z4rch 1st playable

A very technologically impressive entry, as I’m sure most people would agree. First time I played the game I got a little confused with the controls (sometimes spacebar wouldn’t register for vertical thrust if I was hitting too many other keys I think?) and had issues shooting some of the aliens down, but pretty soon I managed to figure it out. It’s actually pretty fun once you know how to kill things, since usually the enemy ends up hitting you once or twice, esp if you’re attacking 2 enemies, and there’s a real sense of “oh crap I might die”, which is important to have.

But I eventually got it down so I could reliably destroy the guys, and actually got through the first wave, only to my disappointment to find there was no second wave! I went back to the main base and healed my ship, but “Wave 1” just sat there… taunting me. And yes it said 0 enemies left.

Perhaps would be more fun if the engine was more efficient/rendered faster, but a very excellent entry overall.

There’s 10 different waves in all (hit ‘Enter’ to continue to the next wave - I should make that clearer…) I can’t get past wave 3; 60 enemies!

Edit - 'Tis done - it now says ‘Press ENTER to continue’ under ‘Wave Complete’. NB I’ve also added a cheat (applet only!): Press ‘A’ to kill all the enemies and finish the wave.
One other thing - your score now goes down the more the land is polluted - so there’s an incentive to clear the ground as fast as possible!

Ahh ok, I should’ve random key spam’ed and found that. Thanks.

One last little tweak: as the waves increase the enemies notice you from further away, so the hover-and-shoot strategy becomes a bit trickier…

Click here to play z4rch

Very impressive, but very slow on my machine. I’m sure a 2GHz machine should be able to outperform virus on an Atari ST? :slight_smile:
Impressive nonetheless for just 4k!