Gorf
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Gorf is an arcade game, released in 1981 by Midway. It is a multiple-mission fixed shooter; essentially it is five different games in one. The player controls a slow-moving spaceship which can move left and right, and to a limited extent up and down. The spaceship, which looks similar to the Starship Enterprise, is armed with a single upward-firing weapon, a quark laser. Unlike similar games in which you cannot fire again until your previous shot disappears, you can fire the laser at any time, but any previous shot on screen immediately disappears.
There are five different missions, and if all five are completed the game loops back to the first mission again, with the difficulty level increased and increase in rank. The player starts out as a lowly Space Cadet, and advances from there to Space Captain, then to Space Colonel, Space General, Space Warrior, and finally to Space Avenger.
The game continues until the player loses all their lives. The game was commonly set to offer only two lives per coin (most games offered three) but was among the first videogames in which the number of lives could be doubled by adding another coin.
Gorf, which if spelled backwards correctly is Frog, features several digitized voice samples which are used for the attract mode and during gameplay:
- "Try again! I devour coins!"
- "Ha ha ha ha!"
- "Prepare for annihilation!"
- "All hail the supreme Gorfian Empire!"
- "LONG LIVE GORF!"
- "Coin detected in pocket!"
- "Some galactic defender you are!"
Only the game logic and RAM/ROM boards are specific to Gorf. The pattern board, cpu board, and RAM boards can be swapped out with other similar games, such as Wizard Of Wor.
Missions
Mission 1: Astro Battles
The first mission is more or less a straight clone of Space Invaders, set against a sky-blue background. The player is protected by a glittering parabolic forcefield, which is gradually worn away by enemy projectiles. The forcefield apparently works in both directions, and therefore it must momentarily deactivate in order for the player's ship to fire out. To advance to the next mission, the player must destroy all the invaders. This part of the game is easily won by opening a hole in the force field, maintaining the player's position under the hole, and wiping out the space invaders before they erode the force field.
Mission 2: Laser Attack
The rest of the missions take place in space. In this mission, the player is faced with two formations of five enemies each. The formations are cross-shaped, and at the bottom of each formation is a single laser gun. The laser guns fire a long, dangerous yellow beam at regular intervals. At the same time, the other enemies may break formation and attempt to divebomb the player. Destroying a laser gun causes the corresponding formation to break apart. To advance to the next mission, the player must destroy all the enemies. The player should fire at the laser guns as much as possible.
Mission 3: Galaxians
This mission is a clone of Galaxian. The player is faced with a swarm of galaxians, which continually divebomb and shower the player with deadly projectiles. To advance to the next mission, the player must destroy all the galaxians. Like other galaxian games, the player is relatively safe in the right or left corners.
Mission 4: Space Warp
A wormhole of some kind is situated in the middle of the screen. Enemies emerge from it one-at-a-time, and spiral outward at increasing speed, whilst growing larger and flinging fireballs at the player. To advance to the next mission, the player must survive a number of these enemies. To win this level, player must concentrate fire on the center of the wormhole, killing the fireballs before they emerge and get loose.
Mission 5: Flag Ship
The final mission is a one-on-one confrontation with the Flag Ship, which has some similarities to the mothership in Phoenix.
The Flag Ship could be considered one of the earliest bosses in mainstream computer games. It is equipped with its own forcefield, which the player must blast through to get a clean shot on the ship. It is also armed with a powerful fireball weapon. The player's weapon has a minor effect on the Flag Ship's hull, and can only blast off tiny pieces of it. This adds to the player's problems, as stray pieces of hull can destroy their ship. These pieces can be destroyed with a single shot. The only way to destroy the Flag Ship is to hit the glowing reactor at the heart of the ship, either by first blasting away the hull to expose it, or by managing to fire a shot directly into the tiny vent that leads to the reactor. Fire only when you have a clear shot at the area around the reactor and spend most of your time dodging projectiles.
Ports
Like many games of the era, Gorf was ported to many home systems of the time. Gorf was ported to the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Commodore 64 Commodore VIC-20 and ColecoVision in 1982. Due to licensing issues, however, the Galaxians third mission was removed.External links
- [The KLOV entry on Gorf]
- [The MobyGames' entry on the home versions of Gorf]
- [Article at The Dot Eaters], featuring a history of Gorf
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