Crossfire

The Good
Released in the arcades in the early Eighties, Targ is the type of game I never heard of before. The idea was to basically survive in a grid-like pattern, and outside this grid are a series of red arrows known as Targs. They could move toward the player; and if the player gets rammed by any one of them, they lose one of their lives.

Believe it or not, Targ was as successful as Space Invaders, which was also released around that time. Sierra On-Line, a new company, had just started making conversions of arcade games, and decided to capitalize on its success. Released on a few 8-bit formats a year later, Crossfire was a decent port of the original.

There are a few differences worth mentioning, with the main ones being the aliens. You see, there is more than one type of alien and each one of them is capable of firing at the player. The player also has limited laser ammo, so they need to find a way to get to it (once it pops up in the game) without getting into the path of aliens or their fire.

I found out if you manage to wipe out all the aliens on screen, the level restarts, meaning there is no level two; but all the one level. This means you are trying to beat your previous high score without losing all your lives. You won't score much by killing aliens, since they are worth less than 100 points. What you need to do is wait for one of the bonus items to get out of the squares, and keep at them. That will boost your score at a rapid rate.

Like Targ, the game is quite a challenge. I often found it hard to shoot the aliens without colliding with their explosion; and since they come in almost all directions, it is likely that one of them kills you if you focus on another.

I was going to play the Apple II version of Crossfire, but I wasn't very comfortable with the IJKM key combination. Instead, I tried out the Commodore 64 version, which was partly created by Chuck Benton, who wrote Softporn Adventure. One of the features that stand out is the excellent soundtrack on the title screen and throughout the game. At first I thought I was going to hear Sierra's rendition of the Peter Gunn theme, but it suddenly goes off in a different direction. It blends well with the gameplay.

The game's graphics are good, with the blocks laid out exactly like its arcade counterparts. I like to think that the blocks are different buildings and the areas that you can move on streets that intersect with one another. The aliens are also drawn nicely, and their AI is impressive. They are capable of making their way toward the player, and as I mentioned before, they can fire at the player.

You can play the game with a joystick, which is so much easier to play the game with. I honestly don't know why anyone would use the keyboard – your fingers all squished up in one area and making sure that you don't press the wrong key by accident.

The Bad
Nothing bad to mention here.

The Bottom Line
This is a pretty good conversion of Targ and anyone who is already familiar with the arcade game should know what the differences are. The game is challenging and it is easy to die if you don't notice what is coming at you, whether it is aliens or one of their bullets. It is also easy to collide with the aliens. The in-game music is brilliantly composed, and blends well with what you're doing. The highlight of this game is making the aliens collide with each other or each other's bullets.