Copter 271 (cartridge)
Copter 271 is a vertical shoot them up.
It was the last official game released on Cartridge for the GX4000/Plus range, it was rushed to the released and seems unfinished.
Contents
Information
| Title: | Copter 271 ( Cartridge ) |
| Company: | Loriciel |
| Type: | Shoot-em-up |
| Year: | 1991 |
Cover
Covers from CPCmania
- Copter 271
Back Cover
Front Cover
Cartridge
- Copter 271
Back Cartridge
Front Cartridge
Manual
You can download in PDF from CPCmania ( See the links ).
Game
You can download in CPR for use in emulators and BIN from CPCmania ( See the links ).
Critic
The game could have been well realised if more time were given to developers, or simply if they had been less ambitious.
This is a vertical 2-players-co-op shoot them up.
A sweet intro animated cinematic open the game, as the game primary aimed to be a GX4000 super production, halas the decline of the console rushed its release and many bugs are still present.
While being a vertical scrolling shooter, you can also scroll aside the screen, this is of course quite heavier for the machine..
But it makes perhaps a too heavy use of Hardwired sprites (need a lot of DATA space and time to upload into the ASIC) and also features too many scrollings (multidirectionnal actually, but the sidescrolling is really un-needed), sprites are perhaps too big too (given most of those are Hardwired sprites).
This game slows down a lot and your shoots (machine gun) are too small/unvisible/slow to be gameplaywise.
The copter sound is also quite annoying, but of course it is best to disable all sounds effects... due to the "bullet-time-perpetual-slow-motion".
Some colours/inks seems to have been be badly chosen/set too.
This game would have nedded less technical ambition and bigger Eprom cartridges too to be actually good.
Video
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Courtesy from Xyphoe.
Implementation details and use of Plus hardware
- Mode 0 is used in game for the play area, mode 1 is used in game for panel.
- Plus palette is used
- Plus raster interrupt is used
- Plus soft scroll is used (the left column is also masked)
- Plus DMA channel 0 is used to generate interrupts to do the background sky effect in the title screen
- Plus DMA channel 1 is used to play the title music
- Software sprites are used for enemies in the game
- Plus sprites are used for the player's aircraft and the shooting stars in the title screen
- Plus split screen is used in the game (it is switched between the panel and play area)
Links
- http://www.cpcmania.com/ ( on the games section : GX4000/CPC+ GAMES )
