H.E.R.O. - 1984
By John Van Ryzin
Published by Activision
Released for Atari 2600

Initial descent down the deadly caverns of this helicopter-cladden spelunker’s rescue operation is tense, but doesn’t stay unfamiliar. No two stages are the same, but every encounter with enemy and obstacle within maintains on reset. The adventure begins with an awkward tumble down initial screens as opposed to heroic dives and elegant acrobatics. And getting caught in the blast radius of your dynamite is an inevitability. The goal is simple: Make the unfamiliar, familiar. Be mindful of your resources. Become a hero for those trapped below. And where H.E.R.O. excels in this tee-up is within the exciting push-pull dance of authored imprecision, firm rules and our place between them.

Acceleration is abrupt. Nearly too fast, even. Inching towards obstacles is a task more dangerous than making room for dynamite. And with full directional movement, the possibilities of where to go – and what to crash into – are endless. Pressing down on the up-directional of the controller to whirr your copter-pack to life is laborious, and each release of the control demands immediate press-down follow up to hold control over climb and descent as each passage grows ever-narrow. The repetition of the similarly-constructed chasms, with their multicoloured walls and environmental abstractions, dull out memorisation. The friction is subtle, as to not lean too far into imprecision and unfair design, and calculated enough so that a perfect run is lost to overconfidence and carelessness than at the hand of faulty programming. Maybe you forgot that a snake pops out of a specific wall just a few stages in. After that, maybe you misjudged how narrow the passage between two hazard walls were when falling down. Got a bit too confident with blasting bats right above lava? That will cost you if you get too close. It’s in that push-and-pull of the immovable and faultless game against the unrestricted, but fallible player where H.E.R.O. shines as a chase towards a perfect run. Learn the rules, throw yourself at them, and fail then overcome.

Frustratingly near-perfect. The developer's condescending reaction to the objective truth that this game's "difficulty" is broken, enemy spawn non-design prevents it from being the casual PC platformer masterpiece it so aspires to be. Gating you off from ever feeling like you've accomplished anything isn't much of a "compromise".

You can't "Get Good" at Vividlope, not on stages where arbitrary enemy spawn acts in defiance of "uninterrupted-flow" gameplay loops. Instead each run is reduced to the crank of a slot machine arm; the tension of multi-gimmick maestro juggling instead placed poorly on a finger cross that THIS TIME the enemy spawn placement will be kind enough for you to awkwardly dance towards a better-than-decent rank.

By all means it is a fun game and a good (definitely not Dreamcast or PS1) vibe, but the disregard for these glaring issues keeps it from ranking among something such as the best within the PopCap library.