NEMESIS: MISSION ABORTED part II.
To develop a winning tactic against the
Blue Boss, I've started cheating, meaning that I've snapshotted the game, and fight the boss until I've learnt how to get past it. Then there was a open space sequence where I had to destroy
swarms of green dandruff from the depth of the galaxy.
Afterward, I've encountered a series of space platforms guarded by red star tanks and by those wicked yellow robots that pained me in the first part of the game - plud red balls forming destroyable barriers.
At this point [mention]
R-Tape[/mention] posted his observations on the game, stating that the pics in the
Sinclair User review were probably mock up's.
Taking a better look at them, I've noticed that the details don't match the graphics of the real game. The first pic seems to be taken from the first part of the game but the colours are different and more varied, and there's a low wood in the lower part of the screen, true to the original arcade game.
The pads are coloured, but in the released Spectrum version they are always white. You can even see that the mock up has been signed by the "artist": in the lower right corner "stu" can be read, clearly short for
Stuart J. Ruecroft.
If you look at the second pic, the screen is a little too busy, too many aliens and colours. There were no wonderful sequences to be found further in the game. So, I've ascertained that in the easiest way possible: the
RZX archive video. And, yes, it's confirmed my naive delusion. Although the
Big Alien Skeletons sequence is still mildy interesting, most of the rest isn't so good, in fact, it's rather disappointing. So much that my interest in insisting playing it has waned. Although, still, it's not that bad.
So, what did the
Sinclair User people reviewed? A real game or just a couple of still screens? Did they play anything?
A line in the review has struck me. It says: "
It was a hit in the arcades, will it be a hit on the Spectrum? Konami did a good job with Jailbreak (reviewed elsewhere this issue) [...]". Wait wait wait.
Konami did a good job with WHAT? The terrible, horrible, infamous
Jailbreak conversion?
So, I've looked for the
Jailbreak review in the issue, and there it was with an astounding
5/5, just like
Nemesis, although they didn't dare to put the
SU Classic badge on the page. Now,
Jail Break received
47% from Crash and
4/10 from C+VG and anyone can see how bad it is.
So, previously I've wondered if the SU people were somehow... "encouraged" to give a privilged treatment to
Nemesis...
Jail Break seems to have the conclusive answer to that.
Nemesis: mission aborted.