Dear Readers,
I played this game a bit more. That high score entry is kind of insane. I can spell out my full name in there!
I got a Micro SD card for my Vega. Now I can have a single save point per game, which means scores will be saved and redefined keys will be saved. Thank goodness!
The power up system for this game is as follows:
1st - 5,000 points
2nd - Extra fire on screen at once
3rd - Hold the fire button to keep shooting
4th - Extra life
Similar to Gradius but also different. There are no speed power ups, thank goodness. There are also some important decisions to make. When I got to the Wall of Hades I had the 5,000 highlighted. I wondered if I should bank the points or wait. Then I lost a life and lost the chance too. I didn't get any further, but now at least I can save scores and keys!
Showing posts with label 1999. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1999. Show all posts
Sunday, 24 April 2016
Saturday, 23 April 2016
1 1999 - Condensed Gradius-like Shmup/STG
ZX Spectrum Vega game #0002
Dear Readers,
Today I'll talk about this game, which was made by a group called Ice Cool Coders. Wow. It's got a cool title screen, kinda scanliney over the title in space near a weird alien planet. Then I pressed a button and the second title screen appeared and it was kinda dramatic with flashy arcade attract effects and music by Steve Corry. Some speech there too! No idea what it said though. The Ice Cool Coders are Balor Knight and Chris Pile. The high score table is pretty awesome, with funny phrases there instead of names and each entry has about 30 characters! The top score is 70,000 by default. If you don't put in your name you come up as "Mr NOBODY WAZ ERE"
"PREPARE FOR DEATH!" is kinda cool and again I like the scanline effect.
The death animations are nice and disintegratey, but are unskippable and get kind of old after dying so many times. I know it's THE END, I just don't need to see it go red and explode slowly for the 100th time!
The game itself is a horizontal shmup stg with different named sections. Some have enemies like the first ones you see in Gradius and others have a boss or walls to avoid. There are also annoying enemies that come up from behind so you can't exactly hug the left side of the screen. These sections loop and are really fast and difficult.
The game is fun enough but you can only shoot one bullet at a time at first, which can be tough to manage. There's a power up system too that's like Gradius, but I haven't really sussed it yet. Whoever programmed this for the Vega seems to have forgotten to put in a button to activate power ups and put two fire buttons instead. Ah well. It can be redefined at least with the in-game option. My highest score this session was 13,585.
The furthest I reached was this thing that looks like the brain from Life Force or Salamander. It moved much quicker though!
Dear Readers,
Today I'll talk about this game, which was made by a group called Ice Cool Coders. Wow. It's got a cool title screen, kinda scanliney over the title in space near a weird alien planet. Then I pressed a button and the second title screen appeared and it was kinda dramatic with flashy arcade attract effects and music by Steve Corry. Some speech there too! No idea what it said though. The Ice Cool Coders are Balor Knight and Chris Pile. The high score table is pretty awesome, with funny phrases there instead of names and each entry has about 30 characters! The top score is 70,000 by default. If you don't put in your name you come up as "Mr NOBODY WAZ ERE"
"PREPARE FOR DEATH!" is kinda cool and again I like the scanline effect.
The death animations are nice and disintegratey, but are unskippable and get kind of old after dying so many times. I know it's THE END, I just don't need to see it go red and explode slowly for the 100th time!
The game itself is a horizontal shmup stg with different named sections. Some have enemies like the first ones you see in Gradius and others have a boss or walls to avoid. There are also annoying enemies that come up from behind so you can't exactly hug the left side of the screen. These sections loop and are really fast and difficult.
The game is fun enough but you can only shoot one bullet at a time at first, which can be tough to manage. There's a power up system too that's like Gradius, but I haven't really sussed it yet. Whoever programmed this for the Vega seems to have forgotten to put in a button to activate power ups and put two fire buttons instead. Ah well. It can be redefined at least with the in-game option. My highest score this session was 13,585.
The furthest I reached was this thing that looks like the brain from Life Force or Salamander. It moved much quicker though!
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