Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: malbers@ns.ccsn.edu (Marcus Albers) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Cybernetix Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 5 Jun 1993 15:25:56 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 142 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <1uqdu4$oep@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: malbers@ns.ccsn.edu (Marcus Albers) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: game, shoot-em-up, arcade, shareware PRODUCT NAME Cybernetix BRIEF DESCRIPTION This is a side scrolling shoot'em up with parallax scrolling, excellent animation, digitized sound F/X, and multiple weapons. The game is shareware and can be found on any Aminet ftp site in the directory pub/aminet/game/shoot. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Vision Software Address: Unit 10, St. Kevin's Arcade Karangahape Road Central Auckland New Zealand LIST PRICE This game is shareware, and the registration fee is 5 pounds sterling (about 10 US dollars should do it). What do you get for your money? The satisfaction of having registered this excellent game. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE NTSC Standard mode. Operates in PAL mode. Not compatible while A570 CD-ROM drive is enabled. SOFTWARE None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 500 AmigaDOS 1.3 1 megabyte Chip RAM External floppy drive A570 CD-ROM drive REVIEW I remember the world of shareware for the Commodore 64 way back when. If I was able to find a game that used sprites instead of a custom character set, it was an excellent find. But finding games that even came close to being commercial quality was unheard of. Things very well may have changed, but I have now entered the world of Amiga shareware. This began in the summer of 1992, when I ordered my first shareware disk from DevWare. I loaded the first program on the disk, a game called Hate which is a Zaxxon clone. I was greeted with a high-res 32 color title screen and 4 voice stereo sound. I was shocked! Was this the world of Amiga shareware? Yes, it was. And it continues to get better... Enter Cybernetix. This is a shoot'em up in the style of Defender and Sanxion. Basic plot: shoot everything that moves. Nothing too cerebral here, but it is fun nonetheless. This is a jewel of a find that should be added to anyone's collection, even if you don't play shoot'em ups as a general rule. The game uses left-right scrolling, with a parallax scrolling starfield. Your mission is to clear the asteroids and aliens which arrive in waves. A small radar system at the top of the screen, a la Defender, shows all of the active aliens remaining in the wave. The longer it takes you to clear a wave, the more aliens show up. The asteroids are destroyed in a matter reminiscent of the old Asteroids game on the Atari 2600: you shoot the big one, and two smaller ones fly off. The smaller asteroids will often yield blue energy crystals. These can be picked up for points, or you can leave them for one of the types of alien space craft to pick up. If one of these aliens picks up two of the crystals, and you shoot the alien, it yields a power-up. This gives you a special ability ranging from speeding up your shots to giving you a spread gun to yielding a temporary shield. These are very useful, especially in the later levels when things seem to get impossibly fast. As I have mentioned before, the animation, graphics, and sound in this game are all superb. The asteroid rotation animation is excellent, almost to the point where it might be mistaken for ray-traced animation. Your ship's explosion is quite spectacular as well: not just your basic go-down-in-flames type explosion, but actual parts of your ship go flying. The warnings ("sector cleared" and such) are done with digitized voice. And yes, it is British for those Americans that can't stand the accent :-) (my dad can't, but I happen to love the sound of the British voice). None of the digitizing is scratchy in the least. As far as actual graphics, I believe they are 32 color hires graphics. The game doesn't run in overscan, which would be nice, nor does it run in interlaced mode. DOCUMENTATION All of the documentation that is needed is available on the startup screen of the game, including pictures of the aliens and what they do. LIKES AND DISLIKES What did I like? The graphics and animation are first-rate. The sound is just as good. I always like shoot'em ups that have multiple weapons; this gives the game a little more variety. What didn't I like? Not much. A "continue" option would have been a welcome addition. Overscan and interlace support would have been welcome as well. Other than that, not much. BUGS The only bug that I found was that the title screen tends to flash; i.e., the graphics jump a bit. This doesn't follow into the actual game, so I believe that it is a minor bug. CONCLUSIONS I rate this game 9.4 out of a possible 10 points. COPYRIGHT NOTICE I impose no copyright on this review. I only ask that if you find this review good enough to post on an online service such as GEnie or Compuserve that you notify me via E-Mail first. Marcus Albers, malbers@ns.ccsn.edu --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu