Tron Deadly Discs

"One of the most popular games for the system."

This fun action game had many fans back in the Intellivision's hayday. Whenever the words ''video games'' were brought up around my older cousins, they always started talking about that game. It's not hard to see why it was so popular once you give it a try; it was a solid, fun action game, albeit kind of monotonous.

Story: N/A
Nope, no story. Good thing too...if there was a story, it would most likely be bleak, since your character is stuck in the disc room forever no matter how many enemies they take out.

Gameplay: 8
One or two players defeat the waves of enemies that come out from doors on the side walls and the wall in the distance. There are no doors on the wall near the bottom of the screen. You must throw your disc at them to damage and kill them. You can block discs with your disc by holding it flat against your chest, but you must be facing the disc that is coming at you. The discs are like boomerangs; they come back to you after they are thrown or blocked. If you hit an enemy, the disc will keep going until it reaches it's maximum distance.

If a side door is parallel with another side door, you can warp through these doors. If one of the doors is closed, you can throw your disc at it to open it. Warping is very useful when you want to hit someone's blind side.

Your score actually means something in this game. The more points you rack up, the more powerful and skilled the enemies get (skill and strength is denoted by a change in the enemy's color, surprise surprise). Also, if you can rack up a lot of points without taking a hit, the number of hits you can take rises. To discover all of the enemy classes, you have to get over one million points! o_O

If you only have a few hit points left, focus on dodging only for a while. After about a minute or so, your hit points will rise back up to the base maximum. Then, you will have to earn the rest of them once again.

As your score gets higher and higher, you will eventually meet up with one of those huge purple things with legs from the movie Tron. It will shoot at you for a few seconds and then disappear. The only way to kill it is to aim very carefully for it's eye.

Graphics: 8
The room you play in is nothing to write home about, but the characters in that room are. The animation on them is extremely smooth. There are less frames of animation when your character moves up and down as opposed to moving left and right, but they still look good. The discs are just blocks, nothing special. The purple thing with legs is big and looks very much like the one from the movie.

Sound/Music: 2
The sounds were kind of weird. The sound of a disc being thrown kinda sounded like flatulation. If you or an enemy were hit, the effect sounded like someone hammering a nail into a piece of wood. The only sound effect I liked was the one heard when someone died. It sounded peaceful, in a strange sort of way. There was no music at all.

Control: 10
This game took advantage of the Intellivision controller very well. The cycloid disc was used to move around and the numeric keypad was used to aim your disc. For instance, the 7 key shot diagonally up and left and the 8 key shot straight up. The 5 key was used as the block button. Being able to shoot in eight different directions while running in any direction made dodging and counter attacking seamless.

Replay Value: 4
Once you get past the maximum amount of points needed to see every enemy you have essentially beaten then game. It will take you a long time to get that good and if and when you do, chances are you won't want to bother getting that far again for a long, long time, if at all. Challenging a teammate to survive for as long as you (or outsurvive you) can be pretty fun (the players can also play strategically if they want to...for instance, they can stand back to back and block simultaneously to help protect each other), but that will wear out after a while also.

Bottom Line?
This game is a good addition to any Intellivision owner's library. What will get you hooked is how you can strengthen your character's hit points and how you can heal yourself by dodging, because once you master that, it's very fun to go far into the game. This game is solid action enjoyment for one player and playing strategically or competitively with someone else is quite cool, which is why I give it an 8.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/07/01, Updated 11/07/01