Deflex History
(I have no idea what the product referred to in the logo is,
I just thought it funny that there's something promising a "clean solution"
named after my game ;-).
Deflex is probably the the game with the longest history
of any Llamasoft game. Me and my mates at sixth-form college were playing a
game very much like Deflex on an 8K Commodore PET-2001 machine - the
only computer in the whole college, at that time, back in 1978. There was a
game circulating around (I can't remember where it came from) which involved
a ball bouncing around on the PET screen, ricicheting off diagonal deflectors.
In that game the ball would often get stuck because the deflectors always channeled
the ball in the same direction.
The innovation - and the birth of Deflex - was to make
it so that upon hitting a deflector, the ball not only was deflected, but the
state of the deflector itself was changed too. There were two kinds of deflector,
each a diagonal line, one angled like a slash "/", and the other like
a backslash "\". By making the deflector toggle between those two
states, ball trajectories became much more complex and interesting, particularly
if there were a lot of deflectors on the screen.
Players laid down deflectors in front of the ball by pressing
one of two deflector keys, one for each kind of bat. In all future versions
of the game controlled by a keyboard, those keys were "n" for a "/"
deflector, and "m" for a "\" deflector. This isn't just
an arbitrary key allocation; there is a historical reason for it, which becomes
obvious if you look at this picture of a section of the old calculator-style
keyboard of the original PET-2001...
...each key carried an associated "graphic" character,
and the N and M keys carried the graphics of the deflector bats, so it seemed
natural to use those keys to place the equivalent deflector in the game :-).
Unfortunately, that original PET game is probably permanently
lost in the heavily-pixellated digital mists of time. We had no disk drive for
storage in those days (a typical coding session lasted one half-hour slot {you
had to book your week's allocation on a Monday morning; I once got banned for
a week because I almost knocked over a teacher in my eagerness to get to the
scheduling chart and pick my week's allocation} and the first and last five
minutes of that session were therefore usually spent LOADing and SAVEing onto
cassette tape). Even if somewhere a knackered old C60 from that era survives,
I doubt very much whether it would be readable enough ever to retrieve that
long-lost ur-Deflex.
The game next made its appearance on the ZX-81. Although I haven't
found an image of this version yet, I do live in hope that I will come across
it somewhere on the Net, since a lot of ZX-81 games did survive long enough
to make it into the modern datasphere. The game was distributed for a while
by dk'Tronics, and used blobby graphics for the deflector bats and an "O"
for the ball, but was still recognisably the same game; it still even used the
"N" and "M" keys from the Pet version.
Until I find that old ZX-81 version, the first version I am able
to offer actual images of, both graphical and binary (for use with an emulator)
is of Deflex running on an unexpanded Vic-20. For some reason I called this
"Deflex V" (there had been two other versions prior, the PET
and ZX-81 versions, unless I am forgetting any; maybe I thought "V"
just sounded more... cool, or something lame like that).
Here's a game in progress on the VIC. I hadn't yet learned to
POKE the hell out of the VIC video chip registers to get a larger screen, so
the action, such as it is, takes place in a fairly small area. Targets would
appear randomly on the screen (numbered in hexadecimal; 1 to 9 and then A to
F, bloody geeky git I was {and remain}); the player used the traditional N and
M keys to place deflectors in the path of the ball.
There wasn't really any "scoring", as such; the objective
was simply to clear all the targets in the shortest time you could. Your best
efforts went into the "High Score List", where you could enter your
name, although fat lot of good it did you, because in the absence of a disk
drive it was much too much of a faff to even think about using cassette tapes
to store high scores on, and so the HST would disappear when the game was turned
off.
The Vic-20 version of Deflex is available for use with emulators.
My favoured emulator for all things 8-bit Commodore is the VICE emulator, which
emulates many of the early 8-bit machines. You can download a .vsf
snapshot image, which is somewhat easier to use but specific to the VICE
emulator; or a .prg image, which may be
slightly trickier to get going, but which is usable on many other VIC emulators.
The next outing for Deflex was certainly the most complex incarnation ever
made, prior to the modern-day PocketPC version, of course ;-). SuperDeflex was
one of the few Llamasoft games made for the Spectrum.
And here's the title screen for that version. The llamas walked
across the screen, their necks undulating and their little tails flipping, spelling
out the title. What you can't hear, thankfully, is the extremely harsh, clumsy
Spectrum-BEEP-command rendition of the "Theme from TRAXX" which accompanies
this screen ;-).
Deflex for the Speccy was a much more involved affair than any
other version. Instead of a ball, you deflected "Sid the space invader"
around an arena which became increasingly beset with hazards - barriers to obstruct
you, extra bats to get in your way, moving targets, lasers that zapped you,
lethal tombstones, and a tiny pink robot who chased after you! There were nine
gameplay levels, each with nine targets to hit, and if you placed too many deflectors...
...a giant llama came out to wipe the screen clear (and chuck
you down a level, to boot). No way I was going to waste that oh-so-sophisticated
two-frame llama animation that I'd spent so long working on ;-).
Scoring was a bit more advanced in this version of the game,
depending upon time taken, number of deflectors used, and current skill level.
Player hi-scores were entered into a hi-score table which was every bit as fleeting
as the one on the Vic-20.
Heh... yeah, that's "all-time" as in "all the
time that has elapsed since you loaded the game off tape" ;-).
You can download SuperDeflex for use with your favourite Spectrum
emulator (I like Spectaculator myself); you can take a .TAP
tape image, or the slightly easier-to-use .Z80
memory snapshot.
Read a little introduction to SuperDeflex in the new games announcements
from this archived copy of Sinclair
User!
Deflex made a brief appearance on the Atari 8-bit machines under the
name Turboflex; unfortunately this is another version whose emulator
image I have yet to turn up, but as and when I can find it, I shall put it up
here. It was a fairly simple version, from what I can recall of it, being written
entirely in Atari BASIC. The only really distinguishing feature that I recall
was that a little player-missile-graphic of a pistol would appear and "shoot"
one of your player lives when you lost one ;-).
Update - I got a copy of Turboflex!
It's the Dutch version, mind, but it's nonetheless Turboflex,
complete with the aforementioned pistol - caught in the act of shooting one
of my lives in the screenshot above - plus screen flashes and some deliciously
grungy Atari sound effects :-). In play it's simple but fun, with each successive
life increasing the difficulty slightly - first the target moves slowly, then
it reverses every time you place a bat, and on your last life it speeds up,
too.
Anyway, thanks to Richard Douwes for bunging me the image, and
I am therefore happy to be able to offer the .BAS
BASIC file itself, or (perhaps slightly easier to get going) the .a8s
Atari800Win memory snapshot image :-).
As a matter of fact that version brings back some good memories
- I remember going to Holland to meet the people from Aackosoft, who wanted
to license some games from me to sell in Holland, and it was my first ever trip
to Amsterdam. One of the chaps from Aackosoft made a point of taking me round
some of the infamous coffee shops and I got very stoned indeed, and then he
dragged me into a cinema to see for the first time a film that I have loved
ever since: Koyaanisqatsi :-).
The final incarnation of Deflex, before the Resurrection, was tucked
away into the far-more-complex Commodore 64 game Iridis Alpha. Iridis
had a pause mode during which a little game called MIF would appear.
MIF was basically the same game as Vic-20 Deflex, with slightly
prettier explosions when you hit a target (the bits of explosion would destroy
deflectors in the vicinity, too, which was a help) and better sound effects.
It was called MIF because it was made whilst I was out at my sadly-missed,
bloody-annoyingly-ripped-off flat in La Plagne ski resort in France, one snowy
day when it was far too horrible outside for anybody sane to actually go out
skiing.
Here is MIF in action on the C=64 emulator VICE.
Instead of a ball the player controls that rainbow-y streak of light-ish thing
made up of coloured squares, and the target is the thing that looks like a ball
(it looks more confusing here as a static image than it actually is in real
life :-]). The almost-depleted vertical bar just in the last blue segment of
its red, white and blue entirety (France, see?) at the upper right edge of the
screen is the timer - you have to hit the target before it disappears. The score
is represented by the bar at the bottom of the screen (in the screenshot just
started; a good score would extend the bar, in rainbow colours, right across
the bottom of the screen). The little tick above the score bar represents the
high-score. A tiny, but fully-formed game :-).
Unlike all other versions of Deflex, in this one when
the ball leaves one side of the screen it reappears on the other.
Wandering about on the web I was amused to find out that someone
has made a Java
version of MIF. It runs a little slowly, but it's amusing nonetheless, and
I note that although the Commodore PET keyboard has passed its legacy down another
generation - the M and N keys are used to place the deflectors - the guy has
implemented them the wrong way round!
MIF itself had a hidden pause mode. Upon activating it
you were presented with a graphics demo called DNA. This was a graphial
celebration of my long-term, deeply-committed love affair with the sin() function,
and allowed the player to dick about with a pair of sinusoidally-modulated sprite
chain thingies.
Nothing to do with Deflex, but in this context it was
Deflex's neighbour, so I thought I'd include it :-).
Help yourself to a VICE snapshot
of MIF; and here's one of DNA. If you
unpause these snapshots you'll be taken to a just-started game of Iridis
Alpha!
There was also a nod in the direction of the Deflex game mechanic
in the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 game Matrix (confusingly enough released
in the US as Attack of the Mutant Camels, when any fule kno that Attack
of the Mutant Camels is something completely different with giant camels
in).
In the really quite unrepresentatively sparse and boring-looking
screenshot from Matrix, above, the angular-Q-shaped structure in the
middle of the screen is actually a little cluster of Deflex deflectors.
Various levels in Matrix feature these deflectors, which divert the shots
from the little green ship as if they were a Deflex ball. The player
has to be careful, because as the deflectors change state and the player moves
around shooting at a screen full of enemies, it becomes quite possible to accidentally
shoot oneself ;-].
The underlying mechanic of Deflex, then, is older than
Llamasoft itself, and is a pleasingly simple idea. It seemed natural, then,
that it should appeal to me when it came time to implement my first PocketPC
game. I wanted something that was instantly accessible, something simple to
learn but satisfyingly challenging to play; something that wouldn't suffer due
to quirks like the iPaq's inability to detect button presses; something which
could, indeed, run on anything that had so much as a pair of buttons
(maybe in newer versions of mobile phones that use a Microsfot UI)...
'Course, now Deflex is a lot flashier, with all those
bleating sheepies and great herds of stampeding Queen Mothers... but under the
skin it's effectively the same game that first saw life in the computer room
at Queen Mary's sixth-form college in Basingstoke at the end of the 1970s.
Deflex, you've come a long way ;-).
