Difference between revisions of "Copter 271 (cartridge)"

Latest revision as of 03:48, 8 November 2011

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.

Information

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

{{#ev:youtube|aDAB-169VFs|340}}

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

• The Amstrad CPC Games Resource

• CPC game base from cpczone

• http://www.cpcmania.com/ ( on the games section : GX4000/CPC+ GAMES )