This is a remake of the 1983 ZX Spectrum game of the same name by Mervyn J. Estcourt. Like the original, it is fast-paced and challenging, but the addition of higher-resolution, stereoscopic graphics takes it to the next level!

Amos (RunnerPack) and I made this in about two weeks after realizing we would not be able to finish a more ambitious project. We think it turned out pretty good.

See the readme file for the story, controls, and game rules.

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This is really cool. My first attempt I died shortly after starting level two. 🙂 Apparently I’ve spent too much time coding and not enough time playing. Nice work guys.

Just played through the first 2 levels at day and night. Cool stuff. I like how everything runs at a solid framerate with the affine background and plenty of sprites in the foreground.

Definitely a fun, fast paced game, and it uses the 3D effect really well! I never played the original, but I’m sure it looks way cooler in 3D!

Interesting… I’ve never played that game, but it’s pretty fun, and well executed! Level 4 was starting to get pretty challenging.

DogP

[RunnerPack]

Thanks for the kind words, everyone!

@DogP: I had never played it either, but when Matej showed me, I instantly knew it would make a great VB game.

I hope this isn’t against the spirit of the competition, but it turns out I goofed and somehow messed up the parallax calculation in the submitted version (collaboration with someone seven time-zones away has its problems, even on the Internet… or maybe because of it :-P). Here’s a fixed version.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by RunnerPack.

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Iv played the original and its not a bad little game so I’m looking forward to seeing how well it work on VB. The screen shots look promising.
Its also good seeing people working together on a project.

I just played it one more time and compared it with videos of the original. I think it’s quite impressive how good your clone is.

It seems like the enemies in the original are more agile though. I your version I usually have problems shooting at them as they are stuck on the outer sides of the screen and I can’t reach them there.

Also it seems like there are more obstacles in the original and the player is forced to navigate through because of the agility of the enemies. As in your version the enemies are usually stuck on the outer sides of the level I can mostly avoid coming close to a tree.

Did you consider putting in a bigger a variety of obstacles/enemies? I can see that it is the same in the original but after the second level the game starts feeling very repetitive as you basically do/see the same thing all of the time.

I’m not meaning to criticizes your game. I think it is great effort for 2 weeks of coding. Just wanted to throw in some ideas that might make it even better.

Thanks for the in-depth analysis, thunderstruck.

thunderstruck wrote:

It seems like the enemies in the original are more agile though. I your version I usually have problems shooting at them as they are stuck on the outer sides of the screen and I can’t reach them there.

This is a known issue which will be fixed in the next release, but the work-around is to slow down and wait for them to move away from the wall before speeding up again.

Also it seems like there are more obstacles in the original and the player is forced to navigate through because of the agility of the enemies.

This is another fairly simple fix we didn’t quite have time to implement.

Did you consider putting in a bigger a variety of obstacles/enemies? I can see that it is the same in the original but after the second level the game starts feeling very repetitive as you basically do/see the same thing all of the time.

Due to the late start, we focused on getting as much of the original functionality done as possible before attempting to add more features. As it was, we had to leave out the helicopters, although the sprite is already there.

I’m not meaning to criticizes your game. I think it is great effort for 2 weeks of coding. Just wanted to throw in some ideas that might make it even better.

Thanks again! We welcome these and any other suggestions for improvements.

This is an interesting game, I hadn’t heard about it before either, but it seems well executed! Also always nice to see the affine mode put to use. Good work, guys!

What a great port. Looks amazing, 3D is great, and the game is challenging. Great job guys.