Spacer

Spacer is a homebrew game by Memir and released on 17 April 1999. It’s a pilotwings-esque flight simulator where you have to gather a set number of diamonds before entering a portal to proceed to the next level.

It was released for the Presence of Mind ’99 competition where it came in 6th place.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password spacingout.

About Spacer

Spacer is a flying simulator where you pick one of four aircraft to fly around and collect objects to complete a stage. Each stage has a certain amount of diamonds/octagons that you need to collect, at which point the portal will appear. Get to the portal and you’re on to the next level, it’s as simple as that.

The challenge is that you need to perform all the air-crobatics without touching any walls or moving obstacles since they take away a portion of your health with each hit. The penalty for dying is that you need to restart the level, so it’s not much of a bummer unless you die on the way to the portal.

The music has some midi-fied renditions of Depeche Mode, It Takes Two and others I don’t recognise.

Controls

The name of the game is control – you won’t get anywhere without absolute control of your character and the camera.

• Joystick – rotate the player
• A – thrust
• Z – special
• C left/right – Rotate left/right
• C up/down – Zoom in/out
• R – Rotate camera up/down

It was painful to realise on level 2 that you could rotate the camera to a bird’s eye view for going down the chimneys. I managed to make it through the first time without it, but it’s a lifesaver.

Characters

There are four playable characters you can choose from:

Helic the helicopter. Can use the propeller to move in the air. His special ability is to remain static in the air (dropping very slowly) and not being able to rotate.

Rocket the rocket. Very similar to Helic, but with much higher thrust.

Mumble the bee. She stays stationary and moves straight in the direction it is pointed in with no regards to gravity. Her special move is to get locked horizontally and move straight up and down.

Stealth the airplane. Unintuitively moves like Helic. Special ability is to lock itself from the ‘helicopter’ mode and move into ‘airplane movement’ mode. It’s incredibly fast which makes it hard to maneuver around any obstacles, but might be interesting if anyone wants to make a TAS for Spacer.

Review and conclusion

I must say that I’m thoroughly impressed by the effort put into Spacer. Not only is it a 3D game from 1999, but it also has plenty of depth to it. To be honest, all the ones that scored higher than it in the POM ’99 competition were just some demos without much entertainment to them, but this actually tried to bring something a bit more ‘N64’ into the mix.

The controls do take a little while getting used to, and it can be a bit annoying to find that last floating gemstone, but those are just some minor hiccups. If I really had to dig deep for something to complain about, it would have to be that the thrust button is controlled by the same thumb as the camera. You either have to stop thrusting to rotate the camera and risk losing control, or contort your index finger to tap the C buttons.

Each level is distinct in both its size and shape. It never gets boring to explore the wide open areas and narrow tunnels, except on the few occasions where there is a lot of backtracking involved.

Memir’s Spacer is without a doubt one of the more complete games on the Nintendo 64 from the classic era. It brings a lot to the table at a time when expectations were fairly basic.