PHOENIX  ranks right up there as one of my all-time favorites.  I first encountered it at a bowling alley in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, which I frequented since I was playing on a Junior-League bowling team at the time.  Since I used to have a real knack for this game, and could beat any of my peers handily at it, it was a good way to regain some team pride against; anyone who beat us on the alley would soon find themselves shredded against the Phoenix Master.   (Notice I say "used to have" – alas, I just can't seem to muster up the kind of single-minded concentration I had when I was twelve, so now the game usually beats me instead. )

This was the fourth game added to my collection, from my third trip to a Super Auction in Mesquite, TX.  It was dead when I bought it  or half-dead, anyway; the monitor worked, but the game logic wouldn't run.  That, combined with the missing glass top, meant that I was able to take it for a mere $25.  Neither of these flaws worried me too much; a new glass top would be easy enough to get, and I already had a working boardset acquired from some previous trading with another collector, so as long as the monitor worked I figured the rest would be simple enough.

Of course, once I got it home, I quickly discovered where a good portion of the former glass top had gone – inside the cabinet, and now all over the inside of my Mitsubishi Precis hatchback!  Fortunately, tempered glass tends to shatter into relatively manageable "pebbles" rather than razor-edged shards and slivers, so it was easy enough, if somewhat tedious, to vacuum them all up before bringing the cabinet inside the apartment.  Fifteen minutes of probing arounf with a VOM to make sure the power-supply voltages were correct and swap out the board, and PHOENIX  was reborn.  The "dead" boardset, too, was eventually resurrected, albeit in a somewhat unusual set of circumstances; it went into the hands of Matt McCullar, a friend and fellow videogame enthusiast; he fixed it up, got it running again, and it now lives at his workplace as a test bed for salvaged 8085 microprocessors.

This is what they call a "cocktail"-model console; it was designed primarily for bars, pizza parlors, and other such locations where people might be tempted to play a game or two of PAC-MAN along with their meal or over a pint of beer, the idea being that it can double as a table for the patrons to eat and drink off of.  As you can see, this one has a few cosmetic problems that need repair – including, of course, the missing glass top I mentioned above.  I did get a new top made for it recently, via a local glazier – but, stupidly, I forgot to account for the rounded inside corners of those metal mounting brackets, so now I've got to have another one made with the right dimensions, since tempered glass apparently can't be re-cut.

Like cabaret models, cocktails typically don't have fancy side-art.  They don't have marquees, either, although they usually have a colorful instruction-card/logo underlay beneath the glass instead.  Obviously that, too, is missing from this particular game.  I haven't quite decided what to do about that yet.

Another problem this table suffers from is that the control panels are pretty well-worn, and not just cosmetically, either – a couple of the buttons were sticking (until I replaced them) because the springs were broken inside.  It also doesn't look like those "1 Player / 2 Player" stickers were put on straight to begin with.  The controls on this style of cabinet are pretty awkwardly positioned, too – which, come to think of it, might be part of the reason I can't do nearly as well at this game as I used to; those controls are really uncomfortable to operate after more than a few minutes!

The runaway success of SPACE INVADERS  established the vertical space-shooter as one of the dominant videogame themes during the early "golden age" period.  GALAXIANS improved on the theme, by having enemies which actively dive-bombed after you instead of simply lining up to be shot at; PHOENIX  not only continued to build on the GALAXIANS theme, but also hinted at the "multi-stage" games to follow by pitting you against enemies with clearly different behaviors in each stage.

Like most games in the vertical space-shooter genre, your ship is restricted to left-right movement along the bottom of the screen, controlled either by two buttons (on the upright model) or a joystick (on the cocktail model) on the left-hand side of the control panel.  On the right are two more buttons; one for firing, and the other to activate your shields.  PHOENIX's "shield" surrounds your ship in a flashing red-and-green ring for about five seconds, during which your ship is immobilized, although you can still fire; any Phoenixes or Warbirds which strike the shield are disintegrated (and you still get the points for their destruction), and their bombs can't reach you inside the shield.  Once the shield goes down, it takes about 15-20 seconds to recharge before it can be used again.  Note, however, that the shield will not protect you from a collision with the underside of the saucer in stage 5.

Extra ships are awarded at operator-selectable intervals.  There is no "buy-in" capability; once your last ship is gone, the game is over.  PHOENIX  saves and displays the highest score, but does not allow you to enter your initials.  The high score is not saved when the game is turned off.

Stage One pits you against a formation of small yellow-and-pink Warbirds which dive-bomb you, GALAXIAN-style, in their attempts to shoot or ram your ship while a few bars of either Für Elise or Moonlight Sonata play in the background.  At first they attack singly or in groups of only two or three, but as you get further into the game they start attacking in progressively larger groups.  Unlike many GALAXIAN-style games, though, the warbirds don't just disappear of the bottom of the screen and reappear at the top; rather, after completing their power-dives they turn around and ascend back to the formation.  This is an opportunity to rack up lots of points; if you can shoot them during the brief moments when they're flapping their wings, instead of simply vanishing in a 50-point puff of pixelated smoke they'll explode rather spectacularly and award you 200 points.

Stage Two is just like Stage One, except that the Warbirds are green-and-grey, your ship can rapid-fire two shots at once, and there's no background music.  (Why you only get accelerated fire during this stage, I don't know.)  The warbirds also attack in larger numbers; typically three or four at a time.  The rapid-fire capability usually allows you to decimate this stage pretty quickly – although that may not be the best strategy, especially in the first few levels, since blowing away the entire formation too quickly means you won't have as many chances to rack up more of those 200-point "exploders"

Stage Three pits you against ten blue Phoenixes.  These start out as small eggs, which drift back and forth across the screen for a few seconds before hatching.  They, too, will attempt to dive-bomb you, often by flying in sweeping curves to try ramming you from the sides.  Your "Shield" button comes in handy here; if you time it just right, you can raise your shields and fry them in the flashing red-and-green circle which surrounds your ship for a few seconds.  Unfortunately, your shield takes a few seconds to recharge, and the Phoenixes seem to know this; if you hit the button too early, the Phoenix will hold off on its attack until the shield expires...  and sometimes, one will deliberately make a kamikaze attack to goad you into hitting the button, sacrificing itself so its brethren can come after you when your shield goes down.  The Phoenixes are easy pickings when they start out as eggs, but they're only worth 50 points that way; the real points come when they hatch.  Just because they're larger doesn't make them easier targets, though; if you don't hit them in the midsection, they'll just sustain a "wing wound" and keep coming.  Wing wounds are worth points, though, so don't pass up the opportunity to clip a Phoenix's wings when you can – just be aware that when the wing-wound heals, that Phoenix will become more aggressive.

Stage Four is the same as Stage Three, except that the Phoenixes are purple.  The purple Phoenixes also seem to hatch faster, and be a little more aggressive, than the blue ones.

In both Phoenix Attack stages, the largest points will come if you can successfuly clip both wings, then shoot the midsection.  It's not easy to do, especially in the later stages when the Phoenixes stage frequent kamikaze attacks from several directions at once, but it's worth going for if you have the opportunity.

Stage Five – the final confrontation!  A huge mothership saucer descends rapidly to about midscreen, then continues a slow descent towards you.  The only way to destroy it is to drill your way through the yellow underside of the ship, punch holes in the rotating purple shield ring, then score a direct hit on the pink-and-green Saucer Alien at the center.  (I have no idea what it's supposed to be; it certainly doesn't look like any kind of bird!)  This task is complicated by the shield ring, which slows you down because of the necessity to blow out large sections of it to get a clear shot at the alien, and by the saucer's honor-guard escort of Warbirds.  The Warbirds get really mean in this level (and stay that way for the rest of the game), dive-bombing in groups of five, six, or more and harassing you constantly as you try to get a clean shot at their alien leader.  A word of caution: do not try to destroy the whole honor guard!  If you do, a whole new  set of Warbirds will appear!  In fact, in later stages it mught be a better strategy to leave the honor guard intact, since their en masse attacks tie up the CPU and slows down the game; a lone Warbird can come after you a lot faster than a mass attack.

Your best bet is to go over to one of the far edges, where the underside is thinnest, and hammer away at the rotating ring until you've opened up a large hole in the ring.  (Don't try to destroy the whole thing - (a) you don't have time, and (b) like the Warbird honor guard, if you destroy the whole ring a new, intact one will appear.)  Then, move to the center and punch through the underside as fast as you can.  Destroying the Saucer Alien nets you a few hundred points (the amount is somewhat random, but seems to be based on both the level number and on how long you take to destroy the alien) and advances you to Stage One of the next level.

From here, the game repeats endlessly until you lose all of your ships; the primary difference is that as you progress through higher levels the birds get faster and attack in larger formations, the Phoenixes get more aggressive and will sometimes stage kamikaze attacks from two or three directions at once, and the Saucer is accompanied by a more numerous formation of warbirds.

As you might suspect, cocktail-size games are even more tightly-packed than their cabaret-sized cousins, compared to a full-size game.  The monitor takes up the bulk of the space, even though it's only a 13-inch model, and everything else kind of crowds around it.

Here are the game-logic boards, sandwiched together and mounted at an angle; this mounting scheme is necessary to leave room for the all-important coin-acceptor mechanisms.  The top board contains the primary game logic and video/sound systems; the bottom board contains a boatload of 2716 ROMs (holding a meager 2K of program and sprite data each!) and 1K static-RAM chips.  This same logic board was used, with a few minor changes, for Centuri's next game, PLEIADES; presumably, it is possible to modify the board to play either one, though I haven't tried it.  Might be an interesting project to look into, though... someday.

PHOENIX used an 8085 microprocessor, with an interesting dual-page video system that allowed one set of objects to move "over" others simply by drawing them on different layers.  (Yes, today that seems like an elementary and obvious technique, but back in 1980 when memory chips were expensive and color-graphics systems were still in their infancy, it was considered quite advanced!)  The background music played during stage one was actually generated by a "melody IC", which was basically just a chip that was pre-programmed to play one of two different melodies in a sort of synthetic "toy-piano" fashion.  (If you've ever recieved one of those musical greeting cards that plays a tune when you open it, you're familiar with the devices.)  While most PHOENIX games used a chip that played Für Elise and Moonlight Sonata, it seems that other chips from that product family were occasionally substituted, since I definitely remember having played PHOENIX consoles ("real" ones, not knock-offs) in the past that had different music – such as Blue Danube, Auld Lang Syne, and even In the Hall of the Mountain King...