The Fly - Gomie vs 2015

[Gizmog]

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING REVIEW SPOILS A PRETTY GOOD MOVIE. GO RENT 1986's "THE FLY" BEFORE CONTINUING. THANK YOU.














I love games like this. Urkelbot's concept is to essentially make an OHR Visualization of what an Atari 2600 adaptation of Cronenberg's 1986 adaptation of The Fly would look like. He largely succeeds, though there's a few areas that are more OHR Game than Atari 2600.

If you haven't seen the movie, here's the basic scenario: Jeff Goldblum is Dr. Brundle, a scientist working on teleportation. He hasn't quite worked the kinks out. Frustrated, he does what most mad scientists would do: he tries the machine on himself. The experiment is a success, but unfortunately for Brundle, a common house fly snuck into the machine with him. The teleportation combines the two on a genetic level and he finds himself having to come to terms with the grotesque physical and mental changes his body goes through as it becomes more and more fly-like.

As he fails in his attempts to hunt down the mistake and fails even harder in his attempts to return himself to normal, he begins to lose his sanity and become a danger to his loved ones. After his final attempt leaves him physically worse than before and leaves him beyond moral redemption, his girlfriend is forced to mercy kill him with a shotgun.

It's a really disturbing movie with great acting on everybody's part. It's grotesquely violent, he kills a hooker and acid-vomits a dude's face off. In short, it's the perfect material for a video game adaptation. Just like Robocop, kids are gonna run home from seeing a rapist get his slime shot off and want to relive that moment on their Atari 2600. The contrast of tone is delicious.

In the game you play his girlfriend Geena Davis. It's your goal to find and destroy the SIX telepods (I guess the two from the movie would've been boring) and stop Brundle. The gameplay boils down to two basic phases. Exploration, where you wander from room to room picking up fly swatters for points and hoping to run into a lab. The labs are the second phase, and in them you'll dodge Brundlefly while trying to reach a switch to destroy pod and pick up the shotgun to kill Brundlefly. It only has one shot though, so you have to be careful.

Graphics are very simple, again trying to emulate an Atari 2600 style. It doesn't totally hit the mark, but it's close enough. There's not an up or down frame for the main character, but the character DOES face up or down when you shoot the shotgun, so watch out.

Gameplay is pretty simple, Brundlefly never got close to catching me. The times I missed him with the shotgun I left and re-entered the room to find the shotgun had replenished itself. You can't slime up so bad you can't win, but I think missing the shot should cost you points. Supposedly if you blow up the six pods and beat Brundlefly there's an additional level of difficulty, but I never saw it due to a script error.

If you haven't experienced Atari 2600 hardware, the start of the game might seem weird. Basically, there were all kinds of toggles on the console to control different things. Number of players, difficulty settings, Game Mode A or Game Mode B. You'd power on the console, set the switches until the game was the way you wanted it to be (I think you could do some selection with the control stick too), and then hit the "Reset" button to actually start playing the game rather than viewing the demo. The Fly emulates that by making you hold down the R button at the start of the game. It's a neat touch.

The game works well enough, but the maps are so empty that it gets a little boring. 6 Telepods might've been too many. If there's an extra difficulty setting, it would've been nice to skip to it rather than play through the mostly empty game. I would recommend it to anyone who's seen the movie and wants a bit of a giggle, or anyone who likes Atari 2600 stuff. It isn't going to satisfy a craving for twitch-gaming or high scores, but it's worth taking a look at.