Uridium 2 (Amiga)

Could this have been the highest resolution title screen ever seen on a home gaming machine in 1993? I wouldn't have a clue, but it looks pretty damn huge.

Uridium 2 is an Amiga exclusive by Graftgold, the makers of... well, Uridium 1 I guess. It's a horizontally scrolling shooter I believe, and with a name like that what else could it be? A sci-fi sounding one-word title beginning with a letter from the far end of the alphabet, it's a dead giveaway.

Whoa, nice hypnotic raster bar effect. Definitely an Amiga game then.

I love this kind of pointless showing off, it's the sort of thing that adds personality to a game. Doesn't suit every game though mind you; I can't imagine it improving... Skyrim any for instance. Though I'd have to hear a chiptune version of the Elder Scrolls theme playing over it to know for sure.

Hey it's player one and player two, thoughtfully labelled so I can tell who's who. I love the anime inspired design of their suits, though I can't help but notice that neither of them look anything like the pilot on the title screen.

Wait, "Downloading mission data"? Even two decades in the past I can't escape always-on cloud connected computer games!

Holy shit that is an awesome font. I want to take it as my own and use it for everything.

Usually I'd get a little annoyed that the game seems entirely oblivious to the second disk drive that almost every Amiga owner bought to avoid swapping disks all the damn time, but I can't stay mad at that typeface.

It's even got green monochrome computer screens, I love when these show up in video games. They've got starships, ray-guns, and FTL drives in this universe, but apparently colour monitor technology has so far eluded them.

Plus this futuristic GUI is laughably primitive compared to the OS on the 1987 computer I'm playing on. But then so is Windows 8's Metro interface, so I guess it's actually depressingly prescient.

Okay four joystick directions and one fire button, I'm sure I can figure this out.

Whoa... one shot killed. I didn't even see those lasers coming my way, never mind the ship that fired them. It's a nice looking game for sure, but damn it's busy visually. Detailed shiny metal ships flying over detailed shiny metal ships.

Someone shot me from off screen this time? Wow, what an asshole.

Also it seems I've ran out of spaceship here. When I got to empty space my fighter flipped over and started flying the opposite direction automatically. It seems that whatever I'm meant to do here has something to do with the battleships in the background.

I need to think back to my briefing, what did the green computer screen say? Oh right, it said "Wall". Well, I'll just try blowing shit up and see how far that gets me.

I... but... they... what?

Well I managed to survive for less than four seconds that time around, which is a new personal worst for me. Colliding with enemies doesn't seem to harm me, but their bullets certainly do the job.

Losing a ship like this means I'm have to warp back in at the start of the level again, but seeing as all the damage I've inflicted on the carrier remains intact and it only takes seconds to fly across the level end to end, it really doesn't seem to matter where I start.

Wait, that's all I get? Three strikes and it's game over? I'd say it has an arcade game level of challenge, except those at least give you some bloody continues.

Still, that's a nice effect on this gleefully redundant extra title screen. It's luring me in, the siren call of the bored 90s game programmer, trying to get me to abandon my quest to blow up enemy battleships for no stated reason and sit here and stare at this all afternoon instead. Well I can't deny that I'm tempted, but I'm determined to see something blow up today that isn't me, so I'm giving the game another try.

Oh I get it now! The waves of enemies show up on the radar down there on the HUD long before they appear on screen, and there's an audio cue to warn me that they're coming. These guys actually seem pretty crap now that I'm able to see them and dodge out of the way in time, and and it's easy enough to swoop in behind them and annihilate their entire wave to snatch the random power up they've been dragging around with them.

I'm working under the assumption that I'm here for the battleship though, so I'm ignoring the fighters and going after the turrets instead.

"LAND"                 "NOW!"
Don't mind if I do mate.

It took me a few seconds to find the exact landing strip it wanted me to use (there's a few of them around), but after I lined myself up with the green arrows my fighter did the rest itself.

Oh sure, let's teleport out of the nice cosy space-fighter right into the heart of the battleship's reactor core, that's going to work out well. I mean I'm certain that my badass spacesuit can handle the immense radiation and heat this thing probably puts out, but I'm less certain it can handle the full force of the inevitable explosion from point-blank range.

By the way that transparent forcefield effect around the core is achieved in game by flickering between on and off frames and I had to combine two of them to make it look right, so you couldn't really call this a 100% legit screenshot. Y'all know I endeavour to keep things real, but sometimes what you see in game ain't what you get with a screen capture.

And now I'm over here I guess? Weird that.

There's very low gravity in here, so I float around in my jetpack very easily, and it seems that if I drift off one side of the screen I appear on the other. Which means I have to waste literally a second of my time turning around to face the right way again. It's highly inconvenient.

Actually now that I think about, the core is firing off a bunch of its own crap right now and it seems to be targeting me, so I can use this screen wrapping to my advantage. If I can skip over to the right hand side (via the left side of the screen) and draw all the core's fire, then when I fly back to the left (via the right side of the screen) I'll be be free to shoot it in peace for a while. Ingenious.

Shouldn't take long now I reckon, it doesn't have much of a shield left.

Well I survived the core's destruction, but I'm still in this reactor room and the place seems to be crumbling down around me. Despite the low gravity, all this falling debris still has enough force to kick my ass, so hanging around isn't a wise idea. No seriously, I really am getting pelted with little bits of broken ship here, the pieces are just a little camera shy I guess.

I learned earlier that holding down fire brings up the teleport rings, giving me an emergency exit back to my fighter, but I'm just going to grab this cryptic looking power up first.

I should be getting out of here, but years of Sonic the Hedgehog games has made it impossible for me to ignore golden ring power ups. Also I kind of want to hang around a bit longer just to listen to the 'get the hell out of there, the ship's about to blow up' music.

Who's teleporting all these things in here anyway? Are they trying to get me to stay here and get my dumb ass blown up? Because it's not going to happen, obviously.


LATER.

And now I'm getting the fuck out of here... right after I float over there and grab that crosshair looking power up. Yeah I'm down to my last sliver of health and a stray bit of BBQ'd starship could end me, but this thing might do something really good!

Okay fine! I'm leaving.

Boooooom.

This actually went on for a lot longer in game, but I cut to the chase for the sake of the filesize.


SOON.

Oh great, just when I started to think I had the game figured out, this latest battleship throws in a new enemy far more deadly than anything I've yet faced: the wall.

Immune to empathy, incapable of fear, instantly lethal and absolutely indestructible, these golden walls are something I want to be avoiding if at all possible. Of course they'd be no trouble at all if my pilot didn't have to fly his fighter 3 meters off the hull at all times, the enemies all fly over it with no trouble. But nope, he has to show off, so I have to deal with it. Thankfully the walls all show up on radar, so they don't entirely pop up out of nowhere as I'm speeding around.

Note to self: pay attention to the damn radar you idiot.

Shhh, I don't think they've spotted me. The enemies on this stage are still entirely useless if I can avoid flying straight into their stray bullets. Their attack patterns have mostly been of the 'fly straight forward' variety.

Hang on, these ships seem really familiar somehow.

Et tu, Captain Picard?

No I haven't reached a side view level, this is actually just my latest cunning trick! By holding fire while pressing up or down I can rotate my fighter, making it a smaller target. Let's see those bastards hit me now!

The wall found my trick to be... unimpressive. Can you guess what I did wrong here? Yep, I wasn't paying attention to the radar.

Well there goes my last life, again. Though I think I'll give the game one more go before I turn it off.


MUCH LATER.

I've reached a second green computer screen! This time I'm up against battle group Kienthei it seems, which is defended by uridimines, turrets... and walls. Man I hate walls.

Oh, I probably should have mentioned uridimines at some point, seeing as they're apparently important enough to be named after the title of the game. They're little homing missile things that pop up occasionally and try to chase me around for a second. Fortunately there's a warning sound for when they pop up, giving me a chance to be elsewhere. So they haven't been a problem... yet.

Hey this second fleet is built from a different tile set. Well that's a relief, I thought I'd be fighting palette swapped battleships for the whole game.

Right, now where are those turrets at? I'd like to trigger the "LAND NOW!" message some time today. Actually for all I know it triggers once I've earned a certain number of points and I could've gotten it sooner by chasing fighters the whole time. I gotta be careful though as these fighters are starting to chase back.

It's a smart idea to grab points in general really, as I seem to be earning an extra 1 up for every 10,000 I get, and I could really use a few right now.


EVENTUALLY.

Alright, I've gotten the message to flash up and I've finally found my landing strip, though I was a few pixels out on my approach so I've got to swing around and take another pass at it.

You might be wondering why I even need a landing strip to get into the engine core, seeing as we're in space, clearly nowhere near a gravity well, and I'm not even using an airlock to get inside.

Well, uh.... obviously the ship must have runways because it's designed with the capability to launch and retrieve vehicles inside an atmosphere as well as space, and I need to active the automatic landing procedure instead of just parking my ship anywhere on the hull because... it might automatically refuel it for the return FTL jump back home! There, that sounds halfway plausible. Now I just need to get my fighter properly lined up with the damn green arrows so I can blow this thing up already.

Oh c'mon, that was my last life! I wasn't even annihilating my foes this time, just trying to line myself up with a pair of arrows.

I don't even know what just blew me up! I mean I'm sure something did, I wasn't just struck down by fate itself, but whoever did it isn't showing up on the radar right now. Still, at least I didn't throw my final life away myself by flying into one of those walls, which was almost certainly going to end up happening knowing me. Perhaps my unseen assailant actually did me a favour. And that concludes my gameplay experience.

Here's something I didn't realise at first though (because the game doesn't even hint at the fact there's an options screen, you have to start hitting F keys for it to appear): you can play the game with one player, two players taking turns, two player co-op on the same screen, one player with an AI sidekick clone following them around, two players with a robot sidekick each... there's a lot of options here. Plus I like how player two looks like she got dressed up to go out somewhere nice, before player one dragged her over to play video games instead.

Also there's even a level select there, kinda.


My thoughts on the video game Uridium 2 are as follows: it seems alright. I found that once I got comfortable with how it worked the challenge wasn't so bad any more as I was able to earn new lives about as fast as I lost them, for a while at least, but it still seems kind of harsh. I think that's mostly due to ships and bullets being hard to see coming rather than any issue with the paper thin armour on my fighter. I can live with one hit kills when the same rules apply to the enemy, but when I'm left examining my screenshots with the zoom tool trying to figure out what just blew me to pieces, well I think there might be something wrong there.

It was very highly rated in its day and I can see the appeal, but overall I'm not dying to play the game again. Though it hasn't exactly driven me away screaming either, so it can have an award for not being crap:

Oh I didn't even mention the music. There's some catchy tunes in there, and the loading music and theme (youtube link) might be worth a listen if you like C64 inspired early 90s techno. Go scroll up and watch the raster bar animation again while you listen for the full effect.

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If you have anything to say about the words and images (and maybe even music) you've just experienced, then I encourage you to speak your mind using the comment box provided. Even if you've played Uridium 2 yourself and want to explain in detail how I'm wrong about everything.