Lady Bug (1981 Arcade Review)

Lady Bug
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Universal
First Released October, 1981
NO MODERN RELEASE

Strange that Atari didn’t make a play for this one. Only Coleco had the vision for it.

Lady Bug was one of the killer apps of the Colecovision’s launch, and I can totally see why. It’s one of the best maze chases ever made, and one that gets no credit today. There’s a few turnstile and/or gate-based maze chases that rode Pac-Man’s coattails, including Mouse Trap, which I’ll be doing tomorrow. Mouse Trap is pretty good, but it’s also probably the most complicated maze chase of the entire era. Lady Bug keeps things nice and simple. To utilize a turnstile, you just walk into it. At the start of the stage, there’s no enemies chasing you, but the border of the maze has lights that act as a timer and let you know when the next baddie will be released. While you might be turning walls, the biggest difference between this and Pac-Man is there’s no turning the tables on the enemies. Not directly, at least. Besides the turnstiles, each maze has randomly generated skulls laying around. If you can lure a bug into one of the skulls, it dies. That’s the only thing resembling an offensive move. There’s no power-pellets, and the deeper you get into the game, the faster the bugs get AND the smarter they are about chasing you. However, if you can grab the fruit in the center of the maze, the enemies freeze for a few seconds.

There’s only one maze, but with the different arrangements of the turnstiles you cause, there might as well be a billion. Also the skulls are randomly placed, so luck DOES factor in.

Lady Bug has probably the best maze layout not created by General Computer in all of the Golden Age of Arcades. It’s an elegant design tailored for close calls. The brilliance is that, no matter how you arrange the turnstiles, you’ll always be vulnerable from at least one angle. You can never fully close yourself in, and of course, this means you can never trap the enemies, either. The random placement of the skulls does factor in a little too much. My best runs always involved the skulls being spread out in a way where a logical pathway was created that would allow me to scoop up most of the dots in that area while also setting a trap that funneled the enemy into a skull to prepare for my escape from that vicinity. In games where the skulls were clumped together, I didn’t do so great. Oh, and there were several times where I was trying to get to the enemy-freezing bonus fruit only to have “bad luck” screw up my plans. The bonus fruit happens to spawn inside the chamber where the monsters respawn. You can imagine my horror when I’m just a sprite away from getting the fruit, only to have a bug somewhere else in the maze hit a skull and respawn in the chamber. You don’t die when this happens, but you have to run away and wait for another opening for the fruit. This happens so often that I’m convinced the AI is programmed to defensively kill itself so it instantly returns to the chamber and prevents you from grabbing the fruit. That’s hardcore.

This type of “guarding” should be annoying, but actually the pace is just right to make this a thrill when you finally make your move.

Lady Bug is the maze chase that gets things right. With no means to fight back, distance between you and the baddies is the key to the whole thing. You’ll get a feel for how much space you need between you and an enemy when attempting to use a turnstile to cut them off from chasing you. If they’re RIGHT behind you, you’re going to die, since your turning of the gate doesn’t stop them from passing through it with you. Late in the game, you might find yourself rushing between several gates in a desperate scramble to create a sizable barrier between you and whatever is tailing you. Some of the enemies are smarter than others, and really, the best option is probably to linger somewhere near the center of the maze and wait for a fruit, which is the best way to scratch-out distance. The controls are the biggest issue for me, as I found that I was constantly getting hung-up on walls. My MAME cabinet includes a four-way-only joystick that made Lady Bug a breeze to control. That won’t be an option for a modern console release, and movement is a lot more picky than Pac-Man. It’ll be a problem for a port.

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What put Lady Bug over-the-top for me was its elaborate scoring system. In addition to normal dots, there’s hearts and letters on the playfield that shift into three different colors. Blue lingers the longest and only scores 100 points. HOWEVER, it’s also the scoring multiplier that builds with each other blue object you collect, ultimately increasing to 5x the value for the rest of the level. Yellow stays in the screen a “medium” amount of time for 300 points, while red only happens for about a second and scores 500 points. The letters are also tied to the words EXTRA and SPECIAL. Each maze gives you three “random” letters, and if you spell either word, you automatically beat the stage you’re on, and EXTRA banks you a free life. SPECIAL gives you a full credit in the machine, which is functionally useless on an emulator. There’s no dip switch option to make it an extra life instead of a credit. Also, this thing is straight-up rigged. In multiple games, I came one letter short of spelling either word, but the game never randomly gave me either, defying odds in the millions or possibly even billions. Or just 1%. Huh, I figured it would be astronomical, but it’s not. Okay, still, it’s clearly not TRULY random, but with the level skipping, I get why.

Coleco, rights holders of Lady Bug, never released an Atari 2600 build of this. Given how stripped-down and disastrously easy their version of Mouse Trap was (see Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include Part Two for my review), that might be a good thing. Coleco even advertised that it was coming to the 2600, but no prototype has ever been found. A 2006 homebrew of Lady Bug was released and it’s very impressive. Check it out for sure.

It’s kind of heartbreaking that Lady Bug has never gotten a modern re-release. A lot of games that followed in Pac-Man’s wake have a cynical, cash-grabby vibe about them. Look at something like Eyes, where the maze wasn’t very thoughtful at all. Comparatively, Lady Bug is much more elegant and cleverly designed to maximize both strategy and excitement. The maze is logically designed and not just slapped together. The scoring system is very rewarding. And, frankly, it’s just plain charming. It’s also so simple that it’s suitable for all ages. Tomorrow, I’ll be looking at Mouse Trap, which has a whopping four buttons (that was a lot of buttons for 1981!), color-coated gates operated by the player, and a stalker-element in a bird that flies over the walls directly at you. I had my nieces and nephew, ages 8 to 12, play both. They were all impressed by Mouse Trap, but the game they wanted to play was Lady Bug. Actually, they wanted a modern remake of it, and I’d be fine with that. It’s due for a comeback.
Verdict: YES!
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