--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"BOLD' 1.1b" by LAURENT KERMEL
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
system ..... ST, STe, Falcon, STEEM, 1 MB RAM, RGB/VGA
tested on .. Falcon/VGA, STEEM (the worst choice to play the game)
genre ...... shot'em'up
size ....... one disk, not harddrive installable
release .... game created in 1989/9o, finished in 2oo4
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As I checked the DHS site for news I stumbled over this game (where else?) and
as it said "R-Type a like" and I like fast and frantick shooters, I leeched it
right away to check it out.
At first, BOLD' is a game that was started about 15 years back (woah!) by a
single french coder, Laurent Kermel, who tells on his website that he worked on
many other games too in the past, but somehow all those games seem to be never
released or finished... untill now, as Laurent decided to make some final
touches on them to give 'em away for free, good thing, no?
A thing that impressed me right away on his page was the very professional look
of his games that partly can deal with commercial games very well...
BOLD' is one of them, a horizontal scrolling shot'em'up in R-Type style. No big
story behind, just make your way through a space station, fight against many
different baddies, robots and space ships with several weapons.
Clou at this point is that your hero can transform itself from a men wearing a
heavy armed space dress into a spaceship and back, this allows you to fly
through smaller points at the steady scrolling level without getting destroyed.
Ok, the Level One Boss has to suffer! The things bound on my ship can all be
collected in level one, such as a two missile throwers, a drone and a laser.
The game features 5 different designed worlds with partly changing enemies and
and interesting obstacles as well as different active and passive ground
installations. If you have made your way through a single level, where you can
collect special items like power ups, new weapons and so on, the usual bad ass
waits for your appearance and a lot of fire power is needed to blast em away.
If you have blast'em away, you will enter a shop where you can buy and sell your
equipment, power ups, extra lifes and so on, you have to pay with the points you
made in the level before, so every killed enemy is worth some money later, a
good reason to kill'em all! This shop reminds me hard to "Xenon 2", in its idea
and style... no question, I liked the Bitmap Bros games a lot and this shop gave
me a little flashback to those great times.
This really isn't Aldi, Lidl nor Walmart...
Ok, let's take a closer look to the technics. At first, the game comes along on
a protected disk but MSA packed. It isn't harddrive installable, bad for the
Falcon owners. Yeps, you're right, the game runs without any problems on the
Falcy as it doesn't uses special ST features like rasters and open borders. And
so it does on STEEM, but there you have to play around with the speed buttons as
the game is nearly unplayable fast, even on my 233 MMX Pentium if I chose the
8Mhz option. But as it runs fine on Falcon too, there is no need to try the
emulation at all, you have to know that my ST's are sleeping in the cellars
nowadays... dreaming of better times.
The rocking things coming now, the grafix are, apart from the intro/game over
pixels, that do their job but aren't brainkillers, well done, the enemies and
stuff are nice pixeled and partly nice animated, the scrolling is soft and quite
smooth (the game is coded in GFA...) and offers even some scrolling stars in the
background. The enemies appearing in always the same waveforms, that isn't that
thrilling but as there are many different ones coming up in later levels, it
doesn't matters that much.
The intro furthermore offers some trackermusic while you get only some chip
generated fx in the game itself, it is a bit boring with the time.
The controls are realised just with the mouse, right mouse button to transform
your hero, left one to shot. Moving the mouse around moves your hero... a little
strange solution but works very well.
As you give away all your points as money in the shop, there is no highscore
included. That surely doesn't rises the motivation that much but the shop itself
is a good thing to have chance to see later levels, as you just have 5 lifes and
no continues. The several available weapons give a special touch and you can, if
you have enough money, transform your little hero into a ultra heavy armed thing
that floodes the screen with bullets.
So what at all?! BOLD' is, even though it is about 15 years old now, still a
very nice and cool game and should force lovers of shot'em'up
games to blow away the dust from their machines.
For a GFA game the techniques are quite stunning, the grafix
well done and sounds ok. Special features like several power
ups, special weapons, the shop as well as so many different
enemies give a quite good motivation to give it a try again and
again. So what to say? Get it and blow some baddies away!
PS... If you're using a harddisk then take care from booting from the game disk,
it may cause a harddisk crash, as it happened on my Falcon after the 2nd
try of the game... :/
_______________________________________________________________moondog_o6/2k4___
|
