Filmation II ever disliked me. Nothing to do in the rooms, empty rooms. Boring games. If i have to choose one, i choose Gunfright from Ultimate, and Pyracurse as the best of his genre.
I played the hell out of Nightshade while also listening Deep Purple - Perfect Strangers over and over so the 2 are forever burned in my head together...can't play one without the other now!
That's a very good point. Filmation 2, maybe on a 128K machine (giving enough memory for the graphical engine and graphical data, plus masses of space (in eight-bit computer terms) for game data, could have done a very good RPG. It would have been massively different from Ultimate's usual arcade style games, but it might have been very popular.
I guess how much you like a game can be placed against how many hours you played it - thus:
PLAYED FOR MONTHS
1 Knight Lore
2 Sabre Wulf
3 Atic Atac
PLAYED FOR WEEKS
4 Alien 8
5 Underwurlde
6 Lunar Jetman
7 Jetpac
8 Cyberun
PLAYED OCCASIONALLY
9 Pssst
10 Tranz Am
11 Cookie
HAD A COUPLE OF GOES
12 Nightshade
NEVER PLAYED
Bubbler
Gunfright
Martianoids
Pentagram
I really didn't take to Nightshade - the blank playing surface, the annoying enemies, the convoluted game, the mediocre sound, the lack of clear actions to take. I wouldn't be surprised if this was where the Stampers started to lose serious interest in 8 bit computing. Based on a quick look, I'd say Gunfright looks better than Nightshade. At least there's some sense in what you have to do.
Nightshade had the better looking advert and box, but Gunfright was a much more playable game IMHO, it's a shame that they abandoned that distinctive box packaging though.
I mean, come on. They made Jetpac, Lunar Jetman, Atic Atac, Underwurlde, and PSSST. All loaded with playability and addictiveness. Then they give us Nightshade...
I didn't like Lunar Jetman. I just didn't have the minerals to stay alive for more than half a screen scroll.
Jetpac was great though - just too easy.
I did like Knight Lore. One of the games I could finish back in the day.
True, speedloaders introduced a lot of loading problems for genuine users, but didn't do too much to deter pirates, as often a tape-to-tape copy of an original would be more reliable than the original (seriously, though I don't know why). Things did settle down, though, and reliable speedloaders eventually became standard in the late eighties and early nineties.
Multiface addons made it easy to copy by then. Many people had them (I didn't though :-( )
Could never understand the popularity of Lunar Jetman , unless it stemmed from it's much superior prequel. Far too hard for it's own good. Nothing wrong with a steep learning curve , but LJ was vertical. Ultimate made some great games , but hey were hardly infallible.
Could never understand the popularity of Lunar Jetman , unless it stemmed from it's much superior prequel. Far too hard for it's own good. Nothing wrong with a steep learning curve , but LJ was vertical. Ultimate made some great games , but hey were hardly infallible.
From my own perspective it wasn't just that it was the sequel to Jetpac, but rather that Ultimate were so far ahead of the game when it first came out. There weren't exactly a huge number of slick scrolling shooters on the market and, although Lunar Jetman was rock hard, it was worth getting to grips with in order to see new parts of it. Finding the missile base for the first time was pretty memorable, as was getting the gun that goes on the back of the buggy.
I suppose the problem with a lot of the later Ultimate games, and certainly everything from Nightshade onwards, is that there were tons of other companies producing games of similar quality by that stage. Gunfright was about the only one I found attractive and easy enough to get to grips with to be worth the effort. They might have gotten away with Pentagram too if it had been six months after Knight Lore, but a whole year later it looked positively prehistoric next to the likes of Fairlight and Batman.
I went for Gunfright. Whilst Nightshadefeels better because, well, I just prefer the whole medieval vibe to a cartoonish wild west, I still think Gunfright is the better game. Hunting-down the villains can be a pain in the arse but there's not all that dicking-around with different weapons to fight the bad guys; and it's got the excellent pantomime-horse power-up.
Could never understand the popularity of Lunar Jetman , unless it stemmed from it's much superior prequel. Far too hard for it's own good. Nothing wrong with a steep learning curve , but LJ was vertical. Ultimate made some great games , but hey were hardly infallible.
It's the keyboard controls that sink Jetman for me, that and the fact that its overcomplicated gameplay sits badly alongside the simplicity of its superior prequel. I quite like playing the Retrospec remake of Jetman, though, because it allows you to use a joypad and all those buttons are handy.
I played the hell out of Nightshade while also listening Deep Purple - Perfect Strangers over and over so the 2 are forever burned in my head together...can't play one without the other now!
I have similar thing going on with Minter's Llamatron and 'Slip Inside This House' by Primal Scream.
It's the keyboard controls that sink Jetman for me, that and the fact that its overcomplicated gameplay sits badly alongside the simplicity of its superior prequel. I quite like playing the Retrospec remake of Jetman, though, because it allows you to use a joypad and all those buttons are handy.
im not sure about that , the controls (keyboard) are fine , just takes a bit of getting used to , how someone could say jetman has overcomplicated gameplay is just silly , its a simple game , and to say its prequel is superior is wrong.
im not sure about that , the controls (keyboard) are fine , just takes a bit of getting used to , how someone could say jetman has overcomplicated gameplay is just silly , its a simple game , and to say its prequel is superior is wrong.
I don't think the keyboard controls are fine at all, and it's not a good sign when an action game has controls that "[take] a bit of getting used to"; they should be easy to pick up and play: even modern action games like Geometry Wars have simple controls.
And, again, I think for an action game the gameplay is too complex: having to manoever the moon buggy, lay-out the platforms underneath it, find and position the bomb on top of the buggy... it all feels like too much to deal with in such a fast-paced game. That's why I prefer the straightforward gameplay of Jetpac. It's not that I think Jetman is a terrible game or even a bad one, really, I just think its overambitious and more interested in finding things for the player to do than creating a good pick-up-and-play action game like its prequel.
I understand what you say about the controls and being more complex than jetpac , but honestly they feel fine to me , i zip around level after level enjoying the game , its not really a fair comparison to geometry wars as that is a basic shoot em up (but a damn fine one) which uses an one analogue joystick to control and another to fire (more wild west hero than Jetman) , all im saying is - if you want a game with a bit of depth and less one dimensional and you can handle the controls then Jetman is a super game.
I love Jetpac and Lunar Jetman. Yes, Lunar Jetman might seem too complicated, but when you get used to it it just clicks into place. Having said that, of course, that mainly applies to the old days on real Spectrums, when we spend more time on one game as we had far less games and we had to load everything from tape. Nowadays, with thousands of games available for download, and every game loading almost instantly via emulation, it's much more tempting to just load a different game if you don't immediately take to the game you're trying.
Still, even back then there were people writing in to Crash about how Lunar Jetman was too complicated for an arcade game, so maybe I'm missing something. Maybe only hardcore Speccy arcade fans took to the game, whilst those with less time (i.e. a social life, whatever that is) couldn't invest the time to gel* with the game.
* Is "gel" (as in bond with) the right spelling? I've checked dictionary.com, and I think so, but I'm not sure.
Comments
Sounds quite like Where Time Stood Still :-)
PLAYED FOR MONTHS
1 Knight Lore
2 Sabre Wulf
3 Atic Atac
PLAYED FOR WEEKS
4 Alien 8
5 Underwurlde
6 Lunar Jetman
7 Jetpac
8 Cyberun
PLAYED OCCASIONALLY
9 Pssst
10 Tranz Am
11 Cookie
HAD A COUPLE OF GOES
12 Nightshade
NEVER PLAYED
Bubbler
Gunfright
Martianoids
Pentagram
I really didn't take to Nightshade - the blank playing surface, the annoying enemies, the convoluted game, the mediocre sound, the lack of clear actions to take. I wouldn't be surprised if this was where the Stampers started to lose serious interest in 8 bit computing. Based on a quick look, I'd say Gunfright looks better than Nightshade. At least there's some sense in what you have to do.
I didn't like Lunar Jetman. I just didn't have the minerals to stay alive for more than half a screen scroll.
Jetpac was great though - just too easy.
I did like Knight Lore. One of the games I could finish back in the day.
Multiface addons made it easy to copy by then. Many people had them (I didn't though :-( )
From my own perspective it wasn't just that it was the sequel to Jetpac, but rather that Ultimate were so far ahead of the game when it first came out. There weren't exactly a huge number of slick scrolling shooters on the market and, although Lunar Jetman was rock hard, it was worth getting to grips with in order to see new parts of it. Finding the missile base for the first time was pretty memorable, as was getting the gun that goes on the back of the buggy.
I suppose the problem with a lot of the later Ultimate games, and certainly everything from Nightshade onwards, is that there were tons of other companies producing games of similar quality by that stage. Gunfright was about the only one I found attractive and easy enough to get to grips with to be worth the effort. They might have gotten away with Pentagram too if it had been six months after Knight Lore, but a whole year later it looked positively prehistoric next to the likes of Fairlight and Batman.
It's the keyboard controls that sink Jetman for me, that and the fact that its overcomplicated gameplay sits badly alongside the simplicity of its superior prequel. I quite like playing the Retrospec remake of Jetman, though, because it allows you to use a joypad and all those buttons are handy.
I have similar thing going on with Minter's Llamatron and 'Slip Inside This House' by Primal Scream.
im not sure about that , the controls (keyboard) are fine , just takes a bit of getting used to , how someone could say jetman has overcomplicated gameplay is just silly , its a simple game , and to say its prequel is superior is wrong.
I don't think the keyboard controls are fine at all, and it's not a good sign when an action game has controls that "[take] a bit of getting used to"; they should be easy to pick up and play: even modern action games like Geometry Wars have simple controls.
And, again, I think for an action game the gameplay is too complex: having to manoever the moon buggy, lay-out the platforms underneath it, find and position the bomb on top of the buggy... it all feels like too much to deal with in such a fast-paced game. That's why I prefer the straightforward gameplay of Jetpac. It's not that I think Jetman is a terrible game or even a bad one, really, I just think its overambitious and more interested in finding things for the player to do than creating a good pick-up-and-play action game like its prequel.
I thought it was a fairly unanimous that JetPac is superior to Lunar Jetman.
Still, even back then there were people writing in to Crash about how Lunar Jetman was too complicated for an arcade game, so maybe I'm missing something. Maybe only hardcore Speccy arcade fans took to the game, whilst those with less time (i.e. a social life, whatever that is) couldn't invest the time to gel* with the game.
* Is "gel" (as in bond with) the right spelling? I've checked dictionary.com, and I think so, but I'm not sure.