Krypton

Published on Game On 02/90

Krypton is a chemical element that is categorized as a noble gas. Xenon is also a chemical element that belongs to the noble gas family. Both names were used for games that happen to be shoot 'em ups.

While Xenon by the Bitmap Brothers is widely remembered, especially its sequel on the Amiga, the same can't be said for Krypton. Admittedly, the latter only saw releases on a diskmag. And yes, I'm using plural here. More on that later.

The game opens with this title screen where the Krypton logo seems to have slipped halfway down the screen. It's totally static, even though it is entirely made up of sprites, and there would be enough space for a classic sine curve movement. Admittedly, there is something to be said about deliberately holding back and not overdoing it with stuff moving about on a game's title screen.

The text scroller at the top lists the people who worked on Krypton. The one name I recognize is Jens-Christian Huus (a.k.a. JCH) who is credited for the music. JCH is a very well-known and liked C64 musician who made a lot of great tracks. If I go by the High Voltage SID Collection, the tune used in Krypton is called Yoko Tsuno and wasn't specifically made for this game. It's a short piece that I find a bit grating, as it sounds too much like silly circus music to my ears.

Woah! The GET READY screen compensates for the relatively tame title screen by having raster bars scrolling up and down constantly. Too bad the text is just using the standard C64 font, which brings the fanciness level down a notch.

And thus the shooting begins. The screen scrolls from right to left, and waves of enemies appear that need to be shot down or evaded. It's all very familiar, even for the game's initial release in 1988. Krypton's main inspiration was most likely Delta (1987) which had a similarly animated player sprite:

Krypton's ship animation looks smoother, because it has about double the number of frames, but Delta's ship has a more interesting design, I think. While looking at Krypton's ship, I noticed that its "wings" are animated in the same style as the colored raster bars in the GET READY screen. Whether there was any intention behind that I can't tell.

Both games use the same method to display the player's shots. Instead of sprites, the shots are modified characters that fly across the screen in steps of 8 pixels. As you can see, the shots of both games look almost identical. The only difference being that Delta's shot consists of two characters.

This is another game that uses sprites to put graphics into the upper and lower border. The Krypton logo at the top is 192 pixels wide, which is the exact width that can be achieved with the C64's eight hardware sprites put next to each other (8 * 24). The logo remains static for the entire game. The graphics at the bottom are more interesting. At first glance, you might think the programmer somehow managed to display characters in the border area. But what you're seeing is another row of sprites. In the above image, I've added gray backgrounds to the individual sprites so you can see how the graphics were split up. There are the remaining ships ("lives") which are just three sprites, as one would expect. The SCORE: and LEVEL: text lines are one (single color) sprite. The reason why this sprite appears rather blocky is because it is displayed at double width and double height, which is something that can be set for each sprite. The actual score number is displayed with two single color sprites that are double width (hence the elongated digits). Note that the level number is also part of one of these sprites, and in good old programmer fashion, it starts at zero. How does the game change the numbers, e.g. if the score goes up? Is there sprite data for each possible number that can be displayed? But the C64 does not have enough memory to store the data for 1000 individual sprite shapes! What wizardry is this? The answer is much simpler: Whenever the score changes, the corresponding sprite's shape gets simply redrawn with the new digits. Since the standard font is used here, I assume that the bitmap data of the digits (PETSCII characters 48-57) is copied over into the sprite shape. This is easy and quick enough to do, so the change appears to be immediate.

Hey! Not cool, game! Not cool!

The fourth wave of enemies sneaks up from behind and will most likely kill you when you play Krypton for the first time. Even if you don't stick to the leftmost side when the formation appears, the enemies will eventually reach you and destroy your ship. Since there is no way to shoot backward, your only chance to survive is to dive into a gap between the bubbles below.

Like this. Luckily, there is a large enough gap for the player sprite to fit in. Touching any of the bubbles causes the ship to explode. Because in space, bubbles burst you.

In the above animation, you can also see how the scoring works: Each destroyed enemy is worth 10 points, and if an entire wave is wiped out, the player gets awarded another 100 points on top of that.

The enemy variety leaves a bit to be desired, because at that point in the game you've already seen all of them, except for the following:

That's not a bunch of enemies exploding because I hit them with a wondrous, curving super-shot. No, that's a wave of aliens that look like explosions.

After that, there are two more waves (another one coming from behind, but easier to evade), and then the game starts repeating the enemies' attack patterns. The sad thing is, that's literally all the game has to offer. From here on out, the seven waves just loop indefinitely, without ever changing their order or the aliens' appearances.


As embarrassing as it may sound, the only thing that causes me to lose ships in Krypton are the bubbles. Even though their pattern is just a couple of screens wide and then repeats, the repetition is not synchronized with the attack waves. This means, each time aliens approach from behind, I have to hope for a sufficiently large gap to appear in time. This is not always guaranteed, and the iffy collision detection with the bubbles doesn't help in that regard.

Here's an example: I tried to fit into that space between the bubbles, which was the only spot I could find before the enemies would reach me, but it turned out to be too narrow, and half a second later I was space debris.

A death means starting from the very beginning of the level, regardless of how far you got. Considering how long this stage apparently is, this is rather cruel, but not unheard of among similar games of the time.

If it weren't for this one enemy formation, I bet I could beat the game without much trouble. When I played it as a kid, I would always lose my ships before getting anywhere close to the end of the first level. Little did I know that Krypton had a dark secret lurking within its blue pixel heart:

Using the dirty tricks of emulation, I decided to disable sprite collisions and just let the game run at warp speed, so I could finally get beyond the first level. I counted the number of waves as they passed by, and I came to 67 until finally, something happened:

Um... okay? I guess I go to the next stage now?

Wait, what? It jumps directly to the high score table and wants me to enter my name! Does this mean that I completed the game?

Answer: Yes, it does. I just played through the entirety that is Krypton, and all I got was a text message and a high score entry. What's worse, though, is the fact that this is essentially a lie:

Why have a level display if there is only one level? Were the authors trying to make their game look larger than it was? Is that the reason why the stage is so incredibly long and one of the enemy formations deliberately hard to evade? I don't know, but it sure feels like that.



CONCLUSION

Krypton is a technically competent but very monotone shoot 'em up that takes literally 35 seconds of gameplay time until you've seen everything it has to offer. I'm not making this up, I used my phone's stopwatch to time it. There are no weapon upgrades, nor are there any new enemies introduced later on.

The monotony is also reflected in the graphics, where shades of blue dominate during most of the game. The music track loops after about one minute and quickly starts grating on one's ears.

All in all, Krypton feels unfinished, as if a looming deadline prevented the authors from adding more substance to the final product. That might be the real reason why there is an unused level counter in the game.

Sadly, this is still the best game on this edition of Game On. I've written quite a bit about the catastrophe that is Mega Paratrooper, and the third game on the disk, B.A.T., is an uninspired Pong clone that I wouldn't know what to write about.

I also have to mention that this wasn't even the first time Krypton got published on Game On. It had already seen a previous release on the very first issue back in 1988. This just makes me wonder how desperate Game On's staff was for games to put on this issue.