Tuesday, July 03, 2018

StarRay



The Atari ST cannot scroll

Logotron's StarRay is a Defender wannabe developed by a trio of incredible talent. It's something I boot up whenever I'm bored and need to kill a few mins after a dreadful day at work! Of course, this was programmed by none other than Steve Bak. A legend who always knew how to get the best from the Atari ST without ever resorting to lame excuses.

Aesthetically speaking, it's fantastic and compliments the gameplay perfectly. Pete Lyon designed what you see and it's glorious. From the moment you see the futuristic Monument Valley, you're in love with his pixels. David Whittaker created all of the jaw-dropping funk (anyone with extra Ram has sampled music on the title screen - but I prefer chip tunes).

StarRay is a blummin' awesome shooter and tons of fun. It boosts the original Defender format with its own brand of great gameplay style - plus beautiful sounds and multilayer parallax visuals. This is how all retro gaming should be! The perfect shooter if you are bored and fancy some frantic mayhem in your life - grab it now and play StarRay!

Take to the skies then download either the floppy disk or use your hard drive.

7 comments:

  1. One of my old favs! Got a good score on it as well I think!

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    1. Will do if I ever get around to loading the disk :P

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  2. The parallax on scrolling on this game makes the SOTB ST port look like it was built on the Atari 2600

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    1. That's it. I've mellowed over the years about SOTB though, as is, it's quite good for a machine with no blitter or hardware scrolling. In fact, bearing that in mind, it performs brilliantly compared to the other machine that does have the extra hardware. If that makes sense?

      However, I think they shouldn't have tried to keep up with the Amoeba with each layer and the other bits. They should not have ported but made a specific reduced ST game. One that scrolled the screen without parallel layers for example. Just make an ST game rather than a clone of what something else is doing.... Those fanboys would still have laughed but this would have worked so much better and been smoother too. IMHO of course. ;-)

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