CONVERSION CAPERS

Which of the home conversions was queen bee?

Boy this version is quick, easily managing to match the frantic pace of the coin-op. The graphics lack definition but movement is smooth, and the action is underscored by fantastic ingame music from Barry Leitch. The multiload on tape is a drag, making this a stronger recommendation for disk users.

The sprites and backgrounds are drab monochrome, but your shots and enemy shots are in colour so you can at least make sense of what’s going on. Gunballs don’t attach to your ship and are instead displayed in the panel on the right, which helps keep this decent conversion running at a decent pace.

A step up over the Speccy version. The 16-colour graphics are a gaudy delight, while sprite movement and scrolling are a little on the choppy side which can lead to frustration at times – particularly as the game is challenging from the get-go. Our honest advice is to poke in unlimited lives before playing.

MSX

What can you say about a risible Spectrum port that plays much slower than the notexactly-speedy original, features no audio bar a few fuzzy blips, and was so sloppily converted that the menu screen still includes options for ‘Kempston’ and ‘Sinclair’ joysticks? As little as possible really.

atari St

The chunky graphics have a whiff of STOS about them and the in-game music is typically shrill, but this is a solid version that recreates the tense shooting gameplay of the original coin-op if not the presentation. After playing the 8-bit versions this highlights how crucial co-op play is to the game.

amiga

The screenshots tell a thousand words here. This is obviously an ST port, and the sprites and use of colour are identical. As usual, the scrolling is slightly smoother, and the main difference is the soundtrack which benefits from added samples (check out the thunder and lightning effects at the beginning).

Sharp X68000

Pretty much unobtainable to western gamers at the time, this is the best version by an absolute mile. It appears 100 per cent accurate to the original and, unlike the other versions, there’s a separate button for unleashing your power-ups. A bunch of configuration options round off this fine conversion.