Reader Reviews

The Phantom Slayer (Dragon 32/TRS-80)

by 3William56

A lot gets said about so-called scary games nowadays. Some folks have palpitations over Silent Hill. Some brown their jockeys over Resident Evil or Dino Crisis. A few chip in with the T-Rex in Tomb Raider. Older, wiser souls talk about the nightmarish claustrophobia of Doom. But to my mind, nothing has ever come close to the absolute scrotum-ratcheting terror of The Phantom Slayer. Stop looking at the screenshot and laughing, you young'uns at the back. This comes from the time before graphics.

Along the way, let's lay to rest an old myth. A lot of people credit Id's Wolfenstein as the first true 3D FPS. That was in 1992. But some us were lost in a claustrophobic 3d maze, kacking our boxers and shooting the heck out of of pixellated faceless monk-things a full 10 years before Wolfenstein was an itch in Id's pants. Yes, folks, 32K RAM and all.

Start with Doom - it's a decently creepy and claustrophobic start. Then remove the chaingun, shotty and rocket launcher. No one-shot kills or rapid-fire slaughter of hapless imps here. Give yourself a single-shot zapper that takes longer and longer to recharge on each level, and takes up to a dozen shots to take out a single nasty. Close the walls in until they're touching your shoulders, and make the maze random and full of dead ends.

Subtract the trashy NIN heavy metal [that was Quake -Ed], and make everything nice and silent. Then, just like the nastiest scene in Alien, give yourself a monster detector that beeps when a Phantom is in range (just eight steps away), with the volume increasing every time it steps closer.

Then, just to be really nasty, let the monsters walk through walls. Make them lethal - one touch, and (with a heart-stopping scream and howl taxing the random noise generator to the limit), the screen spins to face the Phantom, and it's all over. No lives. No conveniently scattered health packs. No continues. No clean underwear.

Modern "scary" games are the slasher movies of gaming. Sure, polygon graphics can show lots of gore and funky monsters, but like the 23rd iteration of Friday the 13th, it's all latex and tomato sauce and cheap CGI rushing about. In really scary films, proper scares come from what you don't see. Horror movies were scarier when technology was low, and they couldn't make a whizz bang monster by CGI. Monsters had to lurk slowly in the shadows, with the detail filled by your fevered imagination (at least, until it jumps out and chews on your face). Games are the same. Polygons and textures just aren't scary, no matter what they depict. But empty corridors, with an unseen monster, and one dead end or missed shot about to take away the last 20 minutes of play - different story. As Dr. Frank-n-Furter said in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, it's all about an-tici-pation.

So you get a brief look at the map at the beginning. You try to memorise the loops and long corridors. Then dumped unceremoniously in the maze, you creep about in silence, straining your ears to hear the first soft boop-boop-boop of the detector. When it kicks in, you have to firstly try to figure out where the bastard is (coming through the walls, remember - no nice clear arenas and long draw distances here, no convenient radar). Then lure it out into a long corridor, and squeeze off a shot. Fine. One hit, a dozen more to go, the gun taking its good sweet time to recharge, and the Phantom bearing down the corridor on you like a tax audit from hell. So turn and you leg it, pounding the arrow keys for dear life, as the boop-Boop-BOOP-BOOP gets louder. You tear down the twisting corridors, hoping that you've memorised the maze well enough and that a dead end (emphasis on dead) doesn't lie around that corner.

You turn, hoping the gun has recharged, and try to get off a shot. If you're too early and the gun hasn't recharged (spacebar pounded through the keyboard), or the Phantom has snuck into the walls, the turning time gets the Phantom that much closer. Leave it too late to turn and shoot, and the corridor will run out before you get in enough hits. Walk backwards, and you might miss a turn and end up in a dead end. Either way, you face the horror of being trapped like a rat as the BOOP-BOOP-BOOP gets louder and louder until Bang! Scream! And the screen spins to the faceless monk thing right f**king there! And my Y-fronts are full again.