Sinistaar 512K Joy

Every bit you add to your CoCo, every upgrade you slip in, and every countless hour you spend punching away on the cramped keyboard adds up. The payoff is always worth the effort with this little guy. :) I haven't been posting much because I'm STILL playing with my CoCo! The move to 512K is part of it, of course. The games are wicked.

I've got tons of stuff ready to post, but one at a time here. First off is Sinistaar. Pretty good game, with excellent "16-bit" like graphics. These two screens are just samples. I couldn't get a shot of the game in action. I was playing it too much and letting those little miner-dudes get through to the evil head guy is just not permissible. The game itself is pretty shocking the first time you fire it up and see it play. You won't believe it's a CoCo. And then you will. :) This is the sort of stuff the CoCo can REALLY do. This isn't the best thing you can do with a 512K CoCo, but it certainly shows it off nicely.

The Faults

The bad stuff isn't too bad. The game stutters a bit when there's several objects on screen, all swirling and running about at the same time. Including the big Sinistaar guy. After a few times through, you anticipate it and actually use it to your advantage. But it shouldn't do that. And it loads from three floppies. So when you're ready to play, bring a lunch.

The Good Stuff

The game play is a lot like what I remember the original arcade being like. But I never got into the arcade game that much. The sound effects are serviceable in game for shooting and such, then get freaky when the giant head-thing starts talking. Which quickly degenerates into a Rocky Horror audience participation event. "I LIVE!" (for Spam!) "I HUNGER" (for your mom) "RUN COWARD RUN!" (Who's Howard?) It's nice and creepy.

The graphics are great. The asteroids alone are worth the load time. The game play is challenging, but more freedom of movement would be nice. The ship only moves and fires at set angles. Of course, that's part of the design, otherwise you'd end up with an asteroids shooter and it wouldn't be quite as challenging.

Overall, Sinistaar isn't a reason to upgrade to 512K in itself, but it sure is a nice bonus.

Angel's Luck,
Capt.