Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Without getting into a dissertation on Orwell, let me sum my opinion of Stack-Up with this:
It’s an exercise in doublethink. It’s both novel and ridiculous, innovative and
wasteful, challenging and absurdly simple. It’s kinda like the video game equivalent
of a cardboard box: It’s really a racecar if you believe it’s a racecar. Stack-Up
requires a bit of make-believe to function. It also requires unspeakable luck, mostly
to just obtain the various pieces. But if you can assemble the whole thing - or have
a set loaned to you (thanks Bryan S.) - you can “enjoy” one of the most unique gaming
experiences of the last thirty years. And that “enjoy” was in quotation marks.
In a departure from the crumb of plot present in Gyromite, this time Professor Hector’s
just fiddling around with a robot. Seriously. Said robot’s got five colored blocks - made
out of some strange foam-like substance - and five platforms arranged about his base. And
he can use his manipulator arms to grab them, move them around, and eventually go from the
“start” condition to the “goal” condition. It does this by reading commands from the
television, by means of light flashes much like a Zapper, which correspond to the buttons
the Professor hits on his giant robot control panel of science. Here’s the rub, though:
While it’d make perfect sense for the game to track the series of movements required
to accomplish this goal state... in truth, it has no idea. You actually have to hit the
start button in order to move on. You have to tell the game when you’ve beaten it,
because it hasn’t been paying attention. At least there’s some level of challenge
in the “Memory” mode, where - rather than performing operations on an individual basis
- you instead program a sequence of actions to go from start to finish, requiring you
to actually think about what you’re doing.
And then there’s Bingo mode. Here, you’ve got a 5x5 grid, with commands scattered about
the edges of the frame. By depressing all the buttons in a row or column, you perform
that action, making the already inefficient process even more inefficient. And if that
wasn’t enough, there are enemies in this mode to bump you off the grid or undo the
work you’ve already done. The one saving grace is that the color of the blocks no longer
matter, and you’re just trying to recreate a pattern rather than a specific order...
or so they say, because color never mattered anyway, because the game never cared about
it in the first place. It continues to have no idea. Sure, it’s an interesting diversion,
but it’s ultimately just that - a diversion. Some folks complain about games that play
themselves - this game doesn’t even do that. It makes you use it to control a toy, and
then takes you on your word that you’ve done what it asks. If you’re trying to justify
including a weird robot thing in your not a video game system in 1985 so as to placate
retailers who got burned by Atari, then yes, it’s exactly what you need. If, three decades
later, you’re looking back on that era with a mix of admiration and puzzlement, it can
seem like Y2K hysteria or being excited about the Pirates. It doesn’t make sense today,
but back then... man, could that Van Slyke swing a bat.