Video Game Collecting

It’s rare for me to pick up a game and know nothing about it. Cybernoid The Fighting Machine for Nintendo NES was one of three titles I won from eBay for a total of $2 (Karate Champ and Solar Jetman being the other.)

I only got to play Cybernoid for about five minutes this evening. There is a psychology in movies that precisely at the 17-minute mark the audience needs to have a general idea of the plot. The major characters and the conflict needs to be mapped out or the audience will lose interest. Studies have been done and from what I understand this is widely understood to be fact. In a videogame I’d say you have no more than three minutes before the player decides if it captures their interest or not. That’s not a lot of time.

Cybernoid starts out on a neat option screen before going to a very simple title screen. What immediately caught my interest was the high score. High scores (or any score for that matter) is a rare commodity in games nowendays so to be reminded that “hey dummy a key element of all games must be a score” is refreshing. It also tells me the programmers wanted this game to be played more than once. Can you imagine early arcade games having an intentional and acheivable ending? They’d have gone out of business much sooner!

Anyways my five minutes of game play revealed that Cybernoid is a neat little arcade shooter where you manuver a ship in an alien world while avoiding being attacked. It’s kinda like Gradius meets Side Arms but at your own pace. There are nooks and crannies you can hide in and items you can pick up. The graphics are nothing spectacular and your lasers and missles couldn’t have been made simpler.

I imagine a lot of people would hate this game. It’s difficult, doesn’t have catchy music, but I think there is a deep plot here some people might miss. I won’t reveal it here yet. Let me play Cybernoid a few more times and I’ll tell you what I think the story is…