I’ve had this post in mind for a little while now, since Windjammers was recently rereleased on the Nintendo Switch. For those who aren’t aware, Windjammers is an old NeoGeo arcade game by Data East released in the mid-90’s. The game plays like a cross between Frisbee ™ and tennis – the players throw a disc back and forth across a tennis-court style field, attempting to score by getting it into a net at the back of the court.
Buy what really makes the game interesting is the way that it keeps players constantly under pressure. Don’t be fooled by its aesthetics – at its core, Windjammers is a fighting game, and uses a lot of the same design techniques.
Mental Pressure – Classic Opposition
The first area of pressure that Windjammers applies is in the places where it hews closely to tennis. Anyone who has played a game of tennis knows the kinds of rapid-fire decision making that goes into it – will the opponent hit short or long? Will they lob? Many tennis players have a habit of returning to near the center of the court and then ranging to the sides as needed, and this is similar to the strategy of counter-play in Windjammers.
Let’s look a little bit at the actual moves of Windjammers, though, to go a bit farther. Once the player catches the disc, they have three options: a “lob”, which is just tossing the disc into the air and having it land slowly; a “straight” throw, either directly forward, or at an angle – note that the disc bounces off the arena walls and continues, Pong-like; or a curved throw, done by rotating the stick before throwing, which makes the disc fly in an arc – either in a parabola around the center, or hugging the arena wall.
Defensively, the player likewise has a couple options – dashing and catching the disc allows a normal return, though the speed at which the player returns the disc after catching it can cause the disc to fly much faster. Alternatively, if the player can predict where the disc will be, he can “block” the disc, causing it to fly up into the air. If the player then gets under where the disc will be, he can catch it and use a super – each character has their own super move (such as having the disc ride the wall, or having it travel in a quick circle), or all characters have a move which rolls the disc on its side at super-high speed.
This leads to the classic kind of pressure one experiences in a fighting game (“yomi” being the term I’ve heard it referred to as) of trying to constantly predict the opponent’s moves in advance. From any position where the disc is caught, the player potentially has as many as 8* different returns available, and an opponent is probably only able to definitively cover 6 of them. And from that results a quick series of mental calculations – attempting to decide which is the safest response, what your opponent thinks is the safest response, what your opponent thinks you will think is the safest response, and whether either of you is immune to iocaine powder.
Time Pressure – Don’t Sleep On Disc
When I say “high speed” in the previous paragraph, I mean it. The player can hold the disc for about a second and a half. After that, even if he hasn’t decided to throw it, the character will throw it for him – and at a significantly slower speed than even the default player throw (which I’ll refer to as “choking”).
This means that a player doesn’t have time to try elaborate headgames like you sometimes see in things like Street Fighter matches – players sitting for 5, 10 or even 20 seconds sometimes trying to lull their opponent for just the right response. But the headgames are still key. They just transpire over a dozen snappy exchanges, rather than as prelude.
And much like a lob, choking becomes a valid response in certain circumstances – even though both are much easier to return, a choke has a much lower risk than a lob Diflucan (because lobs potentially allow the catcher to use their super), and can change up the opponents’ momentum enough to make them overshoot on a catch.
Score Pressure – Nature Abhors A Vacuum
The true danger of the the time pressure is only evident when combined with Windjammers’ scoring – and this is the real trick of this game, one that doesn’t really become evident until really focusing on it.
Let’s start by breaking down Windjammers’ scoring – each court has 3 scoring zones per side – 1 or 2 are red, the inverse number are yellow. The red zones are worth 5 points if a disc gets into it, the yellow zones are 3. And if a disc falls on the court itself (either an uncaught lob or an uncaught block), the player who threw it gets 2 points.
In traditional arcade mode, a winning score is 12 points or more. That means that a game COULD be won in only 3 volleys (5 + 5 + whatever). But it’s more likely to be 4 volleys (3*4 or 5 + 3 + 3 + whatever), with an outside chance of 5 if one score is a lob. (Theoretically one could win with 6 lobs, but that’s more of an extreme fluke than a sincere strategy.).
But there’s also the time clock counting down. The game (in arcade mode at least) only lasts 90 seconds. A player who gets out ahead early can go for the straategy of running the clock down. So an early lead a good way to stack pressure on an opponent.
However, the scoring system still keeps things close. Even if the score is 5-9, each player is still only 1 potential score away from a win. The player with 9 will win if he gets a net. But the player with 5 could score a 5-point shot and then run the clock out.
Summary – Risk vs Reward
That is the real genius of Windjammers. There is never a ‘safe’ move. From the moment the first throw is made, someone could lose. Even a simple fluke shot that scores 3 points could be enough to win the round 3-0. And once the player is behind the 8-ball, a good defensive player can really make it difficult to catch up.
“But Josh,” you might say, “how is that different from football?”
A good question. And football and basketball both rely on similar ideas – if you’re an offensive team, you try to score more than your opponent; if you’re a defensive team, you try to keep defensive pressure and break through where possible.
But Windjammers still has the “no stalling” measure. Basketball and football both have ways for players to essentially just pass the ball around and run out the clock once they’re in an advantageous spot. Windjammers doesn’t. You have to throw the disc, and your opponent isn’t interested in facilitating you.
Conclusion
In the podcast, we talked several times about games that have what I’m going to call “primacy” – the idea that it is the basic, primal form of whatever is being discussed, and that nothing more can be stripped from it without negatively impacting the game itself. For instance – Rock, Paper, Scissors can have additional things added, but can’t have any removed without fully collapsing the game. (In mathematical terms, this would be the “lowest common denominator”, but that term has very negative connotations when discussing media, so I will stick with primacy.)
Windjammers is a game that is an excellent example of primacy. The mechanics are simple, the execution is simple, but there is nothing unnecessary in the game that could be stripped out without significantly diminishing its tension. It manages to tap into the pure competitive drive of a fighting game, despite coming from a designer mostly known for Beat’Em Ups and racing games.
Windjammers teaches good lessons. But only if you look. Which is probably one of the most important lessons of all – a well-designed game doesn’t have to show how clever it is, because the priority is the player’s enjoyment. And Windjammers delivers on both fronts.
* The game uses an analog joystick, not a 9-way, so there is actually more than 8 possible paths depending on the degree of angle applied, but there is, broadly speaking, 8 basic paths.
