Menace

"This is a pure arcade game - a fast action packed journey through six very different worlds where lightning fast reflexes and furious fire button action are your only hope of survival. Your mission orders are simple, you must destroy the planet Draconia. In theory possible, in practice.."

Menace, probably best known of the Amiga. This C64 version is mostly faithful to the original and looks and plays mostly the same. Like the Amiga we get just one piece of music that plays throughout but no sound fx.

The game shouldn't be difficult but an issue with collecting the powerups and especially the refill life bar powerup will cause problems as you progress. You only get one life and in order to restore energy you need to continuously shoot the powerup boxes until they land on the final option. However, getting to that can be problematic as you have to shoot the boxes just right without missing to go through the options fast enough. On top of that you ideally need to kill the last enemy of the attack wave right at the edge of the screen so that the box appears as far away as possible to give you maximum shooting time.

Overall, not a bad shootemup for the c64. Its has minimal but ok presentation but the ending is a bit naff. The game starts over automatically. The game is missing the speech samples which helped make the game stand out on the Amiga. It's kind ov novel that you fly behind the foreground gfx which in any other shooter you would have to avoid.

00:00:00 Sea of Karnaugh
00:05:00 Vanguard Warzone
00:10:35 Carnage Rift
00:15:50 Tropics of Mace
00:20:15 Ruins of Kruger
00:24:40 Plateaus of Draconia