Saturday, May 01, 2010

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Underexposed shooters - Episode 1 - Apidya

I like bullet-hell shooters. I don't claim to be particularly good at them, I'd never have completed Ikaruga or Radiant Silvergun on a single credit, but nevertheless there's something extremely exciting about beating the odds for another split second as you try desperately to thread yourself through bright neon coloured globes of death.

Now, I've played a lot of games in my life and there's one or two shooters that never seem to get the credit they deserve. These types of game have always been more popular in Japan, which is perhaps why the pseudo Japanese yet German developed Apidya, released on the Amiga, never seems to get the respect or attention it deserves. It's not like there aren't lots of good shooters on the Amiga, but people tend to think of games like Blood Money, Agony or Project X when they think of classic Amiga shooters. Weirdly, Apidya seems to be often forgotten, even amongst people who were hardcore Amiga players back in the day.

Well, I am here today to tell you that if you love shooters, particularly horizontally scrolling shooters in the vein of Gradius, then you really must not miss Apidya. The games lead character is turned into a Bee (though the sprite always looked more like a wasp to me) in order to obtain an antidote for his girlfriend who's been attacked by the evil Hexaae's poisonous insects. Starting off in meadows edge, you'll be fighting your way past hordes of all kinds of creepy crawlies, as well as angry moles, a praying mantis, a huge screen filling fish (who's insides you can explore after killing him) as well as the more gruesome maggots who spring from the corpse of a dead rat.

The game is not only imaginative, it's also beautifully drawn and presented. Like most 2D shooters, visually it hasn't aged as badly as many of the early 3D shooters. Game-play wise there's little to fault, the theme of Bee vs other insect and animal life keeps the game feeling fresh, though only the most skilled players will make it past level 4 and through the boss-rush that follows. There's also some neat bonus levels to find too.

What most players remember from this game however is the soundtrack. Playing Apidya will certainly remind you just how completely ear shatteringly awesome the Amiga's sound chip was, especially compared to most other systems (Sega Megadrive, Atari ST) from around that era. Chris Hülsbeck's music is beautiful and lively throughout and fits in perfectly to the game.

This is one shooter you really must track down, it works just fine on UAE. Use your scaler of choice and set Cycle Exact mode to ON and sound emulated 100% accurate for best results. Set NTSC mode too for slightly faster game-play. Easily one of the best shooters on the Amiga, if you've not played it, buzz off and find a copy pronto.

The good - Presentation is fantastic, graphics are great, game-play is challenging and exciting, soundtrack is phenomenal

The bad - Death steals lots your weapons, if you're not some sort of shoot-em-up genius then on later levels you might find that dying once makes the odds of getting past the level just too high.

 Check out this Apidya fan site if you want to find out more about the game - http://www.avians.net/~hawthorn/apidya/
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Saturday, April 24, 2010

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Saturday, April 17, 2010

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Friday, April 16, 2010

Videogame related birthday cakes

Once a geek always a geek. Sadly, last year my Godmother passed away. She was a fantastic lady who always had a story to tell and was always happy no matter what she was going through. One of her amazing talents was sculpting in the medium of icing, marzipan and fruit cake. As such, every year on my birthday as a child, she'd ask me what I wanted on my birthday cake. Me being me, you can probably figure out it wasn't Action Man or Manchester United....

Of all the cakes I had made, I love this one the best. Dizzy is made out of an actual Easter Egg, really awesome work, here's another picture:-


Who would have thought an egg would make for such a well loved videogame hero? The C64 love doesn't stop there of course:-



Creatures was one of the all time great C64 games, Apex really knew how to push the little machine. The fuzzies on the cake look more like the ones in the actual game than those on the box, pictured next to the cake.


Another picture of the Creatures cake, yes I believe those ARE flying saucers, yummy...


While usually my keyboard gets chocolate on it from my fingers, this time my fingers got chocolate on them from the keyboard. Perhaps the sweetest querty keyboard ever on this awesome Pac-Man cake!


A Pac-Man birthday cake is sweet in many, many ways. Moving on, next we have....


Lemmings must have been somewhat more difficult to render in icing and food colouring, nevertheless it's still a lovely job and instantly recognisable. Lemmings was a C64 game too, you know.


Another shot of the Lemmings cake. And finally...


Even though I am sure I had an Amiga at this point, I still chose the C64 game Mayhem in Monsterland to feature on my 15th birthday cake. This shows my impeccable gaming taste for choosing game-play over graphics once again. At 15, wasn't I getting a bit old for this kind of thing? Hell no of course not! Heck if someone offered to make me a Bayonetta Birthday cake I'd jump at the chance, so if you want to make me one just leave a comment and contact details and I'll get right back to you.

For those of you blown away by my amazing birthday cakes, you can get higher resolution versions from my flickr stream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/32165624@N04/
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Saturday, April 10, 2010

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Saturday, April 03, 2010

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Saturday, March 27, 2010

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Saturday, March 13, 2010

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Saturday, March 06, 2010

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Saturday, February 27, 2010

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Saturday, February 20, 2010

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Saturday, February 06, 2010

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Thursday, February 04, 2010

A tale of three SATA caddies

I'm a fan of removable SATA tray caddies for backup. These caddies slide into a special 5.25inch drive tray and being SATA, they can be hot swapped too (though getting the hot swap to work on some controllers, notably certain nForce models, can be quite challenging). Yes, you can just use external USB or even ESATA drives, but ESATA isn't particularly widespread and the caddies have several advantages over USB drives:-


  • They can use inexpensive 3.5 inch SATA hard drives without needing an external power supply, since the caddy tray provides power from the computers power supply.
  • They fit inside the computer, therefore they do not clutter up your desk or position themselves somewhere where they can easily be knocked or accidentally disconnected during a backup.
  • Because they are SATA, data transfer rates are higher, this is a major plus for bigger backups.
Until recently, I'd been purchasing my caddies from E-Buyer, a popular supplier of IT equipment here in the UK. The caddies were branded as "Plexus". Somewhat inconveniently, it's not possible to buy a caddy without buying the tray part (the bit that fits inside the 5.25 drive bay), however, at £4.59 plus shipping for both components, it was hard to care about the pile of unused trays.

Unfortunately however, E-Buyer suddenly stopped supplying the Plexus caddies altogether. This left me in something of a dilemma, at least USB and ESATA are standard parts, a Plexus SATA tray caddy is not. I'd invested in several of these drives for backup and data storage, so I set out looking for a compatible alternative.

Comparing pictures available on the internet yielded some interesting results. Caddies supplied by Lindy Electronics and by Pluscom looked strangely familiar, even down to the zig zag pattern on the side of the tray. I decided this warranted further investigation so I ordered a caddy from Lindy and a friend who had also adopted the caddy system ordered one of the Pluscom models.

Comparing the three, they do look very similar. There are some notable differences however:-

The (apparently discontinued) Plexus caddies have a ribbon cable to connect the SATA and power cables to the drive, whereas the other caddies simply have a connector that the drive must slide onto. This means that the Plexus caddies can accommodate non standard SATA drives including 2.5 inch drives. This is very convenient if you ever repair computers and need to inspect hard drives in another machine. However, since the physical dimensions of the caddy are designed for 3.5inch drives, a 2.5inch drive cannot be screwed in place so you probably wouldn't want to do this as a permanent solution.

The Lindy caddy has a different style of handle, but is otherwise identical, apart from the price which is as much as 4 times higher.

The Pluscom caddies are the most different. There's an extra plastic guide rail on the side of the caddy. The Pluscom tray has been redesigned slightly to use this. What this means is that the Pluscom trays are unable to accept the Lindy or Plexus caddies, but the Pluscom caddies fit just fine in the Lindy or Plexus trays.

From my observations, it seems like the caddies are all manufactured at the same factory, with minor modifications according to each resellers spec. Funnily enough, the best caddies (the Plexus ones) also proved to be the cheapest.
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Saturday, January 30, 2010

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Saturday, January 23, 2010

Trials HD - Its lack of multi player is perplexing

I finally got around to buying the excellent Xbox Live Arcade game, Trials HD. For those of you who have not played it, the game involves trying to ride a motorcycle across insanely deadly ramps and obstacles without falling to a grizzly death. Although the visuals are 3D, the gameplay is strictly 2D, so all you have to worry about is accelerate, brake and leaning backwards and forwards, making this one game that's completely trivial to play but challenging to master. The game is a riot especially with friends (and a few beers on hand). All the more reason why I don't understand why there was no multi player mode of any kind put into the game. Even if full on split screen or XBL multi player was outside of the budget of the game, it would have been trivial to implement a "hotseat" (take it in turns to beat your friends time) type of mode. Anyone who has played the excellent Trackmania hotseat mode will know what I mean. In spite of this oversight, I'd still highly recommend the game to anyone.

Trials HD is (to my mind anyway) a remake/re-imagining of the old 8 bit classics, Kickstart and Kickstart 2. It's great to see an old game concept bought back to life with new console technology, but with the core gameplay mechanics left in tact. I don't think Kickstart/Trials would have worked in full on 3D, lining up the jumps and ramps would just have been too frustrating.

I can think of a few other 8/16bit classics that should be given a fantastic new remake, but I'll save that for another blog post.
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Monday, January 18, 2010

New look for 2010

So I've given the old blog a bit of a facelift for 2010, so my loyal readers (all two of them lol) hope you like the new look better.

You may have noticed I closed one of my websites, lets-play-ds.com is no more. I felt that trying to cover the entire world of Nintendo DS was simply too much for one person. I am considering another videogame related website but it will be on a more narrow focus. I did enjoy reviewing games for the site but I guess my standards are too high, I like to spend at least a day playing them :)

I kept a copy of the site and I'm considering doing more reviews on here, just because I like writing reviews, but of course it is all time permitting. Top-Windows-Tutorials.com is still taking big chunks of my time but it's really starting to roll now, soon I will be on minimum wage!
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Saturday, January 16, 2010

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Saturday, January 09, 2010

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