Star Sled
As someone born a little too late to play most vector-based arcade games, and a little too poor to have a Vectrex, I was never really aware of Tim Skelly’s games. He made Rip Off, which Wikipedia says is the first arcade game with two-player cooperative play. He also did Star Hawk, Armor Attack, and Star Castle, which all made it from the arcades to the Vectrex (along with Rip Off). Star Castle was given to infamous “Worst Game of All Time” creator (for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) Howard Scott Warshaw to clone onto the Atari 2600. He didn’t think it would really work on the 2600, so he adjusted the concept into the massively successful Yars’ Revenge instead. In 2012, another former Atari employee, D. Scott Williamson, proved it could be ported to the 2600 and made a Kickstarter for it. The only copy on eBay as of this writing is $130 and doesn’t include the box.
Anyway, long way to say that Star Sled was heavily inspired by these old vector-based games, most notably Tim Skelly’s works. This game came out as part of Season One on the same week as Saturday Edition, and the two games could not be more different. Whereas Saturday Edition is a deliberate, side-scrolling, basically point-and-click adventure game, Star Sled is an old-school arcade experience where you fly through space to lasso “sparks.” The closest game in my personal history I could compare it to is Sinistar, which I fired up for the first time in years, as part of Williams Arcade’s Greatest Hits on the original PlayStation.
Sinistar is great. Star Sled is great. They both have the limitless depth of the three dimensions of space changed into a simplified, dark, flat world where you fly in circles. In Sinistar, you’re mining asteroids for “Sinibombs” – the only weapon capable of defeating the Sinistar, which is being built off-screen while you’re doing your mining. It’s a race to get well-equipped enough to take on the big boss before he starts coming for you. And he’s fast. You’ll be zooming around, strafing each other, trying to unload on him before he gobbles you up. This is the part that feels the most Star Sled to me.
In Star Sled, you’re a tiny, star-shaped… sled that’s collecting sparks. You do this by lassoing them with what is basically a snowspeeder’s tow cable like you’re in The Empire Strikes Back, taking down AT-AT’s. Your ship flies forward continuously, direction controlled by the crank, and you do a little loop around a floating spark to free it from this meaningless existence. Do a tight loop around it and get bonus points. There’s also a time limit, and your lasso is only so long, and there are space robots that you absolutely must NOT lasso. My favorite levels are the ones with some space fortress to navigate, where you have to capture sparks then escape the floating fortress in a dramatic fashion. There aren’t a ton of levels, but the high score chasing gives them some replayability, and each new set of stages has an additional gimmick to learn, whether it’s a new “boost” ability (with the B button), or a longer lasso that can capture multiple sparks at once for bonus points.
I gotta be honest, I wasn’t good enough at this game (or Sinistar, for that matter) to get to the end and see everything it has to offer. I made it… maybe two-thirds of the way through? It’s hard! In the way that only classic, quarter-eating arcade games could be. I can definitely see myself going back to it every once a while, like maybe now it’ll really click for me. But it might never. It’ll take some determination, and there are many gamers that play games for exactly this. Master a new world with a unique control scheme, but a world that feels familiar all the same. If you had a Vectrex or played arcade games in the early 1980’s, this might be exactly your jam. Me? I’m just a baby, and I will probably never master the precision or put in the practice necessary to fully master Star Sled. And that’s great.
(Included free as part of Season One.) (And here is the soundtrack.)