2004-10-06
Car Battler Joe vs. Autoduel
I played Car Battler Joe a second time through, and totally enjoyed it again. It really is a modern remake of Origin's classic Autoduel game, a real favourite of mine - I doubt they could have made this game without being aware of the original.
In both games you're a guy who gets in an armed and armoured car and fights against other similar vehicles. Both games have role-playing (RPG) game elements where your character and vehicle have statistics that change (improve) as the game goes on. Both games feature a network of cities/towns linked by roads. In the towns you're safe to wander from shop to shop, on the roads it's kill (or run) or be killed. When you destroy an opponent's vehicle you can sometimes salvage stuff. You can pick up courier jobs in towns and get paid for safely delivering the goods elsewhere. There's an arena where drivers meet to battle for sport. Both games allow you to do as you please most of the time - they're reasonably non-linear.
The fine details differ, of course. CBJ runs on the Gameboy Advance which means lots of colours, and much more capable hardware than the C64 and Apple II - but I'm not going to criticize differences in hardware.
Autoduel went for a semi-realistic representation graphics-wise (though the C64 can certainly look better than this), while CBJ is done in a Japanese Anime style.
Autoduel has very little in the way of sound effects and music (probably the Apple II influence) while CBJ has some great music. I really should play more Japanese games to know if the CBJ music is just typical, but even after playing the game through twice, I still get into the music. It reminds me a lot of the music from the 70's Japanese cartoon Gatchaman (aka Battle of the Planets) - so perhaps this is just a Japanese style. It's kind of a fusion of jazz, rock, and swing (I know they're all very related) all played by an orchestra. There's about 20 different pieces of music depending on context, great stuff.
Autoduel has very functional but not particularly interesting towns and cities. You wander the barren streets on foot, and when you enter a building, just a screen of text greets you. Sometimes you get a bit dialogue in the truck stop or at the AADA (American Auto-Duel Association), but that's mostly it. Some towns are spiced up a little, with a casino or the Origin headquarters, but generally everything is very similar. CBJ has towns more like the Ultima games, where you wander a scrolling map of the town, with other townsfolk wandering around. Each one has something to say, and it often changes as the plot progresses, making it quite worthwhile to keep visiting back to these different places.
CBJ also has a neat idea where you can develop your garage, and then a town by bringing building materials to your mom, and the town mayor respectively. Cement, Food, Gasoline and Junk are all useful. Your mom builds you a trailer you can tow behind your car that allows you to haul more stuff from place to place. And it's neat seeing the town progress as you bring more material.
Story-wise, Autoduel advances the loose plot with increasingly important courier missions and the occasional bit of special dialogue in truck stops and AADA offices. CBJ has numerous cut-scenes and larger missions (and occasional "side-quests" that don't have much to do with the overall story, but can still be fun) and a much more detailed back story with a missing dad, a doting mom and talk of a previous civilization that somehow got (mostly) destroyed.
CBJ is a more "personal" story, since you're really taking the role of a particular nearly-mute red-headed kid named Joe with parents and a home village, etc. Autoduel is more distant, and perhaps a little more "epic" because you're a generic stick-figure guy with very little character.
The actual car driving & combat is quite a bit different between the two games. Autoduel was viewed from above, while CBJ has a semi-3d effect, viewed from behind your car ("Mode 7" style for you SNES heads). Autoduel required a fair bit of strategy to win battles, due to limited ammunition, manual weapon selection, and very little armour on the car. Also, each side of your car took damage individually, so when the armour on your right side was gone, for example, you definitely changed your driving habits! CBJ, unfortunately, has very simple combat. You've got multiple weapons, but they're automatically selected based on range, and they're only back or forward firing. You've just got overall hit points for your car. So CBJ battles usually boil down to pointing your car at the baddies, holding down fire, and waiting for them to blow up. CBJ tries to make up for the lack of skill and strategy in combat with many baddies - Autoduel has far fewer cars along the road.
It's also very hard to actually "die" in CBJ, and if you manage to, you can just restart either at your last saved point, or even just restart the mission you failed in. Autoduel takes it to the other extreme. When you die (and it's easy to do!) you actually even lose your saved game! The only fix for this is buying (within the game) a very expensive clone, and you still lose your car and any other possessions you had with you. I'd prefer something in the middle between these two extremes, though if I had to choose, I'd take CBJ - I play a game for fun and the experience of it, not to be punished by re-playing parts over and over again.
The roads between cities in Autoduel are quite plain - just scrolling roads with fenced off green areas with trees in them. Occasionally you'll encounter a building or a cow off the side of the road, but they're just static graphics - you can get out of your car but you can't interact with them at all. Strange that they actually included those - I wonder if they had plans for the buildings that never made it in the final game? Autoduel also includes a radar to help with spotting enemies. The roads in CBJ are a more varied lot - but due to the flat-3d, they still come off mostly the same. Instead of a radar, little arrows point off-screen to vehicles and other items of interest that are nearby. Unique items are hidden off the main path on some maps, making it rewarding to explore dead ends.
On the road in CBJ, you can't get out of your car at all. As I mentioned, you can in Autoduel, but it seems to only serve two purposes: to run away if your car breaks down (useful in the arena, but desperate when you're 50 miles out of town) or to salvage the wrecks of other cars where you sometimes find useful stuff. In CBJ, salvage is much more arcade-style - destroy a car, it blows up, and sometimes it leaves behind a power-up, or something else useful. You just drive over it to pick it up.
Once you've successfully driven through a road in CBJ, you then have the option of skipping it in future trips, and just moving from city to city - this is welcome, especially in the later stages of the game. You can sort of do this in Autoduel by taking the bus from a Truck Stop in one city to another - but then you don't arrive with your car. However, you can park cars in various garages in cities, so if you've got it planned right, you'll be fine.
Courier jobs in Autoduel and CBJ are basically the same. However, CBJ has a lot of different jobs that are slightly more involved than just driving from one city to another. Some involve destroying a few cars along a certain road, or picking up a certain number of objects on a road. Simple stuff, but when you add a nice little text explanation of the task, it gives the appearance of a lot of variety, even if it's sometimes goofy. "Little Bo Peep has lost her 6 sheep, go find them" and stuff like that. There's also a couple missions that actually involve extra story, and cut-scenes, where you're driving someone to their family, or to a rock concert, or filling in for someone in a race.
As I mentioned, both games are fairly flexible, allowing you to wander from town to town, blowing up and collecting stuff, and pretty much ignoring your "quest" if you want. Also, once you've completed the story of each, they let you continue to play, further developing your character and vehicle(s), which I think is fantastic. CBJ even takes it a step further by having a few more new courier missions afterwards, and another couple towns to help develop. It's also great visiting all the characters in the game, and see what new things they have to see.
Well, Car Battler Joe isn't perfect, but it's one of my favourite games of all-time anyway. I still have the desire to make my own game like Autoduel and CBJ - either for the C64 or maybe on the PC in Blitz Basic or something.
In both games you're a guy who gets in an armed and armoured car and fights against other similar vehicles. Both games have role-playing (RPG) game elements where your character and vehicle have statistics that change (improve) as the game goes on. Both games feature a network of cities/towns linked by roads. In the towns you're safe to wander from shop to shop, on the roads it's kill (or run) or be killed. When you destroy an opponent's vehicle you can sometimes salvage stuff. You can pick up courier jobs in towns and get paid for safely delivering the goods elsewhere. There's an arena where drivers meet to battle for sport. Both games allow you to do as you please most of the time - they're reasonably non-linear.
The fine details differ, of course. CBJ runs on the Gameboy Advance which means lots of colours, and much more capable hardware than the C64 and Apple II - but I'm not going to criticize differences in hardware.
Autoduel went for a semi-realistic representation graphics-wise (though the C64 can certainly look better than this), while CBJ is done in a Japanese Anime style.
Autoduel has very little in the way of sound effects and music (probably the Apple II influence) while CBJ has some great music. I really should play more Japanese games to know if the CBJ music is just typical, but even after playing the game through twice, I still get into the music. It reminds me a lot of the music from the 70's Japanese cartoon Gatchaman (aka Battle of the Planets) - so perhaps this is just a Japanese style. It's kind of a fusion of jazz, rock, and swing (I know they're all very related) all played by an orchestra. There's about 20 different pieces of music depending on context, great stuff.
Autoduel has very functional but not particularly interesting towns and cities. You wander the barren streets on foot, and when you enter a building, just a screen of text greets you. Sometimes you get a bit dialogue in the truck stop or at the AADA (American Auto-Duel Association), but that's mostly it. Some towns are spiced up a little, with a casino or the Origin headquarters, but generally everything is very similar. CBJ has towns more like the Ultima games, where you wander a scrolling map of the town, with other townsfolk wandering around. Each one has something to say, and it often changes as the plot progresses, making it quite worthwhile to keep visiting back to these different places.
CBJ also has a neat idea where you can develop your garage, and then a town by bringing building materials to your mom, and the town mayor respectively. Cement, Food, Gasoline and Junk are all useful. Your mom builds you a trailer you can tow behind your car that allows you to haul more stuff from place to place. And it's neat seeing the town progress as you bring more material.
Story-wise, Autoduel advances the loose plot with increasingly important courier missions and the occasional bit of special dialogue in truck stops and AADA offices. CBJ has numerous cut-scenes and larger missions (and occasional "side-quests" that don't have much to do with the overall story, but can still be fun) and a much more detailed back story with a missing dad, a doting mom and talk of a previous civilization that somehow got (mostly) destroyed.
CBJ is a more "personal" story, since you're really taking the role of a particular nearly-mute red-headed kid named Joe with parents and a home village, etc. Autoduel is more distant, and perhaps a little more "epic" because you're a generic stick-figure guy with very little character.
The actual car driving & combat is quite a bit different between the two games. Autoduel was viewed from above, while CBJ has a semi-3d effect, viewed from behind your car ("Mode 7" style for you SNES heads). Autoduel required a fair bit of strategy to win battles, due to limited ammunition, manual weapon selection, and very little armour on the car. Also, each side of your car took damage individually, so when the armour on your right side was gone, for example, you definitely changed your driving habits! CBJ, unfortunately, has very simple combat. You've got multiple weapons, but they're automatically selected based on range, and they're only back or forward firing. You've just got overall hit points for your car. So CBJ battles usually boil down to pointing your car at the baddies, holding down fire, and waiting for them to blow up. CBJ tries to make up for the lack of skill and strategy in combat with many baddies - Autoduel has far fewer cars along the road.
It's also very hard to actually "die" in CBJ, and if you manage to, you can just restart either at your last saved point, or even just restart the mission you failed in. Autoduel takes it to the other extreme. When you die (and it's easy to do!) you actually even lose your saved game! The only fix for this is buying (within the game) a very expensive clone, and you still lose your car and any other possessions you had with you. I'd prefer something in the middle between these two extremes, though if I had to choose, I'd take CBJ - I play a game for fun and the experience of it, not to be punished by re-playing parts over and over again.
The roads between cities in Autoduel are quite plain - just scrolling roads with fenced off green areas with trees in them. Occasionally you'll encounter a building or a cow off the side of the road, but they're just static graphics - you can get out of your car but you can't interact with them at all. Strange that they actually included those - I wonder if they had plans for the buildings that never made it in the final game? Autoduel also includes a radar to help with spotting enemies. The roads in CBJ are a more varied lot - but due to the flat-3d, they still come off mostly the same. Instead of a radar, little arrows point off-screen to vehicles and other items of interest that are nearby. Unique items are hidden off the main path on some maps, making it rewarding to explore dead ends.
On the road in CBJ, you can't get out of your car at all. As I mentioned, you can in Autoduel, but it seems to only serve two purposes: to run away if your car breaks down (useful in the arena, but desperate when you're 50 miles out of town) or to salvage the wrecks of other cars where you sometimes find useful stuff. In CBJ, salvage is much more arcade-style - destroy a car, it blows up, and sometimes it leaves behind a power-up, or something else useful. You just drive over it to pick it up.
Once you've successfully driven through a road in CBJ, you then have the option of skipping it in future trips, and just moving from city to city - this is welcome, especially in the later stages of the game. You can sort of do this in Autoduel by taking the bus from a Truck Stop in one city to another - but then you don't arrive with your car. However, you can park cars in various garages in cities, so if you've got it planned right, you'll be fine.
Courier jobs in Autoduel and CBJ are basically the same. However, CBJ has a lot of different jobs that are slightly more involved than just driving from one city to another. Some involve destroying a few cars along a certain road, or picking up a certain number of objects on a road. Simple stuff, but when you add a nice little text explanation of the task, it gives the appearance of a lot of variety, even if it's sometimes goofy. "Little Bo Peep has lost her 6 sheep, go find them" and stuff like that. There's also a couple missions that actually involve extra story, and cut-scenes, where you're driving someone to their family, or to a rock concert, or filling in for someone in a race.
As I mentioned, both games are fairly flexible, allowing you to wander from town to town, blowing up and collecting stuff, and pretty much ignoring your "quest" if you want. Also, once you've completed the story of each, they let you continue to play, further developing your character and vehicle(s), which I think is fantastic. CBJ even takes it a step further by having a few more new courier missions afterwards, and another couple towns to help develop. It's also great visiting all the characters in the game, and see what new things they have to see.
Well, Car Battler Joe isn't perfect, but it's one of my favourite games of all-time anyway. I still have the desire to make my own game like Autoduel and CBJ - either for the C64 or maybe on the PC in Blitz Basic or something.
