The A-Team - Pity the fool who plays these games

Licenced games. Nobody expects them to be good. Sometimes you get exceptions... Robocop or Airwolf. This is not one."If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can play... a crappy A-Team game."

The A-Team should need no introduction. It's not only one of the most famous television programmes ever made it is also one of the single greatest achievements of modern civilisation. It was the saga of four crime fighting Vietnam veterans, none of which had sensible names. Cigar chewing John "Hannibal" Smith, "Howling Mad" Murdock, Templeton "Face" Peck, and Boscos "B.A." Baracus. These have-a-go mercs could build weapons out of anything (I think they once built a tank out of bed-posts and springs) and where such crack shots that they could riddle a bar-room with machine gun fire and not kill a single human being, yet every bottle in the building would be shot to shit.

To my knowledge (based on the hour or two of gruelling research I did while drinking some alcoholic Dandelion & "howling mad" Burdock) there have only been four A-Team video games ever produced. The most recent is a mobile app based on the lacklustre attempt at a reboot movie from 2010, so we'll skip that noise and go straight into the old school crunk. Kicking off with 1989's El Equipo A on CPC, MSX, DOS and ZX Spectrum.

 

We're starting with the last game released based on the show, as it's by far the most sensible use of the licence and I like to progressively get stupider. El Equipo A was only released in Spain and is probably the only half decent A-Team game. Its an Operation Wolf clone doing nothing special but it ticks all the boxes. It's rather typical of the genre, and could very easily have not been an A-Team game except for that adorable wee Mr T sprite darting past.

So that's the well reasoned, rational approach to making an A-Team game out of the way. Let's begin the shit-show!

Your ears aren't liars. That's the Star Wars theme playing there for no possible reason. The good folks at Elwood Computers where nice enough to label each of those faces there so that you know that they're not Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and C3P0 . They may as well be, for all the similarity this C64 game has to the TV show on which it's apparently based.

Check out this scintillating gameplay footage...

Yeah so that's pretty much it. You shoot up at the four massive heads of the A-Team. Supposedly you're the series long time antagonist Colonel Lynch, but then you get shot and it reads that the A-Team caught you, so you can't be Lynch because he's chasing them right? Are you some random thug baddie then? Why am I giving so much thought to what is an absolute raging crock of shite?

So whatever that was, it was the second attempt to convert the adventures of the A-Team to game format. To their credit it was very close to that episode where the A-Team's heads inflated to a vast size, detached and floated off into space whilst dropping missiles out of their neck-holes which never happened.

Here's the first attempt on the olde 2600. Don't let this faithful cover fool you, it's equally as detached from the TV show as that crazy jibber-jabber on the C64.

What is it with the title screens of these abhorrent  A-Team games and outer space themes? This nonsense may as well have had the Star Wars music too while they where at it.

So gameplay wise, we're back with disembodied heads again. Why where these programmers obsessed with the A-Teams heads? This might make some sense if the player character was "Face" but you're here playing "B.A"/Mr T in his entirety, well not his entirety, because you're just his frigging head.

It's an eight-directional shooter in which ye as T must shoot bullets out of your face. You have to fend off some bad men and whatever the hell the rest of that crap is until your title rocket can take off. He "Ain't going on no plane" but "B.A." seems to have no problem with rocket ships.

You then move to the boss fight, where you are reminded to KILL WARHEAD ON BOTTOM! once again I'm not sure if this boss is Colonel Lynch, The Riddler from Batman, or an angry gardener. I do know that he has some sexy yet dangerous dance moves that spark lighning out of his feet. It's murder on the dancefloor, and you better not KILL WARHEAD ON BOTTOM!

You'll be relieved to know that this hunk of crunk was never released, and survives only as a prototype. Strange that this was canned but that C64 monstrosity managed to get out there on shop shelves and steal kids pocket money. Thats the type of thing the A-Team would put a stop to.

So after playing these piles of bile for so long I'm actually inspired to go do something other than play crappy old games that should be forgotten. Like mow the lawn, clean out my shed, or punch myself repeatedly in the groin. You know... things preferable to playing A-Team games. Mr T has that effect on me. He's an inspirational figure, even when he is just a floating head.

You can catch up with us on Twitter @GamesInBits or visit our website gamesinbits.com and try out our games. It's safe to say that they're better than any based on the A-Team.