Sinclair User


Hades Nebula

Author: Tamara Howard
Publisher: Gamebusters
Machine: Spectrum 48K

 
Published in Sinclair User #65

Hades Nebula

Hades Nebula begins as one of those yellow sort of games.

Broadly-speaking it's Lightforce, only in two-colour.

The common complaint in the SU office when we first saw the game scrolling was, "That's not very fast is it?"

Hades Nebula

But that's not necessarily a bad thing in this instance. Most scrollies start off with one or two aliens, easy to hit, minimum amount of fuss about dying, that sort of thing. But not Hades Nebula. As soon as your craft materialises (in a rather fetching manner I thought) you are set upon by myriad mutated mine carts.

Well, I presume that's what they are. The mutated mine carts are followed by exceedingly wobbly water boatmen, who are really out to kill you. And there are an awful Jot of them. Which is why it needs to be so slow.

On the way there are various pods that you can pick up to give you extra weapons speed and so on, so you can zoom about a bit more and fly into a few bullets. You are going to need good reflexes and a sharp eye to get away from all the enemy fire, but anyone who plays a lot of shooties will already be well equipped with such skills.

What you're probably not well equipped with is the ability to see yellow bullets on a yellow background, or blue bullets on a blue background. Yes, due to a slight difficulty in separating one colour from another completely identical colour, ordinary human beings may find they have a small amount of trouble seeing the bullet that gets them up the bum.

Hades Nebula is surprisingly addictive, mainly because you become determined to avoid those rogue bullets and prove that your eyesight is not that of a mentally defective mole.

All right, so the scrolling is jerky and the game's very yellow, but you're not going to hold that against Nexus are you? (Well, perhaps just a bit.

Overall Summary

Curiously addictive game with nice backgrounds. Scrolling, though, tends to be a little on the slow side.

Tamara Howard

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