Planet Bob - Playing Delta (C64)

RSS Bot · June 2, 2008

Hi there!

I have to excuse the lame screenshot, but it actually didn't look as if the Atari Age server was recovering still tonight... Luckily it did though, so here comes a last minute entry for Delta:

With horizontally scrolling shoot'em ups being one of my favourite genres, I have to say that Delta never was a favourite of mine. Back in the day I totally missed it - being released somewhen inbetween Uridium and Wizball, which were getting most of my attention then.

Trying it almost two decades later in emulation didn't really help it either. It's far from a graphics sensation nowadays and the gameplay also seems severly lacking. It's a total memorize game. Unless you know every single attack wave in advance, you're wrecked into bits within seconds. Even worse, occasionally you have to pick up the correct power ups in advance as well. Speaking of which, the game has Gradius written all over it, you can see it's influence shine through everywhere! (Unfortunately not its playability / level design genious )

Still, MacbethPSW was raving about it on Lemon64 lately, so I decided to give it another try and started playing it once again today. State-saving between levels, I'm artificially limiting the memorizing process to just a single level. That really helped my playing progress, so I'm already through to the first 9 levels. Still not impressed... :ponder: We'll see how this continues...