- #Dropzone gameplay how to
- #Dropzone gameplay software
- #Dropzone gameplay plus
The go-to remedy is to have the main sprite drift backwards to allow for more screen real estate between it and whichever side of the screen it is flying towards, and that is somethingīut there are bigger issues plaguing the gameplay in these games than the centralised sprite dilemma, issues which Parallaxian should fundamentally circumvent by virtue of it (or Uridium-like!) unfairness and frustration that can result. I have long been aware of the playability issue of bi-directionally scrolling shoot-em-ups with a centrally located sprite and the Dropzone-like This, of course, provides important lessons / warnings for me as I continue to develop Parallaxian. It may also be the case that the collision detection appears a little squiffy at times, seemingly erring on the side of you missing the enemy, but I have yet to see.
#Dropzone gameplay plus
The central location of the player's sprite plus the high speed at which the scrolling occurs, gives very little reaction time. Despite the presence of a radar display to warn you what's off-screen (a feature sadly lacking in Uridium),.
a broad "arc" or other vertically substantial projectile would have been much preferrable. Making them extremely hard to hit this problem is compounded by their propensity for sudden dives or climbs.
#Dropzone gameplay software
The enemies (which mostly consist of software sprites made of chars) are too small, especially with regard to their vertical height,. I refer, of course, to the utterly horrible experience of shooting the enemies, a playability problem which can be deconstructed thus: While there are no playability issues with collecting and depositing the little "men", the rest of the gameplay is a stressful chore at best and a fingernails-scraping-on-a-blackboard Yes, I'm sad to say it, but Dropzone - probably like its Defender inspiration - is not a Or rather, there is one elephant-in-the-room, king-sized, over-riding mega reason why this cannot be considered among the greatest of the C64 games: I have never examined the code,īut, despite all of those positives, there are reasons why this is not a What Makes This Game Great article. #Dropzone gameplay how to
Unlike many Commodore 64 games of its era and well beyond, it exhibited no jagged unstable raster jitter between the scrolling area of the screen and the panel zone now this may have been a happyĪccident caused by lack of critical change in background colour, or it may be the result of Maclean knowing how to stabilise the raster at such interfaces. (On the landscape issue, for quite a while many people in the scene believed it was a scrolling bitmap, but according to well, its landscape and title screen were, even if the aliens and main sprite in the game were markedly less so. It was graphically superior to most games of its era. Its sound effects raised the bar on the platform, which is apparently attributable to it being the first C64 game to use. It featured in-game AI based on "feedback loops" that responded, on the fly, to the player's inputs and on-screen actions to this day, very few Commodore 64. It had variable speed, bi-directional horizontal smooth scrolling, complete with inertia / momentum effects, which came at a time when this wasn't exactly commonplace. So what was so special about it? Why the lavish praise for its technical qualities? Preceded it on the C64 all the more astounding. Which Maclean coded first, so it wasn't even designed from the outset for the Commodore 64's relative strengths, making its technical ascendancy over almost everything that The same publisher, coded by Archer Maclean.ĭropzone was actually a near direct byte-by-byte port from the Atari 800 original version of the game, Gold), I made reference to the technical superiority of its contemporary stablemate Retrospective assessment of Raid Over Moscow on the Commodore 64 (released in 1984īy U.S. 
In a somewhat disparaging, if not brutal recent
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