|
KONAMI
1983 |
Played
in MAME32 version 35b3 |
 Yes,
yet another shooter, ever since I built my custom-made arcade joystick I cannot refrain
from playing a good old shoot 'em up, hammering those buttons through the board. Gyruss is
yet another of the all-time classics which shine through scarcely rivalled game play,
great sound and for the time brilliant graphics.
|
|
|
The
revolutionary thing about Gyruss was the fact that your movement is not from side to side,
left to right. You actually circle the screen. The enemy fighters will enter the screen
from any given the angle in formation and assemble in the centre of the screen. Once all
the formations have come in a will attack from the centre outwards. Your goal is to reach
earth passing a series of stars. |
| In
order to reach each one of these stars you will have to withstand two or three waves of
attack. Reaching a star is rewarded by a bonus stage which as usual means shooting
formations of non-aggressive enemy fighters. One power up is available which will turn
your single shot into a double shot. |
|
|
|
The
more you progress through the game the harder it will get to regain this power up which is
achieved by shooting the centre one of the bonus stars which appear in every stage. The
game is great fun to play and with a little skill you can go on for a long time. Keep
hammering those buttons...:-) |
| Tehkan 1984 |
Played in Mame32
version .35b3 |
 Bomb Jack was released in 1984 by Tekhan, The object of the game is
to guide Jack to collect the bombs on each level to advance to the next. One of the bombs
is lit, and if you collect the bombs in the correct order you get HUGE bonuses - 50000 for
23 lit bombs! To hinder you are all manner of enemies, including mechanical birds and
ufos, these enemies all have different attack patterns, the birds can only move in
straight lines, other enemies will follow you around the screen. The longer you take on
each level the faster the enemies become.
|
|
|
After every 9th lit bomb you get a power-up, this
enables you to fight back and destroy the enemies, this only lasts for 5 seconds so you
have to be quick, be sure to collect the power-up when it's grey to get the largest bonus.
Also B - bonus mulitpiers and E - extra lives appear from time to time and very rarely S -
Special, this gives you a free credit (look for the spelling mistake on the free credit
screen!). The graphics are quite good for the time, especially the backgrounds, and the
sound and music is excellent. |
| Many versions of this game were made for home computers, the
Sinclair Spectrum version was the first that I played. It was quite faithful to the arcade
original, with good graphics, but very limited colour due to the infamous colour clash
problem (this was caused by the machine only being able to display one colour per
character square, if two different sprites were on the same square the colours of one
sprite would cover the other), the C64 version was also quite good altough quite hard and
it had different sound and music. |
|
|
Overall this is a simple, but addictive game, it is easy to play
but hard to master, it gets very hard after level 15 or so. MAME emulates Bomb Jack perfectly - give it a try!
RocLobsta |
|
City Connection is a really fun game, both to look at and to
play as well as to listen to. The goal of the game is to cover every single mile of the
highways you are driving on in different cities. Every inch that you cover on these
"streets" will be painted in green which indicates where you have been already.
