MISC GAMES
RELEASES
CYBERDROME 1.2 by RHEA FX standard ST
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Some time ago release of this update was announced on DHS. As games have
become really rare these days on ST, I decided to give it a try. Actually this
isn't quite a new game but more an enhanced version of a game first released in
1992. Gosh, it doesn't make you feel any younger !
Oddly the authors of the game have decided to make it shareware as the full
version will cost you $10. Dunno if they meant it seriously or if it was to be
taken as a joke, but I just cannot imagine shareware games on ST these days !
Anyway I visited their homepage (you can get the url from DHS news section) and
downloaded the shareware trial version, namely a 150 Kb packed file. Once
unpacked onto my harddrive, I switched to low resolution and ran the only PRG I
could find among the many unpacked files.
Shortly after I was welcomed by a poor quality screen, made of blue polygons
and x8 font. The cover pic is of the same low quality reminding of early ST
games. Well sorry but in 92 there were already nice looking games. This looks
like amateur painting, surely a guy who knows nothing about antialiasing or had
no time to add some. Anyway let's keep going.
The main menu, ugly as the rest of the game, is a messy combination of boxes
looking like a computer interface, always with the same (system ???) font
declined in red, green or blue. These are presumably the only colors used...
Seeing some figures in the lower left corner I went for '1' and kept pressing
keys at random until something got started.
Yeah I'm there ! I'm a pilot, ready to launch in his fierce and ugly looking
polygon ship. There's some countdown and there you go, wandering aimlessly in
blue corridors. The game is said to be inspired from world famous movie *TRON*
but except for the palette excessive blue, comparison went no further. You have
to use keys of the numeric pad of your keyboard to control your ship and that
doesn't go really easy. To make you see it by yourself here comes an excerpt
taken from the textfile enclosed in the archive :
=============================================================================
HELM CONTROL HELM CONTROL
8 Forward Thrust ( Decrease Elevation
2 Reverse Thrust ) Increase Elevation
4 Turn Left 90 degrees / Activate Hyper-Jump
6 Turn Right 90 degrees * Configure Hoverjet
1 Slide Left Hyper Mode / Armor Mode
3 Slide Right
5 Stop All Thrusters SHIELD CONTROL
- Decrease Polarity
VIEW DIRECTION + Increase Polarity
7 Rotate View to Left Toggle Shield Polarity Settings
9 Rotate View to Right (-) Negative Shield ON
Null Shield - No Shielding
MISCELLANEOUS SYSTEMS (+) Positive Shield ON
0 (ZERO) Weapon Trigger (++) Weapons & Target ACTIVE
Fire Weapon (Weapons On)
Gravity-Tow (Weapons off) POWER TRANSFER SYSTEM (PTS)
ENT (ENTER) . (PERIOD) PTS Select
Sub-Grid: Gate-Access (Toggle Fill / Drain / Off)
Grid: Mine Location
=============================================================================
Soon enough I felt bored, always wandering in empty corridors, turning left
or right and seeing no other thing to do... The game features no music and no
sound FX except for a few ones that sound like bugs...
Bottom line : this game should have stayed sleeping on a harddrive. Maybe it
could have been fun and even good looking back in '92 (who knows ?) but now in
the year 2002 it just looks, sounds and plays like crap. Thinking of it as a
shareware almost makes me laugh to death ! Delete it right away.
ARTIC MOVES by Dinamic Software standard ST
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What ? Another commercial game that was never released ? Hum I already had
enough with Cyberdrome but let's see what this Artic Moves offers. The game
comes on two disks, well once you've unpacked the two archives of course. Right
from the first gfx, not looking bad at all, I felt familiar with the makers of
AM. Minutes laters, I shuffled thru the many floppies I preciously hold under
my ST and picked two games known as After the War and Astro Marine Corps (AMC).
These two games had similar graphics as well as gameplay : you're a muscled guy
who has to defeat tons of ennemies. In After the war, it was more like a not
quite satisfiying Double Dragon clone and AMC was another failed attempt to
challenge Turrican supremacy in the gender. Then, what about Artic Moves, a
game finished in 92 but that never came out ?
Needless to bore you with the storyline, I don't even remember it but it can
be summed up as follows : plenty of nasties, you only good guy and earth last
hope. stop. Kill the bastards. Stop. End of transmission. Oki then I connected
my good old "speedking" pad and clicked on 'mission 1'. Then I was asked to
insert disk 2, damn how come you have to swap disk say 15 seconds after booting
the first one ? I'll never get that !
Oki here we are standing on an iced ground, surely somewhere in the Artic
(no shit ?), ready to intrude some vilain's secret base. Your character can
move, jump, crouch and shoot. It tends to react too slow what makes you really
frustrated after a while when you get killed at the same place again and again.
There are plenty of ennemies, too many actually !! You will have to shoot
soldiers, guys in jetpacks, some automated riffles robots, blabla blabla.......
Graphics do look ok to me, nothing more but pleasant enough. Sound is almost
reduced to nothingness except for a few digitized effects. It all goes a bit
too slow especially when turning back to kill the bastards behind you and
jumps are unrealistic to the max (it seems like our guy has something stuck up
in the ass !!). But above all, the game plays too fucking difficult !! Ammo and
life is limited of course but ennemies aren't and whenever you turn back to
pick up a missed item, you have to face a new wave of ennemies. After a while
you just get bored, now remembering how frustrating some games used to be in
the early 90s.
Bottom line : unlike Cyberdrome, gfx are okay here and even show some style
still the game seems unfinished with no music and very few FX. Above all it's
completely spoiled by an unadequate difficulty level that will drive you insane
in the end ! If you're an hardcore coder who claims he's gone thru every little
ST game, then here's a new challenge. If you are not, then don't even try it,
it's just another waste of time.
MEM by Exocet of CREATORS standard Ataris
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This game is the COMPLETE opposite of the two ones reviewed just above :
it's small (less than 40 Kb), cute and fun ! Where Cyberdrome and Artic Moves
used at least 700Kb of space on disk, Exocet managed to put all the fun in a
single file. Run that tiny prg and you'll soon be welcomed by the intro screen
shown above. From then, things are pissed easy : press ESC to quit or any other
key to run a game. Controls are also very easy since you only need a mouse with
a working button :)
The game, MEM, is based on a wellknown cards memory game : forty cards are
placed on screen, divided in 5 lines of 8 cards each. To unveil a card, just
click on it. Now you have to find the other card that shows the same motive. Of
course you can only click on another card, then if motives don't match, both
cards motives are hidden again. After a while, and a few cards unveiled, you'll
have to remember what motive was hidding where and that's where this game rocks
so much : could it be easier than that ?? I don't think so. Btw here's a snap
of the set of cards.
All motives look great, following Exocet's now usual cartoonlike style and
the whole thing really looks colorful. A discreet soundchip is played while you
struggle with your memory, trying to remember where the hell you already saw
that pacman or piece of cheese. Once you have found all matches, your number of
tries and time record are shown, thus giving you some points. My own record is
95 (about 50 tries and 120 seconds); try to beat this !
Bottom line : small, cute and addictive are the three words you need to keep
in mind. I don't think that working on a full game for the ST is still worth
these days (well except for RG games of course but hey they're nuts :) but I
really love small games like MEM, Pie Bill Gates and others. You absolutely
need to get MEM : it looks great, sounds cool, play fine and will get your
braincells overheated for sure ! One regret tho : why can't we save highscores
and send them to CREATORS HQ so that the best of us can compete ? Too bad :(
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