The Boeing 767 Personal Entertainment System

by Andrew Toups, 4/28/05

So here?? the situation: it?? about 3 PM in the afternoon at the Narita international airport outside of Tokyo, Japan, and I??e just boarded flight Co 2011 nonstop to Houston. I spent the greater part of the day dragging luggage about and sitting in the Shinkansen train out of Kyoto, where I spent the prior night sleeping in the special tatami room at the Westin Hotel. Though I speak not a lick of Japanese, I??e estimated that tatami is a word that generally means ??raditional?? to dine tatami style is to sit on the floor, cross-legged (or on your knees if you??e female) at a low table and eat a traditional Japanese meal, (a daunting, circulation-cutting proposition for a fat, pasty-legged gaijin such as myself, no matter how delicious the meal); to rest in a tatami-style room is to bathe in a wonderfully relaxing wooden hot tub and to sleep on a torturously flat, un-ergonomic futon on a wooden floor, with your siblings immediately on either side of you, their normally quiet sleeping sounds magnified when placed so close within earshot. I will leave it to smarter, more cultured individuals to pick apart this juxtaposition of pleasure and discomfort in Japanese tatami culture: for the time being my legs are sore, I??e slept poorly, and I?? facing a 14 hour flight stuck in the rear of a Boeing 767 with nothing save a stomach full of BOSS Coffee and bad food and my half-sleeping sister a seat down from me for company.



If you??e ever flown international flights before, you??e surely familiar with the cheap little LCD screens which offer tepid year-old summer comedies and B-list television reruns, as well as a wide range of music stations that always seem to play the same three Postal Service songs, the whole thing being controlled by a small remote controller resembling something between an N-Gage and a DVD-remote. Despite having a Gameboy Advance SP with Yoshi?? Island and every GBA Castlevania game in my possession, I am feeling cranky and arbitrarily stubborn: I want entertainment, and I want something novel, and I don?? care how terrible it is, damn it all. So imagine my delight as I discover for the first time that the Boeing 767 Personal Entertainment System (as I later learned it was called) has received the addition of playing up to 12 rudimentary ??ideo games?? I look down the list:

• Black Jack
• Poker
• Invasion
• Chess
• Solitaire
• Elephant Memory
• Bzzz the Busy Bee
• Cave Crunch
• Caveman
• Hangman

Solitaire, Black Jack, Poker and Chess barely register as ??ideogames??with me at all; playing a game which is a simulation of a real game isn?? exactly my style, so I decide to jump straight to Bzzz the Busy Bee, which seemed to at least have the most imaginative title of the bunch.

Bzzz the Busy Bee


Bzzz the Busy Bee tells a tale which is tragic in its repetitiveness: being a busy bee, the titular Bzzz is driven by either a profound desire or powerful duty to ??ollect??(presumably this signifies pollination) flowers; he is perpetually tormented by malicious frogs, fish, and birds who interfere with his business. Bzzz?? expression never changes over his total two frames of animation; it is unclear whether he gleans any pleasure at all from the flowers he is compelled to collect; instead at times he seems bouncing between the ineffable force of his destiny and the persistent resistance of the natural world surrounding him.

??

All right, so I?? being a tad facetious: the object of the game is to pilot Bzzz around a static screen, collecting flowers while avoiding various environmental hazards, who are given such names as ??urp the frog?? ??lop the fish?? and ??lip the bird??



Flip the bird, indeed. The controls are floaty and unpredictable, the visuals are blurry and it?? hard to make out exactly which sprite signifies what, and the whole game runs at maybe ten frames per second. It?? confusing, frustrating, unrewarding, and not totally unlike the Japanese rail system; alas, my normally god-like patience quickly wears thin and I decide to check out Elephant Memory.

Elephant Memory

??ubba the Elephant has dropped all of his pictures! You must help him pick them up, but in pairs only. For each pair picked up, Bubba will get a peanut, and Bubba just loves those peanuts!??br>
So reads the introductory text of Elephant Memory, followed by this graphic:



It hasn?? been since I played Silent Hill 2 that a game has filled me with such gloom before even getting past the start screen. As it turns out, Elephant Memory is an otherwise unremarkable version of ??oncentration??with decidedly non-distinct imagery on each card. I am bored by it and don?? play for more than a few minutes. However, any game that manages to so move me in such a short period of time is worthy of note. In retrospect I prefer playing this game to Bzzz the Bee, even if in this case by ??laying??I simply mean gazing upon Bubba the Elephant?? character art until my heart sinks and I can no longer bear the misery.

I tried a few of the other games, which were similarly knock-offs of more popular games with a generic mascot slapped on top. They aren?? very interesting so let?? cut to the big finish:

INVASION



At this point, I assumed this space shooter was a just a Space Invaders rip-off. And at first it appeared so!



As things developed, though, it quickly revealed a unique identity of its own.



Now, IGN-style, here are THE FACTS:

• Invasion is a vertically scrolling, horizontal movement bullet hell shooter with a bullet absorption mechanic.
• There is no music ??instead you listen to the on-board radio station.
• It runs at a steady five frames per second.

Let me elaborate.

At first, it does indeed it seem to be a Space Invaders rip ??perhaps even winkingly so. Ships start moving slowly from the top left of the screen and you can move left or right, firing slow moving bullets to destroy them. However, as you progress, wrinkles begin to emerge ??the monsters start taking up to 4 hits to kill. And the bullets they fire are of different paths and speeds. The patterns are sometimes scripted and sometimes the bullets head directly for your ship.

If you skipped the help text at the beginning, you might not realize that it has some Ikaruga-styled bullet-absorption mechanics. Namely, either the left or right side of your ship absorbs bullets and adds to your power up bar. The power up bar has three layers. Reach the first one, and you get a basic three way spread shot. The next one give you a five way. And the final gives you this weird enormous sphere shot in addition to five way shots. Given the simple set up of the game and the resilience of some of the foes, they are all pretty useful to have.



So. I??e mentioned the frame rate in a few other places; here is where it gets important. The frame rate is incredibly low, and the mysterious designers of the game were aware of this, and simply dropped the pace of the game to what you might describe as blisteringly slow. The same system at maybe 3 times the speed would be a fairly intense bullet-hell romp. Played at this rate, however, the game takes on a more contemplative, strategic tone. The movement of your ship, as I mentioned before, is limited to the horizontal axis ??and it doesn?? take long before you are constantly surrounded by bullets. Approach them from the side and you absorb them ??or you could be more bold and let them collide directly into your wings. If you take a bullet, you don?? die ??your shield meter merely reduces (you can take maybe, oh, 15 hits on Normal mode; they go by quickly). Instead of programmed music, you instead listen to the fixed selection of inflight radio stations. Playing Invasion on the blurry LCD screen with the awkward remote control, half awake, listening to Elvis Costello?? perfectly schmaltzy cover of ????l Never Fall In Love Again??is about a unique gaming experience as you can get these days, and I remember it fondly. It put me into an odd, numb, trance-like state that is wholly unlike anything I??e ever felt playing other shooters. It?? almost like a constantly moving chess game ??although your situation is constantly changing in real time, you are granted brief moments to reflect upon how to respond. The focus is ultimately on strategy and response as opposed to action and reaction. It?? a weird combination, and I?? hard pressed to say if I even liked it. Regardless, whether by creative inspiration or mere necessity, Invasion introduces a very fresh perspective on exactly what a 2-D shooter can be; the idea of a ??low??shooter is something I?? like to see explored more with more thought and care in the future.



LAST MINUTE UPDATE: It seems that Bzzz the Busy Bee is copyright Infogrames! BEHOLD:




This warrants further investigation. Or not!