Gyruss - Top-Score Edition

"From the far reaches of Neptune, to the safe haven of Earth--battle your way across the Universe in this exciting adventure based on the popular arcade game. Suspense builds with every beat of thrilling and dramatic music--perhaps unlike any video game music you've ever heard before! To these compelling strains, you'll fend off unremitting waves of spiralling, swirling alien ships. Piloting your spacecraft in a circular flight pattern, blast these fiendish intruders with your rapid-fire lasers--before they vaporize you. And watch out for killer meteors and deadly satellites along the way! Reach one planet and you'll have just enough time to catch your breath for the next--and more difficult--wave of enemy attacks that separate you from eventually reaching the sanctuary of Earth!"

Classic conversion of Konami's arcade game. While I never saw or played the original back then, I did play the C64 game often. The game is not overly difficult (at least early on) which was great for my 9 year old self who previously enjoyed the Atari 2600 version and one of the few games with music. And its the music that makes an other wise very average shooter so re-playable. The Spectrum version had a conversion in the making but without music. It was probably a wise decision not to release it.

The Game is simple. Spin around shoot everything coming at you while avoiding enemy weapons fire or colliding with any that are escaping. The objective is to reach earth and should you do so, you will be rewarded with another go round starting back at Neptune. Like with the Atari 2600 game, the sprites are flickering to get a good amount of on screen enemy sprites without too much slow down. Its a bit annoying on a modern screen but the flicker is less noticeable back on a crt of the period.

A very small game with a cartridge image size of 17k. Simple graphics, simple gameplay and tied together with classical music. Parker Brothers were putting out some great conversions for Atari and C64 in the early days of the machines life although I didn't encounter them till a few years later.

The original game had no loading screen. Quite often the audio would glitch out with missing notes. I used a release with fixes to avoid such bugs during the longplay. This version also adds high score saving.