Mega Apocalypse

Mega Apocalypse was released by Martech in 1987 for the Commodore 64 as the sequel to Crazy Comets, one of the fastest shooters that machine ever ran. Its foundations come from the arcade game Mad Planets: you are a small ship in the middle of a starfield, enormous bodies drift and hurtle around you, and you have to break them apart before they flatten you. A hit planet does not simply vanish, it splits into smaller pieces that are more numerous and quicker than what you shot.

There is no slow section and no breathing space. You turn the ship in any direction, fire, and above all dodge, because within seconds the screen fills with lumps of matter that carry their own momentum and bounce around. This is not a game of tactics but of peripheral vision and of whether your hands can keep up with your eyes. The new feature over the first game is simultaneous two-player action on one screen, which doubles the chaos and is far and away the best way to play it.

Technically it stands among the finest work done on the C64. Dozens of large objects move smoothly, the colours are aggressive to the edge of what the eye tolerates, and the soundtrack is by Rob Hubbard, which by itself is reason enough to load the game.

Its weakness is sameness. Strip away the speed and the sound and one situation repeats forever, just a little faster each time. It works in short intense bursts rather than across a whole evening. That matters less with two players, when the point becomes which of you survives a second longer than the other.

On oldgame.cz the game runs directly in your browser, with nothing to install.