Cartridge Review: Masters of the Universe - The Power of He Man

Before this review can begin, I need to establish my level of nostalgic connection with the He Man franchise - it is zero. I grew up with early 1990's Nickelodeon cartoons, and when I wanted fights and transformations, I turned to the VR Troopers and their derivative action figures. I don't even think I could identify He Man until I became an adult; and as such, I won't be spending any time considering how much of a resemblance this game bears to the realm of Eternia. It is slightly above zero, as far as I can surmise. I hear the collective groan from the hardcore fan base, but remain politely unapologetic for my ignorance of all things He Man. It should be a given that it's more or less impossible to accurately recreate shows or movies as a 4K game program anyhow.

Go beat the game to see the other image.

M-Network's 'Masters of the Universe - the Power of He Man' for Atari 2600 had three graphics programmers, two regular programmers, and one for sound; which might explain why the game feels like an asymmetrical mash up of too many ideas happening at once. One thing that was definitely agreed upon is the fact that a lot of space was to be given to the opening title screen, which features a little animation of Prince Adam transforming into He Man and a weird little boop-y song with unsatisfactory melodic resolution. (The cartoon theme?) Considerable resources are also spent on the flashing image displayed upon clearing the second level and beating the game. These folks are trying to sell an Atari game based on a cartoon character after all, and these graphics are pretty good for the format.

Far less time and energy seems to have been spent on the actual gameplay, however. They could have started with a simpler basic premise, but instead created an overzealous mix of elements that constantly gets in its own way. Somehow though, this bumbling game becomes a horribly awesome freak-out of a thing. Like an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the crummy gameplay is  endearingly, frustratingly, awful. On B difficulty, (loops 3-8+) it's just frustratingly awful and might also trigger nauseous seizures. Actually, it might do that any time.

Naturally, the narrative centers around you riding your hover glider thing to Castle Greyskull and defeating Skeletor. The gangly mash up begins here, because the 2 levels in this game play entirely differently. It's as if nobody could agree or even compromise about how this game should operate. Starting above a home base square, the screen is laid out quite a bit like Defender. You can fly your ship left and right and the screen scrolls in that direction. You can move up and down, too. Some little numbers and an arrow indicate distance from the castle, and you start 30 units away. Either direction will get you there, which seems to indicate that the planet is incredibly small, or that you're moving in some kind of doughnut-shaped 2-dimensional space, but regardless; you also have bombs and lasers. Well, sort of. Since there's only one button to press, you get one or the other. If there's a spinning doodad on the screen, you shoot lasers. If not, you're droppin' bombs, and you must be above a certain height to do so. As we'll see, this is one of the things that makes gameplay so bad - the fact that you need mutually exclusive weapons at the same time.

Your way to the castle is blocked by enemies on the ground that act like little magnets. They stick to one spot, scrolling onscreen with your movement. Fly over one, and they jostle you around horizontally with no escaping. That's a pain the the ass already, but these jerks do two other things: launch a little spinning doodad, and shoot a tiny square upward; both of which kill you. Your bombs create black holes in the ground, and that's the only way to get rid of them. The spinners they launch will immediately fly toward you with staggered pauses. They can only be killed with a laser shot directly to their center; the old Atari gameplay paradigm of being able to hit a pixel with a scanline. It doesn't help at all that your lasers have very short range, slightly more than one body length. Rapid fire on / off is controlled via the color switch on the console.

The image of your ship is so large and slow compared to everything else on the screen that even small horizontal movements have a substantial impact on the scroll. Think about it this way - you can move your ship up and down, but when you move left and right, you are actually moving the screen around you, not the ship itself. To give a sense of fast horizontal movement over a landscape, the 'space' inside the screen scrolls faster than the objects within it, and your clunky ship is the relative 'center' which pushes these parameters around. This means that affecting your ship's left / right position can pull enemies toward you. You and your foes are not scrolling smoothly at fixed, relative points in the background; natural amounts of distance aren't created with horizontal dodges. Compare this game to Stargate for an example of a game on the 2600 that did a much better job with this type of scrolling and enemy positioning.

What was supposed to be a vertical / horizontal dogfight of sorts becomes only a horrid chore. If you don't destroy a magnet immediately with a bomb, it will launch a spinner which prevents you from dropping bombs until you destroy it. Now you're stuck over top of an enemy that can kill you with an upward shot, lacking any way to defend yourself on the vertical axis. You're being jostled around horizontally which affects the scroll of space, bringing the spinner which is already tracking you right into your head in just a few incomprehensible seconds. If you destroy the spinner, the magnet will launch another with very short delay, allowing you to get off only a few bomb shots before another spinner fight. You can't move on until you destroy the magnet and even if you do move on, the next enemy will just be another magnet. If you get hit, the game freezes and flashes horrifying colors but doesn't re-set the board in any way; the enemies left onscreen stay there. When you regain control after a death freeze, you can just get hit again right off the bat, and suck up all 3 of your lives immediately. Oh, but, good news! You can go back to home base and buy more lives for 100 x loop# points a pop. Except you can only carry 3. And no, zero doesn't count as one.

The bizarre physics happening in the screen scroll is both the main reason why gameplay is so broken, and the point of leverage against it; as many situations like this are. We'll get to Castle Greyskull in a second, hang in there.

Hang in there, get it?

The best way to deal with the magnets is to destroy them with bombs before they have a chance to launch a spinner. The game seems to want you to do this by flying above them, after all, their upward shot is destroyed by bombs as well. Yet, this really just leads to a lot of gruesome death because the spinners launch so quickly. A better way to destroy them is by manipulating the weird scroll. When your bombs fall, they create black holes on the ground, which are then part of the landscape, or space; meaning they now scroll faster than objects. What you can do, is create a crater to the side of a magnet, then reverse direction. We would expect the hole in the ground and the magnet, both on fixed positions in the ground, to remain at equal distance from each other at all times. What we find instead is that, since the magnet is scrolling more slowly than the hole, the hole can simply be moved underneath the magnet, and poof, it's gone. You're safe for another few seconds. This principal also contributes to the frustrating nature of the spinner fights - during your window of opportunity to bomb the magnet, the holes you create are always sliding out of their intended locations. It's quite possible to create a hole in the extreme left side of the screen, then slide it under a magnet on the right. In so doing, you limit the number of dog fights you must engage in and eventually reach Castle Greyskull.

This level is much more straightforward and, um, "enjoyable". Skeletor is chillin' out on the right side of the room shooting lasers at a specific frequency, and you can block them with your sword button. Just run to the right and touch him. That's it. Wait, this level also has the most amazing colored, moving walls I've ever seen on Atari. In the same vein as Laser Gates and Yar's Revenge, these barriers are the true graphical miracle of this game; squares within squares that constantly morph into each other while the walls move back and forth. Things get even cooler when you touch a wall or get shot; the screen has a massive spasm of color and you must start back on the left, temporarily slowed down. What's more, you can't really die. Not unless your score hits zero. Every hit just removes some points, and if you've made it this far you should have plenty. Enough to have some fun running into things. Just you and Skeletor, two stupidly immortal cartoon-based video game characters kicking back to enjoy a face-melting disco trip. When you get bored or start throwing up, just end the level to hear that weird little song again and loop the game.

Fuck it, I've got points to spend.

Apparently, the difficulty will continue to increase until the 8th loop, but I can't bring myself to play that long. The best score I managed to get while researching for this article was 40K. Speed increases right away on loop two, and magnets on the first screen launch spinners almost immediately, dragging you into death traps all the time. If you make it to Skeletor again, he'll be firing even more lasers at a quicker frequency. It might be interesting to see if racking up a huge score by remaining on one screen would cause the programming to glitch out or crash. If so, we can only hope the resulting break in reality would engulf all of Eternia in a tie-dye acid wave with a static soundtrack. The colors are the only thing that can save us from the crap-fest that is this game.