Apocalypse II

Well, I received an email yesterday from Dave Allwein, and he said that he had in his possession an unreleased game. He said that it might be only source code, and I kind of winced as I was unsure whether or not I would be able to compile a snes game with the tools that are available. Anyway, he sent it today, and it was a binary! The game is called Apocalypse II, and SNES Central is proud to debut it for the masses! (note, this article was originally published on September 25, 2003) Thanks to Simon Nicol (the developer) for making this ROM image available! By: Evan G Last updated: November 10, 2009

This game is probably complete (although the checksum is bad), and it was already licensed by Nintendo. The game was being made for Psygnosis, written by Simon Nicol, graphics by Herman Serrano, and music by Mike Clarke. It was to be released in April 1995 (though the copyright screen says 1994). The game is multitap compatible.

Apocalypse II was covered in print media in early 1995. In fact, it was reviewed in Nintendo Power, where they complained that it was standard shooter fare, though they liked the graphics and the challenge. The following scans come from Nintendo Power (courtesy of Retromags):

Preview in the January 1995 issue of Nintendo Power

Review in the April 1995 issue of Nintendo Power

The scoring in the game	Powerup heaven!

This game is a shooter in the vein of Asteroids. You pilot a space ship that shoots laser shots at moons of varying sizes. Hitting the moons gains you points for each hit, and destroying them at various sizes gives you more points. Before each stage begins, there are various power ups that fall across the screen. The power ups include:

• Speed Up (makes your ship faster)
• Rotate (allows you to rotate the ship 360 degrees)
• Missile (gives you one missile)
• Shield (makes you temporarily invincible)
• 1up (gives you an extra ship)

The control scheme is as follows:

• A/B: Shoots laser
• L: Rotate counterclockwise
• R: Rotate clockwise
• X: Shield
• Y: Missile

The goal of the game is to destroy the moons and gain points. Getting 10,000 points gains you a life. As you continue to shoot the moons, they begin to glow.

Destroyed one!

However, this game is basically impossible to pass further than level 3 or so. Once the moons begin to glow, they start to move very rapidly (even faster than your ship), and quite often follow you until you eventually die. I suppose the trick to the game is to destroy the moons when they first come on the screen so that you can destroy them easily, as when they are large, they take a lot of hits to destroy. And even with missiles, the purple and blue moons still take far too many hits to die.

So, to remedy this situation, I created an infinite ships cheat:

7E1118 05

Using this cheat kind of defeats the purpose of the game as the moons are instantly destroyed if your ship hits them (though you get no points for this), but I decided to play with it on for a while.

More powerups	The planets ganging up on you

As I am unsure if this game is 100% complete, however, I will sum up the various aspects.

Graphics

Nothing spectacular here. The ship isn't spectacularly designed, and the moons seem designed based on actual planets in the solar system. The planetary meltdowns look cool for the 3 seconds you have before it destroys you. The backgrounds are essentially just a starscape, but it rotates around which is pretty neat.

Sound

The sounds are typical of many space shooters, like Gradius III. However, the voice samples are very muffled (the best example is at the Psygnosis title). Overall, the sound sounds muted. Plus it sucks that there is only one song throughout the game. It is pretty good for a snes game, but after a while it gets old.

Controls

The controls work fairly well in this game, although rotating your ship doesn't always work well enough when a moon is chasing you around. The controls are pretty solid and shooter fans shouldn't have much problems getting into it.

Well, there you have it. It was cool to be able to sample the game, but it wasn't exactly my cup of tea. If you are into old style arcade games, give it a shot, as I am not very good at them. I'm sure most people will have the frustrations with the rapid death that I did as well.

Click here to download

Published Review Scores

Bibliography

• Nintendo Power, Pak Watch (mentions it is development by Psygnosis), Publication date: January 1995, Volume: 68, Pages: 112
• Nintendo Power, Now Playing (review), Publication date: April 1995, Volume: 71, Pages: 100,105