Roach Motel - The Story Of My Last Game - Amiga Written Review With Pics


Roach Motel
Amiga, 1993
Public Domain

*Appropriately written on my Amiga using Excellence
*Game best played in PAL mode, is NTSC compatible

            If you don't mind, I'd like to take you back in time. It's 1999 and my Amiga is but a second computer taking up valuable real estate in my very own room. Second computer for my room, but there was a third for the household, and more powerful than all the rest. It was now sitting in the very spot this Amiga once sat, in the basement, a thrown for the households main computer. My, how the mighty had fallen... Not long before this, when there was a single PC in the basement, and the Amiga was the only computer in my room, it was still managing extensive usage on my behalf, quite a bit after its prime.

            Ever so slowly, my Amiga started to die. It really wasn't even being replaced so much, as I've always shown an attachment to the previous things I once spent so much time loving. I would have been happy to find it a spot somewhere for some occasional fun. But it was not dying in terms of usefulness to me, it was quite literally sucking in its last breaths of air, drinking up its last voltages of electricity. It seemed to be as much, at least in my mind at the time.
^Title screen with instructions

            Disk after disk would be inserted, only to be met with the nightmare inducing "read/write error". The majority of the games I once held so dearly were now considered dead. There was now a large container of floppy disks housing disks I instantly knew would be fruitless to try, along with a second container, floppy disk label stuck to it, showing the title of "Games that work!", and special emphasis was always put on that particular exclamation point by myself. But now, even the "Games that work!" collection was slowly fading away, the heart pumping ever so much slower.

            I didn't want to see the Amiga die. Desperation took hold, I started reaching for smaller containers of disks, grabbing anything which might shock some new life into the still beautiful. Utilities, word processors, magazine disks, a large collection of what I now know to have been the Fred Fish disks. Some worked, some would not, but even at this late hour it all collects for some unforgettable moments in front of my first love, my still true love, my Commodore Amiga 500.

            Eventually the Amiga would be rounded up and put away for many years, as it seemed like a lost cause. Luckily I did keep it around, and would discover that the Amiga never was dying, nor had the majority of those disks, it was simply the very well used disks drives that needed replacement or cleaning. But those revelations would come another day.
^Get ready!

            Hidden within the large number of Fred Fish disks I was then flipping my way through was a little public domain game titled Roach Motel. It would eventually gain the honor of being the last game I remember being able to still play on what I considered to be my mostly dead Amiga. A disk those quite dirty drives would somehow read their way through. Quite a pungent gaming memory, indeed.

            Roach Motel, being a public domain game, is unlikely to win many awards for its gameplay. What is there is enjoyable enough, considering the short amount of time you'll be spending with it. It's a platformer with the majority of action taking place on a single screen, scrolling is kept to a minimum, with far more on the vertical end as opposed to horizontal. There are around seventeen levels, any of which can be selected from the main menu. I noted many issues on my particular setup, getting "out of memory" messages galore, especially on level ten, which I was never able to play without the error or an outright freeze, despite doing all I could think of to increase memory on an already memory heavy machine. One thing that escaped my thoughts at the time, but might be worth a try for others wanting to give this one a try, is to forget the hard drive and just boot it from floppy.
^Lots of physics based platforming

            You play as a funky looking character, with some mighty special teeth, indeed. The fact that I can notice the teeth should speak well for the games overall graphics, it's rather well done in terms of side scrollers, especially those in the public domain realm. Your main goal is to grab all of the spray paint cans scattered randomly throughout the levels, while avoiding or crushing the roaches which will spawn and disappear in an endless fashion. Similar to Ghosts and Goblins, these enemies have no issues spawning directly below you, causing some cheap deaths.

            Starting off with around eight lives, I can't say the deaths in this game cause too much frustration, but there will be plenty of them. Your character is only able to fall the shortest distances imaginable between platforms, which I'm willing to bet will be the cause of most deaths in the game. If you're able to plot your fall in order to land on a roach, fall damage will be negated.
^Ice physics must be used at times to get from one area to another

            An attention to detail is ever present in terms of the games mechanics. Certain platforms can have quite a bit of physics applied to them, most notably those covered in ice. Quite slippery, they will also be a cause of many deaths until you figure out the best approach to them. At times you will be needing to exploit the games physics in order to get from one area to another. An example is gaining a bit of speed on an ice platform so you can make a normally impossible jump to another. There are ladders which only go up, polls where you can only slide down, both of which act in a fast manner, as opposed to the many ropes which you can go up or down on, but much slower. Lava will also be ever present, causing near instant and guaranteed death.

            The music is a rather short but enjoyable loop of samples, including a bit of voice, helping the game to receive that "funky" feeling from me. There's really not much more to say about it all. It's a simple public domain Amiga platformer, there are some things that will scream out at you as public domain in the terrible sense, but also a few things which will cause you to smile and think "hmmm..." Of note is how the game detects upon start-up if your Amiga is an NTSC or PAL machine, and is quite compatible with NTSC despite being designed to fully utilize the extra PAL resolution. The graphics will be stretched vertically in NTSC, and the bottom portion of the screen, showing the score, will be cropped out as well. The music as well as the overall gameplay seem to run at the same speed in either mode, and all in all it's rater nice to see some PAL Amiga designs actually utilizing what PAL had to offer, while at the same time caring about the NTSC machines.
^Naturally, harder as the levels increase, notes from the readme

            While not a game I imagine too many out there are going to be reading about and leaping to get a hold of themselves, I'm also sure that most out there will get a few kicks out of it should they end up seeking it out. Its ever enduring appeal to me will always be the memories of sadness simply looking at my Amiga in the late 90's brought to me, knowing that almost everything I could throw into the disk drive would be met with a horrible error message and sound... But never this one game. Even during rock bottom for my beloved Amiga, this one game stood tall, allowing me a period of time to relive the glory days.

            Hope everyone will check out the companion video review for Roach Motel, showing off the game and vocalizing those heartfelt memories. Also of possible interest for those reading would be my special video and article concerning that horrid "read/write error", can Disk Doctor cure our floppies needs?

Comments

  1. Hey I made this game when I was a kid. Thanks for your fun review. It's a blast from the past.

    ReplyDelete

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