3-D Havok
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Name:
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3-D Havok
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| Company: |
Amiga |
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Model #:
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2110 |
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Programmers:
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Frank Ellis and Jerry
Lawson (Videosoft) |
| Year: |
1983
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Released?
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No
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Notes:
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Sold as a
reproduction cartridge in 2010 |
According to the manual that came with the
reproduction sold a few years back, your stellar
cruiser’s hyperwarp has cut out and you are adrift in an
asteroid field. Your only hope is to shoot your
way out with your ‘high-density laser-pulse inverter’
(which sounds like a fancy way of saying laser
beams). Ok so there’s not much of a plot, but who
needs a deep plot when you have 3-D(ish)
action! Shoot on brave space warrior, the
fate of the crew is in your hands.
3-D Havoc is composed of two different
stages (three if you count the ending as a stage).
The first stage is a first person perspective shooter
where you must shoot incoming asteroids… IN 3-D!
Each asteroid that hits your ship causes your shields to
drop a little. Once your shields fail your ship
will begin to make sputtering sounds and move very
slowly. However due to the incomplete nature
of this prototype, it’s actually impossible to die in
the game (it’s assumed that once your shields failed the
next hit would be lethal). You can actually turn
your shields off and on with the left difficulty switch
(the top and bottom of the screen will be gray when the
shields are up and black when they are down), but
there’s no point in doing so. It’s unknown if the
ability to turn the shields on and off is a deliberate
choice (in the completed prototype turning off the
shields may have conserved fuel or had some other
benefit) or if this was simply a tool used to debug the
game during development.
In addition to the shield gauge there are also a
Gred gauge which measures how much ammo you have left and
a Fuel gauge which measures, you guessed it, how much fuel
you have left. If you run out of fuel your
ship will stop moving and you’ll be a sitting duck for
asteroids. This has an unintended consequence in
that if you stop in a spot where you are unable to shoot
asteroids (they can miss your ship completely in certain
spots), you will never be able to complete the level and
will be stuck. In a similar manner the Gred gauge
can also run out leaving you with no ammo and no way to
complete the level. However both the Fuel and Gred
gauges deplete so slowly you’d almost have to be trying to
run out of fuel or ammo to have this happen. In case
you’re wondering, no one is sure what Gred stands
for. It might be short for Grenades (your shots look
more like bullets or grenades than lasers), but this is
pure speculation on my part. There also
appears to be a bar at the top of screen that might be yet
another gauge of some sort, but it appears to be either
non-functional in this prototype or simply some random
eye-candy like the colored squares above it.
After shooting a dozen or so asteroids you’ll be
taken to the second stage which takes place in a
tunnel of sorts. Here you must shoot down
several enemy spacecraft before they can destroy your
ship. After shooting down three or four ships,
you’ll see a brief screen that says HERO with your
crew cheering your apparent asteroid shooting prowess
(they have more faith than I do, my money was on a
fiery asteroid related death). After this you’ll
be briefly taken back to the second stage where you
can shoot down two or three more ships before being
booted back to the first stage. If you beat the
first stage again you’ll see a large flying saucer
with a number on it indicating your current level (you
start on level 0). After which you’ll be taken
to the next level of difficulty and all your systems
will be given a recharge. It’s unknown if this
repeating of the first and second stage before
completing a level is a bug or if this is how it would
have worked in the final version.
Much like 3-D Genesis, the big draw of 3-D Havoc was the
3-D effect. Attempting to play the game without the
benefit of red/blue glasses is nearly impossible as the
screen is constantly switching back and forth between red
and blue frames that make up the 3-D perspective.
Even with the proper glasses, the 3-D effect is pretty bad
as the 2600 just doesn’t have the resolution to do it
properly. Still, it would have been a decent gimmick
at the time and probably sold pretty well given 3-D’s
brief resurgence in popularity at the time. The
3-D effect can be turned on and off with the
Color/B&W switch, making the game playable by those
without the special glasses.
The history of 3-D Havoc is interesting.
Originally planned to be a cassette based game for the
Amiga Power Module (a Supercharger type unit), it was then
moved to the Power Play Arcade series of multicarts (see this
page for more information). 3-D Havoc would
have been teamed up with 3-D Genesis and 3-D Ghost Attack
on Power Play Arcade cart #1 (5 carts were planned in
total). It’s unknown why Amiga decided to put three
full games on one cart as any one of these games could
have stood on their own, but it would have been a real
deal for the penny conscious gamer. Perhaps Amiga
knew that the market was becoming cluttered and thought
that offering several games on one cartridge was a way to
stand out from the crowd (Xonox did something similar with
their double enders). Whatever the reason it was all
for naught as the project was cancelled before getting out
the door due to Amiga’s decision to stop with the games
and focus on a little computer that they’d been developing
instead...
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