FFlynn, You Must Reach the MCP

While I don’t think Tron was a very good movie (a pale imitation of John Carter of Mars with a technological coat of paint) there is no denying that it had very interesting moments. There are scenes that were instantly iconic, ones that inspired film geeks for years to come. What Tron lacked in compelling story it more than made up in cool visuals, such that it was easy for any game company to look at the film and say, “yeah, we want that license so we can turn those scenes into profits… we mean, games.”

Mattel struck while the iron was hot and grabbed up the Tron license for home consoles, then proceeded to make four games (three on Intellivision, one on Atari) based on that movie. Credit where it’s due, each of the titles were their own thing, wholly independent of the other games in the series. You could play Tron: Deadly Discs, Tron: Maze-A-Tron, and Adventures of Tron and never feel like they were copying any ideas from each other, and the same was true for the final game of the run, Tron: Solar Sailer. This was a completely different experience from the other games that had come before.

Whether or not Tron: Solar Sailer is actually a good game is another matter entirely, though. Again, credit to Mattel, they tried to do something interesting, something that pushed certain boundaries for video games, licensed or otherwise. It doesn’t feel like Mattel skimped out when making this title as this is no rush job. It is, however, more of a glorified tech demo than an actual game, something meant to show off technology more than be truly fun and playable. The game itself is too simple, too basic, without a lot of meat on it. But in the ways that players of 1983 might have cared, it certainly seemed like a very cool experience (at least at first).

In the game you play as Flynn, hero of the movie, in charge of piloting the Solar Sailer barge towards the Master Control Program. This involves the ship moving from light beam to light beam, keeping up its charge so that the beam doesn’t disappear and crash the ship (if it does crash it’s game over). But Flynn has to be careful because there are enemies, tanks and recognizers, that will attack the sailer and try to break the beam. Flynn can fight back, shooting at the enemies, but this also drains energy and could cause a crash, forcing the ship to move from beam to beam to stay energized.

Once the ship has progressed far enough along the sectors, Flynn will have to enter a code to push through onto the next voyage. This code was given at the start of the trip, by Tron, spoken directly to Flynn, and if the code is entered in wrong, its game over. The goal is to get through the various sectors on path to the MCP. Once there, Flynn will need to use Bit to collect ones and zeroes that fly towards the screen. These need to be collected to create the code to shut down the MCP. Collect enough and the day is saved. Flynn is victorious and the world of the Grid can continue existing, free of its tyranny.

In many ways I appreciate the ambition of Tron: Solar Sailer. It’s a two-part game that tries, very hard, to make both parts interesting. There’s certainly a very long game, one with plenty of stages and wide open spaces to fly around. It’s not open world, as the game is effectively one large, long grid that you sail horizontally across, but there’s certainly a lot of it, with many dangers to avoid and paths to switch between. And then, when you get to the end, you have a different play experience to complete all to defeat the game. I like what the game wants to do here, I just don’t think that it’s quite able to really pull it off.

The first issue is that the sailing section of the game feels pretty random. You move along the beams, with the only notification about the beam’s health being voice clips that play to warn you about if the energy of the beam is “low”, “medium”, or “high”. Switching beams changes the charge, and you can do lazy loops around the grid to find the right path on a beam that will take you further. Hell, with luck, and not many enemies spawning around you, there’s a solid chance you can ride a beam almost all the way from one end of the sectors to the other. It’s a game that, frequently, doesn’t require much of you to play.

If that sounds kind of tedious, well, it is. There’s not a lot to the sailing section of Tron: Solar Sailer, but I have to think that’s largely because the actual scene from the movie that it’s based on also didn’t have much to it. It’s a long, slow, sailing section that certainly looks pretty but there isn’t much action. The heroes are on a ship, strapped to a beam, and they get to ride that beam until the beam runs out. That’s not exactly a thrilling idea to turn into a gameplay experience, and Tron: Solar Sailer shows this. The programmers tried to do what they could but there’s no getting around the fact that you’re effectively playing on an on-rails shooter, one where shooting doesn’t matter that much.

That’s a big flaw of the game: the shooting doesn’t really matter. Because the beam’s energy is the “health bar” for the ship, shooting at enemies only matters if they’re right on top of you (like with the recognizers that fly in and zoom towards the ship). In most cases even if you take damage you can ignore it since all you need to do it switch beams and recharge. This is a shooting game that actively doesn’t care if you bother shooting. Shooting is, in fact, entirely besides the point of the experience.

This is even more noticeable in the last act of the game when battling the MCP. Your goal is to collect numbers and get them into the binary code to shut off the MCP. It doesn’t matter if you collect the wrong numbers as they simply fall off the code, no harm, no foul. And you can’t take damage during this sequence because there’s no enemies around to attack you. It’s just you, in a circular void, collecting numbers simply for the sake of. It feels like the programmers knew they had to have an ending for the game and then just slapped this on before calling it a day. It does feel underbaked, but only because the team just couldn’t come up with anything better.

But all of this isn’t really why people bought the game. The true treasure of it was the fact that it sounded like a Tron game. Tron: Solar Sailer required the use of the Intellivoice module, an add-on that could create synthesized speech and sounds. When you start the experience, Tron will tell you the code you need to get through the sectors. You have to remember this because the game, quite literally, speaks it at you. As you sail along, the crew of the ship will tell you how the beam is doing and if you’re under attack, all while the villain spouts lines at you. Then, when you get to the MCP core, the MCP speaks at you while you collect letters. And all of this happens while a decent little chiptune plays in the background. For 1983 this all seemed very cutting edge.

It also wears out its welcome pretty quickly. Since the game talks at you it doesn’t give you any kind of HUD. You have to listen to the same voice clips over and over again to know how you’re doing instead of having a simple progress bar or energy meter. The latter could have been unobtrusive and would have made the game easier to navigate, but then Mattel wouldn’t have been able to use Tron: Solar Sailer to push their Intellivoice module, and that was the real goal. All of that is why this game plays more like a tech demo than a real experience. The tech behind it is only needed because the game is otherwise nerfed without it, but some simple changes would make the special tech completely irrelevant.

I don’t hate Tron: Solar Sailer. For a few minutes it’s kind of fun. It’s just that there isn’t a lot of meat to the experience and, very quickly, you run out of steam playing it. I’d say you could get five or so minutes of real enjoyment from the title, but then the game goes on for another half an hour and it gets pretty dull. The ideas in Tron: Solar Sailer aren’t bad, but it certainly needed more fleshing out (and maybe a strong console) to really make this game a winner.