Atomic Runner (Chelnov)

tripping out of the gate

have you ever been recommended a game by someone, only to completely fuck it up in the first 15 seconds, and wonder what the hell you're supposed to do? that's basically what happened with me and the 1992 genesis port of data east's 1988 arcade game "atomic runner chelnov", except that nobody really recommended this game to me. it's just been sitting on my genesis mini 2's metaphorical shelf, waiting to be picked like from the complete system ROM lists of yore. so, i guess sega themselves recommended i play this game. it's even alphabetically third on the list! although clayfighter is also on this thing, not every suggestion can be a winner...

so, boot it up. after a somewhat lengthy (by 1992 standards) intro text dump, chelnov literally hits the ground running for... about that 15 seconds i quoted myself at earlier before running into an enemy and dying a screeching, one-hit death. repeat two more times for a game over. that's enough atomic runner for now.

it took me... five separate attempts on five different days to finally get past the first 30 seconds or so of this game? and the final try was when i was partially blasted out of my mind on weed, it finally all just clicked. cool! after about a collective ten minutes of repeated failure, i can finally game over in stage 2, not stage 1!

to my credit, atomic runner is a strange game that i can't really think of a time i've heard anyone talk about except when discussing the genesis mini 2's game list, and a hardcoregaming101 article that i am sure exists but have not read prior to writing this so i don't cross-contaminate my own thoughts. i can't even really draw any parallels to more well-known titles that are similar to it. it's like driving a car that someone built themselves and, while it functions, all the pedals and levers and knobs are in different places, it automatically accelerates, and it immediately overwhelms you until about 10 seconds after you crash it into a wall.

so what the hell am i talking about, anyway?

the only objective adjective i've used so far to describe atomic runner is "auto-runner", but that's only a fraction of what's going on here. when you think of an auto-runner, you might think of bit.trip runner, super mario run, super meat boy forever. if you're a clever gamer, you might even think of something like 1982's moon patrol! but atomic runner is also a shoot-em-up! probably?

the moment-to-moment gameplay of atomic runner involves the screen near-constantly scrolling to the right, only stopping for the end-level bosses. with the controller at rest, chelnov runs to keep up with the screen scroll and stays stationary in-frame. since i also said it's a shoot-em-up, chelnov can shoot straight ahead with A, with stereotypical unlimited ammo, and holding up makes him shoot at a 45° angle in the direction he's facing. B makes him jump (rather high, for his tiny sprite), and perform a somersault if you jump while holding left or right. shooting during said somersault makes him shoot in several cardinal and orthoginal directions, and is also the only way you can shoot straight up, which can be more dangerous than it sounds due to needing to jump straight towards what you want to shoot at. still with me?

pressing right makes chelnov run faster (outpacing the screen), and pressing down makes chelnov crouch in place, effectively moving left in-frame. he also shoots faster when not moving, pretty handy for getting rid of beefier targets. pressing left... makes chelnov stand still, and by itself, does not change which direction he's facing. this seemingly small choice is probably the biggest hurdle in getting a grip on atomic runner, since it's completely counter-intuitive to the either the shoot-em-up or sidescrolling platformer genre, sincr my muscle memory / intuition told me i should move left. and i do. just... not relative to everything else. if you see a projectile or enemy coming right at you and press left, you will freeze in place, not dodge it, and take your one-hit death like a champ!

the default control scheme does not use the d-pad by itself to make chelnov turn around, requiring you to hold C and pick a direction to make him face. unless you're fighting an end-level boss, your other controls do not change and you still run to the right even if you're facing and shooting left, and since this a shoot-em-up, you bet your sweet fucking bippy that enemies come from all sides of the screen to keep you on your toes.

in my opinion, this control setup _just barely_ avoids having the kind of problem that zombies ate my neighbors has, where there are too few buttons assigned to do too many things, in a hard as balls game. there's even an alternate control scheme that reassigns A / B / C to shoot left, jump, and shoot right, respectively. this felt easier for me to use on a subsequent playthrough, although i'm not sure if it was because i was already used to atomic runner's other idiosynchracies, like how if you want to jump and aim 45° up, you can't hold an up-diagonal direction because that will make chelnov do his somersault.

in which i stop spending several paragraphs talking about the fucking controls

the system of power-ups, literally different colored sprites of the word "UP" that increase chelnov's capabilities are mainly pure stat increases of the weapon itself (size and power, attack speed and frequency, bullet travel range) alongside an extra powerup for jump height, and your choice of six weapons. there's also a secret powerup we'll talk about later! remember that! anyway, these powerups are carried by enemies and stashed in stationary fires. they're easy enough to collect, as long as chelnov doesn't run past them. if he runs past them, or if you reveal them when he's already ahead of them, they're lost.

from everything i've described so far, this thing sounds really hard and kind of unforgiving, doesn't it? like a stereotypical shoot-em-up is? well, hard is correct. unforgiving... maybe not.

easy and forgiving are not necessarily synonymous with each other in the context of game difficulty. typical shoot-em-ups tend to be both, where you have limited lives / continues, very infrequent checkpoints, and death means you lose all of your power-ups, and you may potentially be checkpointed in an area where you will struggle greatly to gain back your lost ground.

while atomic runner does take away all your power-ups on death, the options menu lets you tweak your lives and continues counter, all the way up to a base total of 15 continues with 5 lives each! tack on a rather low point threshold to grant an extra live, and, while it doesn't beat the ghouls n ghosts approach of infinite continues, it'll get you pretty far. and each level has several checkpoints! i can't even remember how many there are because they're so numerous, but i'll take a stab and say that each level has at least five, if not more. given that each level is about 3 minutes long, i'd say the checkered points are plentiful.

and that's not all, either! if you die and revive at the same checkpoint several times (i believe it's four times?), eventually the game will replace the first available power-up you see with a special flashing "UP". this increases all of your stats by one stage when picked up, and it will keep appearing until you hit the next checkpoint. the classic kind of helper item that i most commonly associate with 2010s era mario games, the kind that when those games offered them to me, i scoffed and went "fuck you for even suggesting that i need help, shaggy mayonaise". in this, it feels different. maybe because it's less of an "auto-win, skip the level, let your bigger sibling beat the level for you" option.

in true shoot-em-up fashion, the layouts of enemies and power-ups are completely static, although if you die during an end boss, you'll most likely be stuck using the default laser and a smattering of stat ups. i wouldn't say there's really a "bad" weapon? the weapons tend to have one thing they're not very good at and you have to play around, but are good at doing what you need them to do (i.e., killing shit). you have:

• the default laser. travels fast, has low cooldown and does okay damage but is rather small in comparison to other weapons on offer.
• fireballs that are fired and travel slightly slower than the laser but eventually become much bigger at max stats.
• boomerangs that you can eventually have about 3 or 4 of out at a time. travels about as fast as the laser and seems to be slightly stronger, but does not travel the full length of the screen depending on your positioning.
• small-ish spiked balls that travel slowly in a corkscrew shape. at max stats, you can have several dozen out at a time. they can easily hit things for big damage, but due to slow travel time, those that do miss can take a while before you're able to fire them again.
• a large spike ball on a flail that you can eventually throw three of at a time a short distance in front of you. even at max stats, they don't travel too far, but they absolutely destroy anything they touch.
• homing missles! you don't even need to look in the correct direction to shoot enemies behind you, and they have infinite range. although, the damage-per-second on beefier targets left me wanting, and they might have trouble going where you want them to go if you're in a pinch. the drop to equip them also doesn't seem to show up too often.

so what about the platforming? if this game's so unique as an autorunner shoot-em-up, how's the platforming? it's uh. secondary? kind of? and i think that's preferrable. 90% of the time, there is no platforming, and you're running on a flat plane, or a gentle incline, and the extent of "platforming" is doing acrobatics to dodge enemies or get on a higher tiered platform to get items.

the other 10% of it is crossing large bottomless pits by bouncing off of enemies heads, which happens several times in different levels. i think this is probably the most they could've gotten away with before the difficulty level crosses into the territory of "ridiculous". the only kind of thing i wonder about is that, for the huge vertical draft chelnov has at max power (the full vertical length of the screen), there's not much verticality in the level design. maybe that's for the best, though, as chelnov cannot go down through semi-solid platforms à la revenge of shinobi, just up.

we have max 330 mega pro-gear spec at home

considering atomic runner is an 8-meg (1 MB) ROM, the amount of graphic variety and detail is really impressive. multiple layers of parallax scrolling, and lots of varied foreground / background elements. in fact, sometimes it might be too noisy? particularly stage 5 with the entire stage being bright turquoise and gold colors, it can be hard to see where enemy bullets are. also, sometimes it felt like the only time there was negative space was to put emphasis on something. my bf descibed the entire game's aesthetic as "ancient world maximalism", it gives it that feel that the graphics are quite thought out.

i might be showing my lack of expertise in the neo geo library with saying this, but atomic runner's graphics and sound sort of gives me the vibe of a very early neo geo game? think magician lord and nam 1975 (primarily the former). some of the sprites are very fluid, primary chelnov himself, almost cinematic platformer level. good thing the controls are very snappy, unlike said cinematic platformers.

i know music is mostly subjective, some things not withstanding, but i'd say that atomic runner has pretty good tunes on the whole. i found myself going back to listen to the music to stage 3 and 4 a lot afterwards. it has that whole "some of the instruments are panned to one side of the stereo audio like i'm listening to the doors" thing going on, which i'm not sure is a stylistic choice or a trick to include more channels of audio from the sound chip, and i'm not gonna try to pretend like i definitively know, but it keeps it's end of the aesthetics up to put a nice bow on the whole package. i'd like to see the music of the egypt level from atomic runner and the music of the egypt level from rolling thunder 2 fight each other, though. that'd be pretty cool.

i also found out after the fact that, according to vgmrips.com, a lot of the sound team is shared with another data east "old arcade port that's mostly better on the genesis", midnight resistance, and damn those dudes know how to cook. they kept the momentum going.

all in all, i'd say atomic runner is definitely not for everybody. which is sort of a stupid statement, no game is for everybody, no game should be for everybody. it should be playable by everybody, but not everybody is going to like it. is that part of the reason why i can't really think of another game that's basically trying to cop it's style of a shoot-em-up autorunner?

is atomic runner the best an atomic runner-like can be?

it's somewhat common knowledge among f-zero fans that there hasn't been a proper sequel since f-zero GX because "where do we go from here?" didn't have a proper answer, at least until f-zero 99 meekly sneaked it's way in and out of the gaming zeitgeist, even though it's still receiving updates as of posting this, albeit it only started receiving them after the playerbase started bleeding. sorry i'm getting distracted

is there anything that an atomic runner 2 could do, besides making it a "same but more" sequel? is there an indy game somewhere i don't know about that very heavily borrows from atomic runner to make something better? idk. maybe someone will. toonami promoed a licensed game for a williams street anime called ninja kamui shinobi origins and said it had a "rolling thunder" vibe, so some game devs are thinking of the late 80s / early 90s arcade games (or at least, are thinking of namco), which atomic runner is a part of.

i can't really be one to say whether or not atomic runner is the best kind of game it could be. i wouldn't even want to say "have better controls that wouldn't immediately turn people off to it" because i feel like that's what makes the game unique. despite the one hit deaths and somewhat limited continues, completing it without save-state abuse is feasible for the average Gamer that's even partially fluent in retro jank.

or maybe i wouldn't have needed to spend all that time learning and talking about the controls if i read the manual first. i probably should have just read the manual first.

FINAL GRADE: 1

*grades are on a scale from 3 to -3