Iridis Alpha, developed by Jeff Minter of Llamasoft and published by Hewson in 1986.
"CAN YOU KEEP PACE WITH THE POWER OF IRIDIS ALPHA?
Enter into the world of Jeff Minter's IRIDIS ALPHA. Manoeuvre in the bizarre world of high speed surrealism. Bombard your senses with dynamic visual experiences whilst keeping pace with fast and furious bi-directional scrolling. Mega blast your way through 5 planets each with 20 different levels. Get to grips with IRIDIS ALPHA. The key to your survival is-ENERGY!"
Jeff Minter takes on the classic shoot em up and intends to shake up the genre with Iridis Alpha. From what we know of his previous games, it usually about putting the player at as big a disadvantage as possible so is this going to be a play once and be done with it or perhaps the greatest game llamasoft ever put out?. It ultimately comes down to being the kind of player that plays games for fun or have an affinity for score chasing in really challenging games.
The game stands out for having better sprite work than other llamasoft games as well being quite colourful with plenty of rainbow gfx throughout. if you are unfamiliar with the game watching the video for the first time, nothing will make much sense but stick with it. The game is split into two playfields working like a mirror. You only control one side at a time even though you will be moving both screens all the time. Both craft has it's own energy bar. Killing enemies fills the bar. crashing into enemies empties it. The colour of your ship also reflects the energy level. That's a normal way of doing things right? except here if you fill your energy bar, you overload and go boom and equally if you empty it, you go boom. To help managing it, you can land and dump energy into the core whist also balancing the energy reserves of both craft at the same time. In the landed state you can walk across the ground whilst shooting but not that useful. You need to jump of the edge of the land in order to take off. If you managing to fill the core with energy, you will go into a bonus round for more points.
The bonus round requires you to fly to the top of the screen within a time limit. You shoot in the opposite direction to push your craft where you want to go but there is gravity and inertia working against you as well as obstacles blocking your path. IBalls will be attacking you and taking your time away so you shoot shoot at them when possible. Make it to the top and receive a score bonus. Back into the game, the idea is to fly fast but many attack waves wont allow you to do it as many of them home in on you. Flying fast raises your score multiplier and sitting still will score you nothing. Many enemies will drop gates which will jump you between both playfields. This is a key game mechanic as the side you are not playing is degrading and if left to long, you go boom. This can be especially problematic with attack waves that don't drop the warps, but there is a way out. Every level has a warp gate that allows you to move between worlds which will also reset the entropy.
In this longplay, I don't manage to finish the game. I don't know if it even ends and it maybe just a pure score attack endless game. Five worlds each with 20 waves (0-19) equalling 100 levels. You have to do all that on both sides for 200 levels in all. As you complete waves, you are working towards unlocking the other planets. These unlock at a set number of waves completed so you are free to complete these on which ever planets you have access to. Each time you destroy an enemy you will move an arrow at the bottom of the screen which selects the destination of the planet warp.
I'm not sure how realistic it is to expect the player to survive long enough to finish them all. I don't and that's with all the quality of life features modern emulators provide. That said although I have a good idea what I'm supposed to be doing, I may not have the right strategy to tackle it as intended. My initial intention of the longplay was to show one level with all waves completed and a couple of levels on the other planets. But due to how long it takes to unlock the extra planets, the playthrough really dragged on.
Overall then, I don't think this is a fun game. There are too many ideas thrown into the game and many of them are working against the player. As a C64 game though, it looks good, scrolls smoothly and controls reasonably well but there is definitely a difficulty curve to adjust to.
There are extra lives to earn when meeting score milestones and when they run out, it is game over. To close the video I show an extra game (Made in France)that appears when pausing the game. Its a simple game which has you dropping mirrors to direct your worm to the dot. Collect as many as you can before the time runs out. I then show another hidden mode in the pause mode (DNA) which looks to be just an effect generator where you can set some parameters to change the flow of the dna.
Негізгі бет Ойындар Commodore 64 Gameplay - Iridis Alpha (EU)
Пікірлер