Berserk is a beautifully designed game. You are a gorgeous, perfectly rendered human, your legs scrambling for purchase - Looney Tunes style - as you walk away from droids with rotating heads. The game is about shooting these guys, and not getting shot by them. And it's ideal.
As I'm always saying about Atari 2600 games, the best ones perfect the simplest concepts. Here, we are confronted with a room full of enemies, and we simply need to get them before they get us, and then move on to the next room. It's easy to understand, and it offers a structure and a level of animation that feels polished and thoughtful. Those walls are electrified, so if you or an enemy walk into them, you witness the horrible buzz and flicker of a body surging with deadly electricity. It looks convincing. I am assured that this death is far from painless.
It's also really cute and good that your enemies, after dying and flickering away, display a split-second smiley face. In that tiny moment, the game introduces a little bit of humour to the gruesome task of killing. Perhaps they are released into their deaths joyfully, or perhaps it means nothing because they are robots, perhaps they are whisked away into the mainframe to be reborn on the next screen.
It's amazing what little design elements can do for enriching an almost featureless world. This smiley face, as it turns out, is a hint at something sinister lurking within. For now, I must simply keep shooting.
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P. S. I have been added to a catalogue for gaming blogs called Warp Point. Check it out if you're looking for more blog posts about games!
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