Dear Vic and Shaun,
Thank you for another splendid podcast.
Solar Fox was an ossum pick. I think I agreed with most of what Shaun had to say about it - apart from one thing - there were points aplenty to be scabbed!!!!! By weaving backwards and forwards horizontally, trapping the ships at the edge of the screen, and shooting their bullets, you can get 100,000 points or more... by the end of level 2! And that's on the 'normal' slow-mode.
This month's duo was a nice try too.
Scramble is - of course - even better than Solar Fox, and a great starting point for any knock-offs. My favourite from back in the day was the dodgily titled 'Penetrator' on the ZX Spectrum - with it's built in level editor, and colour-clash.
But I also have fond memories of Atlantis.
I first saw B.O.A. in the newsagent where I used to play games on the way to primary school in the early 80s. Back in them days we got 80 minutes for lunch, so we had plenty of time to run home and back, and invest our bus money in the 'spacies', as we called them, until the bell was about to ring (and sometimes after). The next time I saw it was about 1986, when my brother and I found it in the games room of a campsite we'd stopped off at on holiday. The tech or op or whoever had left almost 30 credits on the clock, so we made it our mission to use them all up. Weirdly, no one else came into the games room for the rest of the afternoon, so said mission was eventually accomplished. Happy days.
On coming back to it now, while I still like the game, I'm not so enamoured with its lack of structure. As far as I can see, there are no clear levels or bonuses or end of game baddie. With just a bit more thought, this could have been a great game!
Mariner, on the other hand, has plenty of structure. It also has 'janky' charm in spades. It's just a shame that the game itself is - to use the technical term - sh*te. At the end of the day, the graphics, the sound and the gameplay are all way below par. The only way to get a decent score was to make it through the final level, which was mostly impossible. I played this one a lot - and only managed it two or three times.
How about a nice vertical shoot em up next? Have you had a look at Tokio (Scamble formation)? Simple stuff but very addictive...
