Crossfire

Moby ID: 75
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Description official descriptions

In this adaptation of the arcade game Targ your job is to defend your city from marauding alien beasts. You can simultaneously maneuver your craft and shoot in four directions while patrolling the regular grid of streets - the enemy has surrounded your city block, and attacks are coming in from all sides as the aliens swarm in with all guns blazing. To survive, you'll have to blast your way out by darting in and out of the line of fire and taking down the assailants with your own volleys: once they're all eliminated, you go forth to the next level, to face yet another wave.

Ammunition is limited, and from time to time you'll have to restock by picking up a fresh supply. Every level contains four bonus crystals: as time goes by, they emerge one-by-one to be picked up, and each is worth twice as much as the last. The game starts you off with three ships, though you get a fresh one for every 5000 points you score.

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Critics

Average score: 79% (based on 3 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.4 out of 5 (based on 30 ratings with 3 reviews)

Pretty good conversion of the original game

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.

Commodore 64 · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2011

An addictive and fun exercise of your reflexes.

The Good
Crossfire starts out as an easy game of reflexes: shoot everything you can in all four directions. The more insects that get released into the grid, the harder it gets. After about five minutes of playing, you're intensly aware that your life hangs by a thread, and the entire world around you disappears as you concentrate on not merely blowing away the bad guys, but staying alive!

The Bad
The keyboard controls allow you to move and fire in all four directions, while the joystick controls, by design, only allow you to fire in the direction you're moving. This is not a problem that is easily solvable, since common joysticks of the time only had two buttons, but they could've used the second button for something.

The Bottom Line
More fun than you would normally think in such a simple game.

PC Booter · by Trixter (8952) · 1999

Crossfire is a fairly challenging shooter that will sharpen your hit-and-run tactics.

The Good
Once you got used to the keyboard controls, it was a lot of fun popping in and out of alleyways and shooting the aliens.

The Bad
The main thing I didn't like about Crossfire is that there was only one screen layout. The game would have been a lot more fun if it had different arrangements of roads other than the standard grid. The gameplay didn't offer much depth for a game released in 1984.

The Bottom Line
Crossfire is a game of cat and mouse where you are pitted against several different types of aliens that try to track you down and shoot you in the grid-like streets of a city. You duck in and out of the alleyways to shoot aliens and avoid getting shot.

Apple II · by Droog (460) · 2003

Trivia

Controls

The keyboard controls allow you to fire in all four directions, while the joystick lets you fire in the direction you're traveling. This means that the keyboard controls are actually more effective for playing the game than the joystick.

Graphics

The Composite-mode colors of the PC version are identical to the Apple version.

PCjr

Both a PC and a PCjr bootable cartridge version of this game exist. The PCjr cartridge version is differently colored.

Remake

There is a Windows remake of the game, created for the Retro Remakes competition 2006, with the title Gridfire.

Information also contributed by Sciere

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Trixter.

Apple II added by POMAH. VIC-20, Atari 8-bit added by Servo. Commodore 64 added by wanax.

Additional contributors: Nélio, Patrick Bregger.

Game added March 5, 1999. Last modified September 21, 2023.