Cisco Heat - Atari ST (Full Playthrough & Opinion)

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Village Monk's Gaming Memories

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Published on May 15, 2016 4:34:41 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OpkFWrS1Gs

Game:

Cisco Heat (1990)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 23:49

572 views

7

Cisco Heat is a conversion of an arcade game originally made by Jaleco and ported to the ST as well as a bunch of other computer Formats by Ice Software and Image Works in 1991. It's the time for the annual police race where you race through the streets of San Francisco to reach the end before the timer runs out whilst avoiding the local populace along the way over five stages.

The game is very arcadey in terms of presentation with nothing more than a choice of car, which as far as I can tell just a different paint job with no advantages for one over the other at all, before you are thrown into the race. The car itself is simplistic to drive with the joystick being used to move the vehicle around and the space button allowing it to move between high and low gears. The developers have mapped the joystick up with speeding up the vehicle, I personally would have preferred to use the fire button for this as you constantly need to keep pressing up to get to the end. Turning corners is a problem as they were in the arcade original given that they are sharp turns you’ll more often than not you will collide with another road user or crash into the side of the road due to the extreme 90 degree turn the game suddenly makes. Often it is random luck whether you hit another road user as there is very little way that you are actually going to be able to avoid anybody.

Visually the game does not look as smooth or as visually appealing as the arcade original, but overall I feel that the developers have done a good job in replicating the feel for the home port. The sprites have a fair amount of detail to them and the game runs at the fair whack of speed.

Now originally this was an arcade game and the usual idea of an arcade game is to make it super difficult to that people will be inclined to put more coins into the machine. As a result Cisco Heat for the ST is very demanding to complete. For a long, long time I only managed to ever get to the second stage because it seems if you make more than three mistakes in the first stage, which is possible given the amount of traffic on the road, you will not make it to the end within the time frame. It is really evil on the amount of time it gives you and worse still it puts you back to the first stage if you run out of the three continues.

My major problem here is the traffic on the road. If you play the original arcade version of Cisco Heat then you’ll see much smoother visuals, plus cars stay in their own lane, meaning that it’s much easier to overtake them. In the Atari version they move all over the road, often blocking your path and will quite happily phase through obstacles without taking so much as a hit. This makes the home computers versions a lot harder as the unpredictable nature of the traffic and coming in large numbers meaning that there is a large element of luck of whether you are going to make the checkpoint.

Eventually I did manage to beat this game through trial and error and my advice is to pick the faster red and white car, keep one hand on the joystick and the other on the space bar to control the gears and get out of low gear as soon as you hit 80mph, finally when you corner don’t simply hit left or right like you’ll instantly do, always go for the diagonals, you’ll lose so much time in the later levels if you slow down for those tight turns.

Overall Cisco Heat isn’t a bad conversion, offering fast paced action and a fair amount of fun, however there are certainly better racers on the ST.

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