When Taito’s Qix first hit the arcades in 1981, it was a hit. The gameplay was like nothing anyone had seen before. Though it’s not as well-known as some of its contemporaries (like Donkey Kong, Galaga, and Frogger—1981 was a good year for videogames), it’s always been one of my favorite arcade classics. Its popularity waned, however, probably because it was unpredictable and hard to master. These qualities were not valued in the early days of videogames, but they are treasured today.
Like several of the games from the class of ‘81, Qix spawned a new genre, though it’s been sadly underrepresented over the years. Bad Sector is the latest Qix-like, and it’s a Qix-killer. In Bad Sector, your task is to immunize a data storage device while it’s under attack from a computer virus. As you claim territory, the virus replicates and mutates, getting faster and more aggressive.
Here’s the basic gameplay: You begin each stage on the border of a rectangular playing field. Your goal is to claim territory by breaking away from the border and drawing new shapes. You always move in a straight line and turn at right angles, leaving a line in your wake. Connect your lines with an already existing border and you claim the territory within the new shape. Your movement is restricted to the border of the play area and to the borders of territories you’ve claimed. Your movement has only one speed, and that’s full speed ahead.
In Qix, you had to contend with a single large enemy (the “Qix”), but in Bad Sector, the virus manifests itself as multiple small attackers. These bits of malice merely bounce from wall to wall at first, which is enough to deal with, but later they start aiming their bounces right at you. If any make contact with the line you’re drawing before you finish, both you and the line are destroyed. You have a limited amount of time in which to claim a certain percentage of the total territory.
To make things easier on yourself, you can eliminate virus particles, as well as the stationary virus generators that produce them, by corralling them inside new territories. The tension as you race to safety while watching an attacker approach your half-drawn line is delicious. Bad Sector is less about reacting than it is about observation and tactics. Sure, you’ll often find yourself turning sooner than you had planned because of an errant particle bouncing your way, but the crux of the game is in waiting for an ideal opening, plotting a course in your head, and then drawing like hell.
Bad Sector is probably the best Qix-like since Taito’s 1989 revamp, Volfied. I like its theming better, too. The idea of drawing shapes in space to combat an alien never made sense to me. Although fighting a computer virus in the same way is absurd, it works. It’s like the interface a computer hacker in a Hollywood movie might use to reclaim an infected hard drive. If only my virus software was this much fun.
Games in this genre don’t come along very often, and it’ll probably be a while before we see another one as well done as this. For now, when I want a Qix fix, I’ll fire up Bad Sector.
Bad Sector (for Windows only) is $1.99. A free demo is available.
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