Sinistar

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Sinistar
Arcade version of Sinistar
Developer(s) Williams Electronics
Publisher(s) Williams Electronics
Designer(s) Noah Falstein and John Newcomer
Release date(s) 1982
Genre(s) Multi-directional shooter
Mode(s) Up to 2 players, alternating turns
Platform(s) Arcade
Input Joystick
Arcade cabinet Standard and sit-down
Arcade display Raster, standard resolution (used 240 × 292) (Vertical)

Sinistar is an arcade game released by Williams in 1982. It belongs to a class of video games from the 1980s called "twitch games". Other "twitch games" include Tempest, Defender, and Robotron: 2084. Sinistar's voice was supplied by John Doremus.

Contents

[edit] Description

The player pilots a lone fighter ship through a quadrant of the galaxy, initially blasting away at drifting planetoids to "mine" Sinisite Crystals from them, which when harvested, create Sinibombs. Sinibombs are the weapons capable of damaging Sinistar. The fighter's bomb bay can hold 20 Sinibombs.

The player creates Sinibombs by shooting at the drifting planetoids (which resemble clouds) and catching the crystals released. It typically takes 5 or more shots to destroy one planetoid, which yields between 1 and 10 Sinisites. At the same time that the player is trying to get Sinisites, the "worker" ships are also trying to take the crystals. They use these Sinisites to create Sinistar, the skeletal-looking bad guy who is trying to destroy you. At the same time that all of this is going on, other ships (called "warrior ships") are trying to shoot you and kill you.

If you are killed before the Sinistar is formed, you are shown how far along the worker ships are in building the Sinistar. The workers must harvest 15 Sinisite crystals before the Sinistar is completely formed. Once it is completely formed, a digitized voice says "Beware, I live". While he is chasing you, he says further things, such as "I hunger" and "Run, coward!" (which sounds a lot like Ron Howard, leading the developers to dub the game "Opie-star").

There are four zones that repeat over and over again. You move from one zone to the next after you have defeated the Sinistar. These zones are Worker Zone, Warrior Zone, Planetoid Zone, and Void Zone. The first three zones have more workers, warriors and planetoids, respectively. The Void Zone is especially difficult because it has almost no planetoids.

[edit] Difficulty

There are many, many things that make Sinistar difficult. First of all, there is the challenge of getting the Sinibombs. What often happened is that either the player would be killed before Sinistar was even formed, or conversely, Sinistar would become live and you would only have 10 Sinibombs when 15 were needed to kill Sinistar. Once Sinistar became active, it became almost impossible to get more Sinibombs since Sinistar moved much faster than the player could.

[edit] 255 Lives Bug

Sinistar contains a well-known bug that grants the player many lives. It happens only if you are down to 1 ship left. If when the Sinistar is about to eat you, a warrior ship shoots you and kills you, something strange happens. When it happens, the warrior shot takes you down to 0 lives and then Sinistar eating you takes you down to -1 lives. -1 in 8 bit two's complement notation is 11111111, or 255 if interpreted as an unsigned value. So when you go down to -1 lives, the game resets you to 255 lives. 255 is the largest number allowed in the 8 bit system. When the Sinistar goes to eat you, the warriors stop shooting, so your only chance for this bug to occur is if one of their previous shots hits you.

[edit] Legacy

Because the game came out relatively close to the video game crash of 1983, it became a somewhat hard game to find. It was really only the Internet that raised the game above cult status, so a sequel was not released until 1999. It was called Sinistar: Unleashed and it was released for the PC. For similar reasons, Sinistar also was not widely ported. It is available as part of Midway Arcade Treasures, which was released for the PC, Xbox, GameCube and PS2 in 2003, and part of Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play For the PlayStation Portable, in late 2005.

Sinistar represented a number of firsts in game design. It was the first game to use stereo sound (in the sitdown version), with two independent front and back sound boards for this purpose. In addition, Sinistar was the first game to use digitized speech as successfully as it did. It was also the first to use the 49-way, custom-designed optical joystick that Williams had produced specifically for this game.

In July 2000, Midway licensed Sinistar, along with other Williams Electronics games, to Macromedia Shockwave for use in an online applet to demonstrate the power of the shockwave web content platform, entitled Shockwave Arcade Collection. The conversion was created by Digital Eclipse. It is currently freely available to be played within the shockwave web applet.

Xenostar, a public domain tribute to Sinistar, was created and released for the Amiga computer in 1994.

The theme music to the game was sampled in 2005 on 'Grand Ol' Party Crash' by Cage feat. Jello Biafra and Dj Shadow.

The game is thrown out of a second story window in the music video for Sheena Easton's "Almost Over You"

The sound bites "Beware, I live" and the roaring sound are used in the trailer of the movie We Are The Strange

The line "Run, coward!" was named the fourth best game line ever in the January 2002 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly.

[edit] External links

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