Hi there!

Firefly, Firefly... wasn't the Serenity a Firefly as well?

Well, this Sci-Fi Shoot'em up C64 game from Special FX / Ocean was made long before the TV series. Even long before Buffy

The game is starting with a familiar sight: The intergalactic map grid! (Or is it a grid map? ) Just like in the old 2600 days you're moving an iconic Firefly from sector to sector here, choosing your next mission.

To clear a sector of the map, you beam into a manageable labyrinth full of enemies. You're mission is to deactivate 4 reactors there, then you won this sector and move on to the next.

Graphically impressive (at least in motion!) with really good SFX, there's a lot of action. Your Firefly alone can shoot 8 boomerang-like bullets, which'll return to you and form a shield surrounding your ship when idling (Think Ufo! from the Oyssey 2).

Deactivating a generator is a 2 step process. First you have to catch four bubbly somethings they're spitting out, while avoiding their shots. Then you can enter them and play a rather silly mini-game sequence: The game is switching rapidly between and symbols and you have to hit fire when it's up.

This is speeding up during the course of the game, until it's IMO getting impossible without using save states

The game has no real ending: Once you conquered a certain spot on the map, the game just loops back and resets the grid...

Overall a nice little diversion for a short while, but nothing really memorable.

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another shoot'em up from the same programming team in the form of "G.U.T.Z.", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel