Electra is a horizontal-scrolling shooter very much in the vein of Uridium.
The game starts with this rather gray title screen which doesn't exactly incite excitement. There is no animation or music, just a static, suppressive silence which is expectantly waiting for you to press a function key. The most remarkable thing here is probably the fact that five different fonts made it into one screen.
Pressing F3 switches the game's difficulty between BEGINNER and EXPERT. From my experience, this only affects the speed of your ship, which goes from "fast" to "bloody hell, way too fast". The default is set to EXPERT, so that might be the expected way to play. I'm going with BEGINNER, thank you very much.
The backstory is a relatively simple affair: In the far-flung future, mankind has found it in its scientific interest to build platforms on the surface of stars. You, a nameless space pilot, has received the honorable assignment to remove radioactive crystals from said platforms and then perform a safe landing. Numerous alien lifeforms seem to have chosen the same day to fly around those very stars, and they're just generally in your way. However, what makes your task really difficult are the platforms themselves, which were clearly not built for ships flying over them. You'll see why.
Pressing F1 puts you near the very gray platform on the very gray surface of Merope. Your ship immediately stars flying to the right, and if you don't pay attention, you'll crash into a wall after just a couple of seconds.
Like this. To avoid an early death, you can either move up or down, or you can reverse direction. For reasons unknown, your ace pilot skills prevent you from controlling your ship's speed, which forces you to perform an odd back and forth dance if you ever want to stay in place for a moment.
Admittedly, the turning animation is rather cool-looking.
The walls all have the same checkered pattern and cast a long, black shadow, which usually makes them easily recognizable. Still, if I die on a level, it's usually because I crashed into one of them.
Each platform has 48 crystals that need to be collected. You pick them up by simply flying over them.
I like the animation of the crystals. It's not only pretty, it also makes them clearly visible against the background, even though they have the same color shades as everything else on the platform. This becomes very apparent when looking at static screenshots where it's really hard to see them.
Walls aren't the only obstacles, you can also crash into various aliens. Most of them come in waves of eight from the right, though they hardly classify as waves. They just float into view, slowly move to the left, and do not react to you at all. They don't shoot at you, they never break formation, they also ignore any obstacles that you can collide with. I'm getting the impression they're really just tourists on a sightseeing tour. Still, they're usually in the way, so I'm not feeling guilty shooting them down.
Aside from the alien tourists, there's also the occasional spider-like creature or flying rocket. Neither of those can be destroyed. At least they don't travel in groups.
Luckily, collision isn't done with pure sprite collision detection but by proximity instead. This means you can graze alien sprites to a certain extent without exploding. The same goes for shooting aliens: If your shots appear to pass through an alien, then you're not properly aligned and you also won't collide with it.
If you fly around for a while, you'll notice some oddities about the way the aliens spawn: The tourists, for example, are not persistent. Flying away until they're off screen and then flying back often makes them disappear or they get replaced by a different formation. The only persistent enemies are the rockets.
While you can see only one rocket at a time, there are several of them moving over the platform simultaneously, all at the same vertical position and the same speed. They always come from the left, and they never change their vertical position until you either die or get to the next level.
The spider creatures always come from the right, and they tend to spawn at your current vertical position. Always staying at the bottom means no enemies can ever collide with you, except for the spider.
Once you've gathered all crystals, you can land on the designated spot at the platform's right end. Unlike Uridium, the game doesn't tell you when you're ready to land, nor is there any indicator that shows how many crystals you've found so far. If you can't land, you have to check for any missed crystals yourself.
 |
| Look at me, landing in the opposite direction to what's indicated, like the rebel I am! |
You get 300 points for finishing the stage. Each subsequent stage gives you 300 points more upon completion.
Here's the entirety of the first level, Merope (click to enlarge):
If you're wondering about the "MRs" that are splattered all over the platform, those are just the initials of the game's author. They're not particularly subtle, but maybe he sees himself as the in-universe creator of the platforms.
In the sound department, Electra isn't much to write home about. There is no music, only sound effects, and those are very sparse. There's a grand total of three different sounds, one for hitting an alien, one for crashing the ship, and one for picking up a crystal. That's it.
Level two starts out rather blue. With your ship being the exact same color, the game becomes a bit of an eye strain. In practice, it's not a big issue, though, thanks to the fact that your ship always stays in the middle of the screen, and its massive shadow still sets it apart from the background.
Alhena is where the platform design becomes a bit dickish. Crystals are located right next to walls, making them really hard to reach. You either have to reverse direction with perfect timing, so you still touch the crystal but don't crash into the wall, or you can approach the crystal from behind and, right after passing the wall, swerve over the crystal. Either way takes practice and will get you killed quite a lot. If you crash, the level resets, forcing you to pick up all the crystals again.
Someone needs to have a word with the platforms' architects and ask them if they could please ditch their unhealthy wall fetish for future projects.
From here on out, the game remains the same, apart from the changing stages. In total there are nine stages, all of them named after stars:
Level 1: Merope
Level 2: Alhena
Level 3: Mizar
Level 4: Alcyone
Level 5: Diadem
Level 6: Pollux
Level 7: Mebsuta
Level 8: Alkaid
Level 9: Electra
Like Uridium, Electra got its name from its final stage.
Once you've completed the last level, the game starts over with level one. Each subsequent loop speeds up your ship, but everything else remains the same. I played through the game twice, and during the third loop I had to stop because the ship became near impossible for me to handle. I got a nice score, though, which is even saved onto disk:
Apparently, I got to stage EROPE R, and I started on difficulty M, which doesn't exist. This is the second time I managed to confuse a game's high score table on the same disk.
CONCLUSION
Electra is an okay, somewhat simplified Uridium variant. It probably won't blow you away, and some parts, like the crystal placement, can be a bit frustrating. Overall, I'd say it plays fine. I especially appreciate the lenient collision detection, which isn't something you see very often in C64 games.
While Electra has a smaller playfield than Uridium, its bas-relief graphic style is less chunky than the one employed by the original. On the other hand, Uridium has more than one scrolling speed, which is something Electra is sorely missing.
In the end, I don't really want to compare both games too much. There's a three-year gap between them, which makes technical comparisons a bit unfair.
But hey, as far as I can tell, the game was made by one guy as a hobby project. I've certainly seen worse full-price games on the C64.
No comments:
Post a Comment