Some records certainly make me whisper “fucking hell” under my breath whilst listening to them and The Pale Fountains “Bicycle Thieves” is one of them. Okay okay, Mick Head records make up a good number of them but let’s ignore that for now.
From a swirling Animals-esque intro, it’s one of those songs that just gets better and better as it goes on and Mick Head absolutely belts the vocals out like their life depends on it. Lyrically, …Across The Kitchen Table might be peak Pale Fountains (that opening line!) but “and when I seen you in the subway station, you looked like you hadn’t seen The Queen’s face for a while” is still up there in my books.
Sitting at the intersection of glitchgoth and cybergoth, Glitchangels is Berzerk reimagined as a Nuclear Throne-alike. Throw out the unending maze of the arcade classic, replace it with discreet rooms with tight corridors, clear the enemies to open the exits, paper it with Droid Assault inspired art – strip out the Paradroid elements, keep the store and upgrades.
Glitch everything, movement, firepower, everything. Play the videogame as VHS, make a mistake, rewind and forward your angel to safety. It’s weirdly now. It could really only collect all these things together and vibe like it does in the now but yes, it’s an EBM arcade dancefloor Robotron.
What a heady mix for a twin stick shooter all this makes. Instantly familiar to anyone who’s even mildly been paying attention in our post Geometry Wars world and it’s not like the game makes any effort to hide or obscure its influences anyway, quite the opposite. It’s there in the credits, it’s there the moment you spawn into the first screen. 40 years of twin sticking, goth’d up, glitched up.
Buy it on Switch, grab a cider and black and sit in a tree to play it, preferably in a graveyard. In Whitby if you need to. Maybe get the flourescent gear out, meet the game on its terms, you know? Sod it, chuck a glowstick or two in your bag whilst you’re at it. If you know anyone with a dry ice machine, I’m not saying it’d complete the vibe but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.
Or, y’know, grab it on the PC or Xbox. Whatever works. But really, do grab it. It’s good. I’ve been having an absolute ball with the thing.
Fight. Die. Glitch. Win. It totally does what it says on the tin.
Revisiting Saboteur for the first time in a very long time, all thanks to a slightly messy but the game is perfectly intact recent-ish port.
I was pleasantly surprised how much I still enjoy the game!
I can’t quite put my finger entirely on how it works as well as it does for me but a part of it is how irrevocably tied to a certain strand of VHS film it is. Look, I can’t explain why or how (I’m not entirely convinced anyone knows why), just know that the eighties had the most amazing preoccupation with ninjas and Saboteur gets that.
Rather than just kick or punch things for points, you’re tasked with sneaking into a waterside warehouse to pilfer a floppy disk and, of course, getting out alive. Naturally the warehouse is crawling with guards, security cameras and guard dogs (which is only a Tadashi Yamashita short of everything you need to make this work) and you’ll have to make short order of them to escape in one piece. I find throwing bricks helps.
What I find most impressive about Saboteur is that it feels like a segment from one of these low budget VHS tat films. You ride in by dinghy, you creep through the warehouse kicking security guards in the face as you go, you fiddle with computer terminals and shunt through underground tunnels in train carriages. It’s probably a whole five or ten minutes of a film made game yet somehow it completely nails the vibe.
It is incredibly eighties action film in a way a lot of other ninja-y games just aren’t. Partly it’s the animations which though super limited, I just love the sneaky ninja walk cycle. Nobody ever ran like this outside of VHS ninja films, except in Saboteur! Partly it’s the vehicles – a dinghy and a helicopter? In the same videogame? Well now!
If you want a tenuous Rob comparison, Saboteur is the American Ninja to the Datasoft Bruce Lee’s Shaw Brothers film. I’d go out on a limb and say Bruce Lee has the better ninja, solely because they’ve got a big stick and don’t need to rummage around in rubble for something to hit somebody with BUT there’s always room for a bit of variety.
It is worth mentioning that Saboteur is very 1985 and from 8 bit home computers so don’t go expecting wonderfully fluid graceful movement here. It totally is clunky!
You don’t chain moves or combo or anything, you stand still to punch someone in the nose, you jump kick them in precisely one (1) frame. The port does very little to remove that old clunk and friction, adds a bit of its own if I’m being truthful, and I don’t think sticking with that hurts the game especially either.
I’ve rarely cared about clunky and that’s the case for Saboteur too. It works enough, you know? Perhaps it may not work enough outside of the hazy VHS moment it’s forever trapped in for me, I’m not sure. To be brutally honest. I don’t really care if it doesn’t – not while it’s still got that magic for me.
Saboteur, a port of its sequel and a new entry into the series (which I really must check out when I have some spare cash) are all available across the usual videogame formats. As usual, I’ve been playing on the PS4.
You are reading Rob’s Punching Robots Club
The online home of Rob Fearon, disabled videogame maker, games journalist, crap film watcher, gobshite and doodler. Rob’s been around games a very, very long time now and Punching Robots Club is their personal blog featuring whatever nonsense takes their fancy.
Sometimes it’s a sketch, a review, an article about videogames, a pointer to something Rob finds cool. Whatever, really. Expect anything, Rob’s tired of being a brand online and so it’s just stuff and things these days. Nice stuff and things, mind you.
