Solar Fox

"Cell-grabbing, reflex intensive fun!"

Solar Fox. Truly my top favorite game for the good ol' Atari 2600. Solar Fox can probably be described as a type of ''Pac-Man in space'' game. Your goal is to guide your spacecraft around the screen, grabbing energy ''cells,'' while avoiding the deadly fireballs of the guardian Sentinels. Grab all the cells and you go to the next stage, which is another collection of cells.

Solar Fox is a training ground for today's Top Gun 2D fighter pilots. What do I mean? If you can play Solar Fox and do good, you definitely ready for any 2D shooter.

The cells you must get are arranged in some shape. Your ship can only move in the four cardinal directions (no diagonals), so it takes some foresight to see the best path to take to get the cells efficiently. Efficiently? Yes. To add to the challenge, each stage (called racks) has a timer called a skip-a-rack timer. If you can get all the cells before the timer runs out, you get to skip the next rack and go to the one after it. For example, beat the timer on rack three, and you go to rack five.

In these early days of video gaming, when video game violence was just in it's conception, I thought of Solar Fox as one of the few ''passive'' games out there. You can not attack. Your only weapons are your skill as a pilot and your reflexes. Beautiful.

The Sentinels are the ''guardians'' of the racks, and spit fireballs at you to take you out. The challenge really picks up when they start blanketing the screen with fireballs.

The rundown:

Graphics: The only thing that changes are all the different colors the cells can become as you progress. Nothing to complain about on this game.

Control: As good as your controller. Control is the KEY component to this game, and it controls excellently. As long as your controller works, you are in excellent hands.

Story: Well, Atari had to do something to make you want to play the game. Although really simple, it sets the premise for the game nicely, if you care for it.

Gameplay: Addictive. There are 26 different stages (after rack 20, the racks repeat in different colors). You will have the immense desire to see that 20th rack (and that 6th challenge rack). It will keep you coming back until you do it. After rack 6, you face the ''double cell'' racks, in which each cell has to be hit twice in order to get it. This REALLY puts the heat to you to do this AND beat the timer, not to mention the Sentinels get fireball crazy by then.

Solar Fox has some wonderful features that add to its replay value. I just mentioned the Challenge racks. These are special racks without Sentinels. There is a timer here as well, but it goes much faster than the skip-a-rack timer. If you manage to finish the rack in time, you get a letter of the alphabet. Each challenge rack gives a letter. The point is that if you get them all, you get a word. At the time of the game's conception and the Golden Age of Atari, if you got the word, you could win a special prize. I finally got the code word some 10 years after the game was released. By then, Atari had went under and the new 8 and 16-bit systems had arrived. *snap*

I extremely recommend Solar Fox. It's wonderfully challenging and powerfully tense. Hone those shooter game reflexes (without the shooting), and kick those dodge skills into high gear.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 07/17/00, Updated 07/17/00