LGR - Silpheed - DOS PC Game Review
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
lazygamereviews
I've been trying remember the name of a pretty cool shmup for a while now to no avail. It was a shareware title I was playing roughly around 2001, and I'm pretty sure it must've been developed around that time. I remember it taking place in outer space and having a ver basic, vector graphic kind of look to it with enemies that would sometimes look like alien ships and sometimes like demonic bats or chinese dragons (everything was a bit abstract looking though. What really set the game apart from most shmups, however, was that it wasn't simply either horizontal or vertical, but it would switch up the perspective often within the same level. There were even levels with third person segments. I don't remember it having music, and the sound effects were a bit ear rapey, bit they still had a certain charm.
Does anyone remember the name of this game?
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I've been trying remember the name of a pretty cool shmup for a while now to no avail. It was a shareware title I was playing roughly around 2001, and I'm pretty sure it must've been developed around that time. I remember it taking place in outer space and having a ver basic, vector graphic kind of look to it with enemies that would sometimes look like alien ships and sometimes like demonic bats or chinese dragons (everything was a bit abstract looking though. What really set the game apart from most shmups, however, was that it wasn't simply either horizontal or vertical, but it would switch up the perspective often within the same level. There were even levels with third person segments. I don't remember it having music, and the sound effects were a bit ear rapey, bit they still had a certain charm.
Does anyone remember the name of this game?
reply
Obi_Wan_Kenobi
I must have been good at video games back in the day because I beat this game on my parents tandy 1000 ex computer. My friends always wanted to play this game on my computer because they had regular PCs and not Tandys. The tandys had the enhanced sound card built into the pc so we could have better music while playing on the tandy. Also, the game cut scenes ran faster on the tandy compared to my friends pc. Must have been because of having more video memory in the tandy and i do remember the tandy could display more colors than my friends pc could. I remember the end level was fighting that huge space ship where you have to destroy the shield generators before you can damage the ship.
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I must have been good at video games back in the day because I beat this game on my parents tandy 1000 ex computer. My friends always wanted to play this game on my computer because they had regular PCs and not Tandys. The tandys had the enhanced sound card built into the pc so we could have better music while playing on the tandy. Also, the game cut scenes ran faster on the tandy compared to my friends pc. Must have been because of having more video memory in the tandy and i do remember the tandy could display more colors than my friends pc could. I remember the end level was fighting that huge space ship where you have to destroy the shield generators before you can damage the ship.
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rahn45
One of the interesting things about this game is how it handled damage which was pretty ahead of it's time as well: Sure you could take multiple hits, but once your shields went down it was your upgrades that started taking damage instead; your ship would fall apart with each additional hit, going slower with the engines going down, your weapon systems becoming less effective and your auto fire going out. It would make for some intense moments in where you might come out of a fight by the skin of your teeth with a heavily damaged ship.
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One of the interesting things about this game is how it handled damage which was pretty ahead of it's time as well: Sure you could take multiple hits, but once your shields went down it was your upgrades that started taking damage instead; your ship would fall apart with each additional hit, going slower with the engines going down, your weapon systems becoming less effective and your auto fire going out. It would make for some intense moments in where you might come out of a fight by the skin of your teeth with a heavily damaged ship.
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thedungeondelver
Little factoid about this game: its code was written such that its gameplay routines were -not- tied to the system's internal CPU clock but to their own timing routines. What this means for the layperson is that if you have a copy of the game, you can basically run it on -any- Microsoft OS for PCs - as long as they're 32 bit. I used to fire it up in Windows XP and it ran fine. Not through DOSBox, mind you: just double-clicking the. exe. Doesn't work on 64-bit OS's.
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Little factoid about this game: its code was written such that its gameplay routines were -not- tied to the system's internal CPU clock but to their own timing routines. What this means for the layperson is that if you have a copy of the game, you can basically run it on -any- Microsoft OS for PCs - as long as they're 32 bit. I used to fire it up in Windows XP and it ran fine. Not through DOSBox, mind you: just double-clicking the. exe. Doesn't work on 64-bit OS's.
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speedyblupi
Yeah, I worked that out about 5 minutes after posting that message actually: P.
I'd never unlocked auto aim before, so I tried it on that level to see what it was like: Needless to say, I lost.
But I worked out that v beam and laser is an effective combination if you've not unlocked double lasers. I got the idea from seeing a Silpheed drawn with that weapon combination on the FM77 version of Silpheed.
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Yeah, I worked that out about 5 minutes after posting that message actually: P.
I'd never unlocked auto aim before, so I tried it on that level to see what it was like: Needless to say, I lost.
But I worked out that v beam and laser is an effective combination if you've not unlocked double lasers. I got the idea from seeing a Silpheed drawn with that weapon combination on the FM77 version of Silpheed.
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kurochan101
Difficult at level 5? Try making it to level 18, when it goes Touhou on you and you spend more time dodging projectiles than doing anything else. :p The game features 2 -Barriers- you can collect, on level 9 and level 17. If you still have the first one by the time you collect the 2nd one (Good luck trying to hold onto it in level 14, you get a 2, 000, 000 points boost in your score.
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Difficult at level 5? Try making it to level 18, when it goes Touhou on you and you spend more time dodging projectiles than doing anything else. :p The game features 2 -Barriers- you can collect, on level 9 and level 17. If you still have the first one by the time you collect the 2nd one (Good luck trying to hold onto it in level 14, you get a 2, 000, 000 points boost in your score.
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LGR
-atombat I LOL-d at that last part, that-s totally how he would sound.
A music card on a PC of the time is something like the AdLib or Sound Blaster.
And as far as I know, the only versions were for the NEC PC88, Fujitsu FM-7, IBM PC, TRS-80 and Apple IIgs. I know the MSX didn-t get Silpheed (though it got other Game Arts games) and I-ve not seen any reference to an X68000 version.
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-atombat I LOL-d at that last part, that-s totally how he would sound.
A music card on a PC of the time is something like the AdLib or Sound Blaster.
And as far as I know, the only versions were for the NEC PC88, Fujitsu FM-7, IBM PC, TRS-80 and Apple IIgs. I know the MSX didn-t get Silpheed (though it got other Game Arts games) and I-ve not seen any reference to an X68000 version.
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TanRu
One of my all time favorites for sure. Great review. By the way, the intro text a line from Cassius from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and is one of my favorite quotes. It roughly translates to how many years from now will our horrible, but necessary assassination be repeated in countries not yet existing, and languages not yet formed.
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One of my all time favorites for sure. Great review. By the way, the intro text a line from Cassius from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and is one of my favorite quotes. It roughly translates to how many years from now will our horrible, but necessary assassination be repeated in countries not yet existing, and languages not yet formed.
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VWestlife
NEC did at least plan to import the PC88 series to the USA as the PC-8801A (-A- for American model, but I've never seen or heard of one anywhere. NEC soon began selling their own IBM PC clones and laptops here instead, which were really quite good. And anyway, the MT-32 soundtracks for this game are pretty darn awesome indeed!
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NEC did at least plan to import the PC88 series to the USA as the PC-8801A (-A- for American model, but I've never seen or heard of one anywhere. NEC soon began selling their own IBM PC clones and laptops here instead, which were really quite good. And anyway, the MT-32 soundtracks for this game are pretty darn awesome indeed!
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Jg235
Extremely cool looking and sounding games that you wanted to have but then the graphics were always lacking a bit in those days, sometimes the music compensated for that but today with the graphics hardware available they could bring these games to life, that cool ship could look exactly like the one on the box art.
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Extremely cool looking and sounding games that you wanted to have but then the graphics were always lacking a bit in those days, sometimes the music compensated for that but today with the graphics hardware available they could bring these games to life, that cool ship could look exactly like the one on the box art.
reply
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