Supercyber

Supercyber is a Spanish DOS action game from 1993, written for a competition run at the time by the magazine PC Actual. That fact explains most of what it is: short, made by a small team under deadline pressure, yet unexpectedly good-looking for its category.

It plays as a side-scrolling arcade game. You pilot a combat machine, move from left to right and destroy whatever appears, across five stages. The graphics run in VGA with 256 colours, which was not a given for a contest entry in 1993 — plenty of comparable projects still made do with EGA and four shades. The look is the first thing you notice about Supercyber: colourful backdrops, decently drawn machinery, a scene you can read at a glance.

Underneath, though, it is a very direct game. Enemy waves repeat, the weapon system has no depth, and five stages go by in a single sitting. Difficulty is a matter of reflexes and memorisation rather than tactics. It is also a weakness that the stages differ mainly in scenery instead of in what they ask you to do.

Where it earns its place is as a glimpse into one corner of history: the Spanish home scene of the nineties revolved largely around magazines and their competitions, and this is what came out when three people had a few months to work with. As a game Supercyber is average and finishable out of curiosity alone; as evidence of what amateurs could do on a PC in 1993, it is more interesting than that average suggests.

Here on oldgame.cz it launches straight in the browser, so you can walk through those five stages without installing anything.