We are still waiting on a suitable Amiga AGA emulator with robust recording features before tackling such games.Voidrunner
Voidrunner, developed by Jeff Minter of Llamasoft and published by Mastertronic on the MAD label in 1987.
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Player's Review
"VOIDRUNNER: the final conflict of the Droid Wars
This simulation gives you the chance to:
a) shoot more aliens, faster than you ever did before
b) experience a thousand different, violent demises
c) wonder just why that red ship there is going down when you distinctly told it to go up
d) be a smartass, when you finally learn to handle 30 different types of ship formation
e) bust your joystick, in the white heat and fury of your blasting"
Grid Runner has evolved. In the original game, you had a single ship and was limited to moving on the lower lines of the screen. In Matrix, you can now move all round the screen making it easier to destroy the waves as they dropped down the lines and in both you had the annoying laser firing at you from both sides. Now Voidrunner lets you move round the screen and only worry about a single laser firing at you but steps it up by giving you multiple ships which not only change direction but also firing pattern dependent on the level parameters. If you die, the level continues from where you died without resetting. Now it cant all be in the players favour so a distracting moving background has also been added and it can be hard to see what's going on at times with all the contrasting colours.
The enemy waves can appear anywhere on the screen. White marker lines appear first to give you an idea of where they will appear from. The laser wall can be mostly ignored. When its at its brightest point, that is when it is deadly but only if your green ship is on the same line. I'm sure they is a system to predict when it is about to fire but I cant see it apart from memorising how many seconds pass between each shot. The Commodore 16 version has more colours so maybe its more visible on that machine. The most annoying enemy is the Red Dot thing. Moving into its line of site making it fire a quick and deadly shot at you. It only gets one shot, then it turns blue and can be destroyed. Some enemies drop bombs and only the purple ones can be shot and the yellow ones can be level dependent. One annoyance and surely a bug is that sometimes these blue dots appear on the edge of the screen and depending on which way the level has you facing, there is no way to shoot them. It can cost a life or more to clear them and move on.
In the longplay, I play through all 30 levels as they appear. Some are quick to clear and some take a little time. But the final level, that was taking so long i though it was going to be endless with the aim of draining last remaining lives but it does eventually end and the game loops back to level one. I did note that it didn't award an extra life before it looped as it normally awards one for completing the level.
Overall, the game could have benefitted from some more varied backgrounds to stop the levels looking the same for the whole game. I almost forgot to note the audio which is a bit odd as the Sid filters are used to have an audio phasing in and out effect on everything. Don't worry, its not your hearing that's fading. That said the audio can sound kind of broken and buggy overall.
This simulation gives you the chance to:
a) shoot more aliens, faster than you ever did before
b) experience a thousand different, violent demises
c) wonder just why that red ship there is going down when you distinctly told it to go up
d) be a smartass, when you finally learn to handle 30 different types of ship formation
e) bust your joystick, in the white heat and fury of your blasting"
Grid Runner has evolved. In the original game, you had a single ship and was limited to moving on the lower lines of the screen. In Matrix, you can now move all round the screen making it easier to destroy the waves as they dropped down the lines and in both you had the annoying laser firing at you from both sides. Now Voidrunner lets you move round the screen and only worry about a single laser firing at you but steps it up by giving you multiple ships which not only change direction but also firing pattern dependent on the level parameters. If you die, the level continues from where you died without resetting. Now it cant all be in the players favour so a distracting moving background has also been added and it can be hard to see what's going on at times with all the contrasting colours.
The enemy waves can appear anywhere on the screen. White marker lines appear first to give you an idea of where they will appear from. The laser wall can be mostly ignored. When its at its brightest point, that is when it is deadly but only if your green ship is on the same line. I'm sure they is a system to predict when it is about to fire but I cant see it apart from memorising how many seconds pass between each shot. The Commodore 16 version has more colours so maybe its more visible on that machine. The most annoying enemy is the Red Dot thing. Moving into its line of site making it fire a quick and deadly shot at you. It only gets one shot, then it turns blue and can be destroyed. Some enemies drop bombs and only the purple ones can be shot and the yellow ones can be level dependent. One annoyance and surely a bug is that sometimes these blue dots appear on the edge of the screen and depending on which way the level has you facing, there is no way to shoot them. It can cost a life or more to clear them and move on.
In the longplay, I play through all 30 levels as they appear. Some are quick to clear and some take a little time. But the final level, that was taking so long i though it was going to be endless with the aim of draining last remaining lives but it does eventually end and the game loops back to level one. I did note that it didn't award an extra life before it looped as it normally awards one for completing the level.
Overall, the game could have benefitted from some more varied backgrounds to stop the levels looking the same for the whole game. I almost forgot to note the audio which is a bit odd as the Sid filters are used to have an audio phasing in and out effect on everything. Don't worry, its not your hearing that's fading. That said the audio can sound kind of broken and buggy overall.
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