards springs.

Kid's scowl matches my own as I finally find an overground ramp and can get some speed and finally feel like I'm making some satisfying progress towards the end of the level.

Except of course I've only seen a couple of flowers so far and have 49 left to destroy to open the exit because it's been mostly underground so I have to pull a reluctant Kid back up the hill once more and slap each flower one by one until I can get back to exploring. They're all racked up in a perfect position for a Whizz... but Kid can't Whizz on slopes. No, I can't explain it.

I slippety-dipped right into a little chasm with a swinging ball. I jumped. I ran. I tried to pick up speed. I tried to avoid the ball. I tried to get out. I did my best. My very best.

-GAME OVER-
And it's back to the start of level one. Lordy.

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With that, I think it's time for small break. When you're ready to hurl yourself back into Kid Chaos, click one of the following fine buttons to continue reading.

Kid Chaos (Amiga) - Guest PostPart 1 - Part 2