Nebulus

Thoughts by NetDanzr (16 00 2006) – PC (DOS)

Nebulus is one of the most addictive puzzle arcades I have ever played. First encountered on my Spectrum, the game has followed me ever since, and still graces my hard drive. Created by the same people who released the hellish Impossaball, Hewson, the game is a little simpler, but even more addictive.

The goal of the game sounds simple: you need to climb up a tower, initiate its destruct sequence, and make your way to the next tower. Rinse and repeat, once for each of the eight towers. To make matters worse, there are lots of flying, bouncing and sliding nasties who try to knock you down the tower. You will have only a limited power against them: some you will be able to kill for extra points (when you get enough of them, you get another life). Some you will be only able to stun. Yet others will be immune to your snowballs, and the only way around them is sneaking or jumping.

What made the game so addictive and unique was a whole new engine, unheard of before. Back in the 1980s, if somebody told me that I would climb a tower, I’d get the picture of a stationary screen with platforms and ladders, Donkey Kong style. Nothing could be farther from the truth, however. The game featured round towers that rotated, with your character always in the middle of the screen. This allowed the designers to use extensive stairways instead of ladders, and some rather unique methods of killing. Your most common way of dying would be falling down into the water below the tower. If you made it quite high up the tower, this would require you to suffer several hits, which greatly decreased the amount of frustration. Don’t worry; you would have enough frustration with the game. In addition to a limited amount of lives (3), there was also a 500 seconds time limit, which I found unbeatable at the latter, more devious towers.

Where the game failed was originality and graphics. The graphics were a little weak even for a Spectrum game, and improved only slightly on a PC. However, at the time I have gotten it, I was in love with another Spectrum game, Jumping Jack. Nebulus was nothing more than taking the flat screen of Jumping Jack and bending it to create a rotating tower. The game also took away much of the action, replacing it with puzzle, creating an almost unbeatable combination. Still, as it is often the case, the more popular game prevailed. While Nebulus is known until today and present in many arcade compilations, nobody ever remembers Jumping Jack anymore. If it weren’t for Jumping Jack, Nebulus would have been one of the most groundbreaking games ever. This way, it is “only” one of the most addictive, playable and fun games you can get your hands on.

Thoughts by Wandrell (09 00 2012) – Castelian – NES

Platforms and jumping are two of the oldest tricks in videogames history, so it’s no surprise people keep trying to get something new out of it. In this case the novelty is the third dimension, just with the small drawback of it being a 2D game.

It’s not such bad idea; you are climbing around a tower, so when you move it rotates over itself. In practice this means you never move through the horizontal axis, instead the map changes around you.

Sadly, it all ends being a bit of a gimmick, as it adds nearly nothing to the game. There is little difference between this and a moving screen, you could say that taking advantage of what you remember from the hidden side is an important point, but in reality it’s all just a visual trick to make the game look interesting.

Because the game itself lacks any big attention catcher, it’s just another platformer. A hard platformer, but this difficulty also feels cheap and artificial, the traps are hard to spot, weird killing things pop at random to stop you from advancing and in general climbing the tower ends becoming too much of a nuisance to be any fun.

They try to reduce the problem a bit with a nice trick: the enemies won’t kill you, they will make you fall to the lower level. Still, things can’t be nice and they compensate this through a tight countdown, so you have to hurry if you are planning on finishing the level.

I want to think that, in the end, the problems may be due to the port. Perhaps playing in another platform the controls improve or something. But this version in particular needs a lot of work, it’s not a game I would recommend.

But as I’ve just said, if you are planning on giving the game a try do not check first this version, that way maybe there is a chance that you will enjoy it.