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### Plutos [Sirius 7800]

#### http://www.atariprotos.com/7800/software/sirius/sirius.htm

#### http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=2765

#### Reviewed By T.M.R

The world can never have too many scrolling shoot 'em ups, but one machine that has been somewhat lacking in that department, in part because it doesn't have many titles to it's name, is the 7800. For some reason Atari's ProSystem doesn't have much in the way of horizontally-scrolling shooty goodness so knowing that Sirius existed but, for reasons unknown, was aborted before completion isn't just a mystery, it's a bit of a shame as well. Developed by Kevin Franklin, whose previous form includes C64 budget blaster Zybex, and featuring some graphics by his long-term collaborator Mick Owen, the majority of the work was done before publisher Tynesoft pulled the plug and everything ground to a halt.

Sirius sees our hero, equipped with a shiny spaceship that has a reasonable cannon mounted at the front, wading into enemy space and straight into trouble; aliens pile in from the right and swirl around the play area, simultaneously getting in the way of the bullets and pumping out a fair few of their own. Floating along with the attackers are power-ups; a support drone, increased power to the main cannon, a two-way gun that fires diagonally forwards and diamonds that don't actually do anything but are worth a few bob. One nice touch is how the support drones work, the game only allows one to be in service at any time but since the player can collect a couple they sit in reserve and, if the ship and drone are destroyed, the new ship arrives with a drone in tow.

The graphics are very nice indeed, there are some reasonable presentation graphics and I get the suspicion that the game uses what were originally C64 sprites, certainly the size and even colouring of the majority of the objects throughout would suggest that they were designed with Commodore's machine in mind. The backgrounds range from some reasonable if generic organic-styled detail to some very attractive columns and supports and the level layouts are varied and can be quite nasty to negotiate. Sound, unfortunately, is a little tame since it's merely a selection of firing noises that become slightly annoying after a while combined with explosions and alert sounds when power-ups are collected.

There are some bugs as well, I've spotted nothing show-stopping but have noticed that the bullets occasionally get "stuck" on screen (far more so when playing on hard difficulty) and there is one point on the first level where two turrets affixed to a large asteroid will only fire sometimes and, bizarrely, if they fail to do so the four aliens that are meant to come into play from the bottom about a screen on will all spontaneously combust! When on the easy setting it can be fairly challenging and, whilst fair, it doesn't feel entirely balanced. The hard difficulty on the other hand is really out for blood; aliens require a lot more shots to destroy, anything that was allowed to fire suddenly gets trigger happy and one or two things that weren't previously armed are suddenly tooled up, including the power-ups!

Since it's not a finished game there are places where things could have been improved, but we'll never know if those improvements would have been made and as it stands this is a reasonable shoot 'em up. It's a shame that it was never quite completed because it does work pretty well as a game, there are only four levels but each is of a reasonable size and there's enough challenge to keep most players going for a short while at least and, had the harder difficulty been fully debugged, it would have given more seasoned shoot 'em uppers a run for their money.

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Graphics: | 91%
Sound: | 75%
Game Concept: | 90%
Gameplay: | 90%
Lasting Appeal: | 87%

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