Uridium

Thoughts by Mr Creosote (21 00 2007) – C64

The alien invasion of Earth is afoot, and there’s just no way to stop the attacking forces by conventional means. Even if the puny earthling forces manage to destroy one wave, countless more are just waiting to take its place. So the humans recognize their only chance is to go to the source and cut off the invaders' supplies.

Those are provided by 16 huge spaceships. Each is responsible for one raw material (therefore, the levels have names like ‘zinc’ and ‘silver’). The player jumps into the seat of the small, fast and agile Manta ship to blast these flying fortresses up.

At least since Star Wars, everybody knows a small fighter can’t just fire its guns at a huge battle station and expect it to explode. Unlike Star Wars, the solution in Uridium isn’t quite as ridiculous. Really, what kind of engineer would leave a glaring security hole open?

Flying over the surface of the supply ship first, you fend off its defending fighters while avoiding to crash into radar dishes and anything else sticking out from the surface. Once you’ve really wreaked havoc, you land on the alien ship, enter it and trigger the self-destruction sequence.

The latter part only consists of a tiny reaction test in order to get bonus points (which is anything but unimportant, because points equal extra lives). The real meat is maneuvering the Manta over the 16 supply ships. This happens at an amazing speed. At the same time, the animation isn’t just fluid, but absolutely breathtaking as well! The Manta’s rotation (to get through really narrow passages and to avoid enemy projectiles) and turning (to fly back in case you missed a few targets) looks so good that you’ll do it more often than really necessary.

The downside of this speed is, as so often, the difficulty level. Uridium is an unforgiving game. One hit, and one life is gone. And at 50 frames per second, anything happens so quickly, that you sometimes have little chance to react at all. If you feel up to that challenge, there are countless hours of fun waiting in this game. A masterpiece!

Thoughts by Mr Creosote (26 00 2007) – Uridium Plus – C64

Uridium Plus, released the same year as the Uridium. Not much time to change anything, but also not much need to, since the original version was very successful – never change a winning horse. So the basics remain the same: the player flies the Manta ship’s assault on the aliens' huge Dreadnoughts, first taking out the numerous waves of defenders, then landing and activating the self-destruct mechanism – all that to stop the invaders' supply of raw materials.

Just running the game and trying the first levels, the changes are hard to spot. Not even the title screen mentions the ‘plus’. The most noticable change is that the player no longer has to wait for ‘Land now’ to flash on screen before he’s actually allowed to land. So once you reach the landing strip, you can land (although it might not be the wisest choice to do so, because less kills means less points and thus less precious extra lives). For some reason, that message still appears after some time, but it’s without any function.

On the technological side, this is one of the few games which uses the capabilities of the C128. Oh, sure, it also runs on a basic C64 (and it does so very well), but if it detects a C128, it shows even more flashy eye-candy-type effects (more background stars, more bullets flying around) which certainly can’t hurt. Last, but not least, the reviewer’s subjective feeling is that the ‘plus’ version is even harder. The latter might be a questionable change, indeed.

That’s it. Uridium Plus isn’t a plus version like IK+ or Elite Plus (both of which are significant improvements) are. It’s more of a data disk, but since the original is great, so are these levels. So, it’s a great choice for successful veterans who have mastered the first game already, but due to its difficulty, maybe not the best point to jump into the series.