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 | OK, let’s cut a long story short with the intro – we’re presented with a slideshow of Japanese anime cartoon pics, with Japanese captions, but the pics give a pretty good idea. Basically, large plant-like alien destroys a skyscraper, critically injuring your girlfriend. What would any red-blooded bloke do when his girlfriend is critically injured by alien plantforms? |  |
 | Of course you hop into your super-jet, armed to the teeth, go out, outnumbered 10000 to 1, and kick the pants off of them! So, Commander Pup hops into the pilot seat – these plants have got a bad day ahead!! |  |
 | So, we hit the “Game Start” button, and off we go. The first thing that I noticed was the background – or more to the point, the speed at which it moved! If we get a chance to look close enough, it looks like the city whizzing along below us, and there are tall skyscrapers whipping past regularly. That’s a good start. That explosion looked nice as well… Wait a minute, that was me! Perhaps I should concentrate on the game, not just the background…. Thankfully the background slows down after 10 or 15 seconds, as trying to see the bad guys on that rapidly scrolling background isn’t easy! The enemy are nicely drawn, and varied, the only drawback is that when there’s lots on screen, the whole thing slows and starts to flicker. I initially put this down to my system speed, but the framerate wasn’t changing, so it is the game itself, and a limitation of the system. |  |
 | There would appear to be two different firing modes, spacebar will use your secondary weapon, which can be changed by picking up red, numbered pods that are scattered about the place. I couldn’t really see a reason to not use secondary fire all the time, although the ammo is limited (there’s a counter up the top), I haven’t run out yet! Perhaps in later levels the powerups are more scarce. |  |
 | There are also many little “P” pods – I really don’t know what these do, one would think they stand for “Power” or something, but one hit from an enemy ship is enough to kill anyway, so without a manual to refer to, I really have no idea what they do. It is frustrating when you lose a life, you lose your secondary weapon, which can make survival difficult in the flickering frenzy of ships. Can’t really complain about this though, as it is a pretty standard feature of shoot-em-ups. Both the Intro music and in-game music, whilst not actually bad, sound very… electronic? I Don’t know, it just wasn’t my thing I guess, and I wound up turning it down pretty quick. Because sound effects are limited to “Blips” when you shoot, you’re not really missing much by doing this. The Pup |  |
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