Planet Bob - Playing Armalyte (C64)

RSS Bot · September 7, 2009

Hi there!

Legendary to some, here comes Armalyte, once again a horizontal scrolling shoot'em up:

http://home.arcor.de/cybergoth/xype/armalyte.gif

The manual claims that Armalyte is the follow up to Delta, but other than sharing the genre, there's really not much that would remind someone of Delta inside the game. It's also from a completely different programming team, so I guess the makers were probably just fans of Delta, so they set their game inside the same universe.

Every serious shoot'em up player has to make certain descissions in his life. Doom or Duke Nukem? Quake or Unreal? And... Armalyte or Katakis?

Well, I wholeheartedly will answer Katakis any time. Armalyte is admitteldy on a very high technical level, but IMO nowhere better than Katakis.

The easiest point Katakis scores is music, since Armalyte has none during the game - just SFX.

Armalytes graphics probably win on a technical level. I'm pretty sure that it has a better sprite multiplexor and can move more things around. The background graphics are limited to three colors per level though and I prefer the art direction of Katakis. Armalytes backgrounds and enemies vary between generic and giger-esque, the middle and end section boss battles are usually against big, 90° turned 'V' and 'U' shaped battleships.

Armalytes extra weapons seem to be closer to Gradius than Katakis' more R-Typic arsenal and are generally composed of little dashes flying vertically or sideways.

The playabilty is fine, albeit both the design of the levels and enemy attack waves often feels rather generic and there's little to no surprises.

Don't get me wrong, Armalyte definitely is an entertaining and nice enough shoot'em up. I just never got the hype and to me it isn't even competing with Katakis for the crown, but resides somewhere on the lower end of the Top 10 C64 shmups

Armalyte is won after 8 levels and as many bosses are passed:

http://home.arcor.de/cybergoth/xype/armalyte_x.gif

Some future day the Playing series may see another horizontal scrolling shoot'em up in the form of "Menace", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?app=blog&blogid=54&showentry=6422