Personal Compuer Games
1st May 1984
An epic piece of intergalactic mayhem for Oric owners
The Ultra
Violent space games are, of course, a thing of the past. You no longer have any urge, do you, to leap into your space capsule, seize the controls and wipe out a few waves of savage alien life-forms?
Oh, you do? Then listen. If you're an Oric owner in search of full-blooded arcade excitement there is a classic little number you could slip into your machine when your little sister isn't watching. It's ultra-mean, it's ultra-dangerous. It's The Ultra.
Get one thing straight. This program from PSS has no pretensions to originality. It's descended directly from the Invaders/Galaxians tradition, with a spacecraft at the bottom of the screen which can be moved left or right and can only fire straight upwards.
But right from the opening moments when, shooting through hyper-space, you see your spacecraft materialize dramatically in the centre of the screen and then drop into position, you know that the battles you're about to fight are going to be exciting.The aliens come in waves. And there are no less than 16 different types. It's not just the alien shapes that change. Each new attack wave has a different type of movement and demands different tactics if you're going to survive.
The first wave of green snappers is pretty easy. Just keep your cool and pick them off one by one - they don't fire fast enough to put you in severe danger.
In round two, the attackers are grouped in a single formation which swirls round the screen. You can wipe them out by keeping to one side and picking off a column at a time.The rainbow-coloured attackers of wave 3 are a harder proposition. They follow each other round the screen in a rounded rectangle. You can blast them in succession very rapidly, but it's easy to get trapped by a bullet from the other side of the rectangle.
By now you'll have discovered a serious hazard in using The Ultra's spaceship. It overheats if you fire too much. This means it simply isn't good enough to hammer the fire button incessantly. You have to aim. Each time you fire, a temperature gauge at the top of the screen rises. Twelve rapid shots will result in you being completely unable to fire until your gun cools down - this takes about 10 seconds, during which time you're completely defenceless.
To avoid such an event, you must fire sparingly and keep an eye on the gauge. It must be said that this feature adds a good deal of sophistication to the action. It's much more realistic than those games in which you blindly pulverise everything with an inexhaustible supply of ammo.Another welcome feature is that you're granted five spaceships, instead of the usual three. This gives you a chance to get further into the action. You also get bonus ships at 2,000 and 10,000 points.
Oric owners aren't exactly spoilt for choice in good games. But this one gives them classic entertainment as good as that offered on any micro.
