Spacefighter

Published on Magic Disk 64 03/90

Spacefighter incorporates elements from Defender, Elite, Uridium, and even Impossible Mission. It's hard to pin down to one genre, so I'll just call it a side-scrolling shooter with trading elements.

This is another game that completely undersells itself with the title screen. I mean, sure, the text is neatly arranged, and if there is no capable pixel artist around, it's certainly better than a badly drawn picture. Still, a game called Spacefighter evokes images of spaceships and explosions, but instead, we get a screen with the wholesome charm of a spreadsheet application. One might be excused for thinking that this is a text adventure.

Instead of just complaining about the lack of a title/loading image, I decided to create one myself, just for the fun of it:

And fun was had, even though it took me way too long to finish the thing.

Pixel Aspect Ratio

Screens with wrong aspect ratios are a pet peeve of mine that seems to follow me around everywhere I go. Each time I see a TV where people's faces look stretched I get the urge to find the remote and correct the display's aspect ratio.

All screenshots on this blog are pixel perfect, which means that each pixel of the original image is represented by one pixel (or an integer multiple thereof) on your screen. This also means that the pictures are not aspect-corrected.

On a real C64, the displayed pixels are not perfectly square. Instead, they are squished horizontally at a ratio of about 0.936:1. This assumes the computer is a PAL model which was the predominant version in Europe.

For this reason, the images shown here are all a bit wider than they would appear on the real hardware. This is most noticeable with pictures containing spherical objects, like this one: