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Parallax

Submitted by Dan Dooré on Thu, 2006-02-09 21:31. Game


Fred Publishing


Neil Holmes


Doug Holmes


Stuart Leonardi and Roger Hartley


1992

Granted

Parallax.dsk.zip (305.67 KB)

Shoot ‘em up in the mould of, well, a shoot ‘em up.

Horizontal Scrolling arcade action.


Disc Protection by Simon Cooke included some hidden demos unknown to the publisher.

There was a bug that caused a crash when some of the later levels were loaded, this was fixed with a patch issued on Fred 25 which also had the effect of disabling the hidden demos.

However, even with the patch applied the following message exists in the code : “HERE, USED TO BE SOME ENTROPY DEMOS - AND YOU CAN STILL GET TO THEM IF YOU POKE THE JUMP JUST ABOVE WITH 16607… COOKIE!”

FRED Magazine reported that this game was originally going to span over three whole disks, but Cookie’s clever algorithms managed to squeeze it onto only one.


To access the hidden demo (if not patched), you’re apparently supposed to hold down keys P, U, R, G and E at the title screen. Purge: No Way Back II was the name of an earlier but unfinished BASIC shoot ‘em up (Demo on Fred 11) as a sequel to ‘No Way Back’ on Fred 8.

I fact I never managed to get this to work. My disk is dated 1995, so maybe the publisher removed it from later copies. Ironically, even if you can find a disk with it included, it will probably never work in SimCoupe since most modern keyboards can’t register five keypresses at the same time.

In the ‘Hidden Demo’ it suggests pressing ‘E’ ‘D’ ‘G’ and INV.



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Parallax

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 2006-03-31 20:20.

Playing this game again, I think I’ve realised why I always found it so annoying…

It may look and sound like a shoot ‘em up, but it plays like a puzzle game! The only way to shoot waves is to memorise the sequence of correct places to position yourself on screen, and to get there before the aliens start arriving. Fortunately there’s a nice long gap between waves to enable you to do this.

And why is the smart-bomb so pointless? Even if you hang back to the left side of the screen, you usually have to set it off before any of the aliens in the next wave have even arrived. And because you can’t save them up, to help you out in a tricky situation, the best possible thing it can do for you is to give you a different power-up instead.

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Parallax

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 2006-04-25 10:48.

Where’s all the scenery? Wheres all the aliens? I thought Sphera was poor but at least you come back to Sphera for a bit of gaming action, within a couple of minutes of playing Parallax its game over; and then waiting ages for the game to boot back up again….
R-type on the speccy puts this game to dire shame…theres no excuses - this game should’ve been mint seen as though this is the only side scrolling shooter - a complete waste of grapics and code. Terrible.

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Unfortunately...

Submitted by davidl on Wed, 2006-05-24 01:48.

Unfortunately SAM is too slow to handle a full screen of pretty graphics and to handle all the fast moving sprites in this game… so the result is a plain looking - but very fast shooter… it’s certainly a good game, and with the useage of a convenient TARDIS would have benefitted with the Quazar Mayhem Accelerator to allow scenary as well :)

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Paralax

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 2006-06-01 15:55.

FADE on one of the FRED disks didnt seem to have any problems - it wasnt exactly FAST (heh heh…) but it was okay. This being kept in mind, FADE was a user game and in the professinal hands maybe it wouldnt have been so slow. Lazy progamming as found in Paralax is often excused as the Sam computer not been tecnicaly advanced to handle advanced features - I believe the Sam is more capable than what many make out - I think it could handle complex stuff if the right people make the games.

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PURGE:

Submitted by Dan Dooré on Mon, 2006-04-10 08:15.

My disc has this enabled - when you press the keys on the title screen the logo changes to ‘PURGE’ with animated fire in it.

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Hidden demo Parallax

Submitted by Stefan Drissen on Wed, 2007-04-18 00:33.

Make sure you have NOT patched your copy of Parallax with the fix on Fred 25 since apart from fixing the load crash on one of the higher levels this also disables the hidden demo.

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