109: Super Obliteration

Number 109
(44.2 points)
Super Obliteration
1995: 97 (3.2)
1996: 60 (41.0)

Amiga Power were never shy to promote public domain games in their Top 100 lists, but for this to appear twice, it must be good, right?

You control a character who looks a little too similar to the main hero from Turrican, and the game basically plays a lot like a cross between Asteroids and Pang. You can fire your laser in all directions, breaking the rocks into smaller pieces. Once the screen is cleared of rocks, you move on to the next one.

This game has two fatal flaws. One, you really need two joysticks to both move and fire and have any hope of success, so if you don't have two joysticks, you're not likely to enjoy it much (the least they could do is keep you firing in the same direction while holding the fire button, but that's not what happens). Two, and truly bizarrely, whenever I picked up an item, there was a fifty-fifty chance that it would instantly kill me. It doesn't matter what item, and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason behind it, I just ended up having to jump over the items that appeared because I was afraid of being killed by them. Perhaps there was a bug in the game - in fact, playing the WHDLoad version I found online, this didn't seem to happen, which is weird - but nevertheless, it's hard to recommend this. Play Pang instead.

Recommended TOSEC disk(s):
Amiga Power #38 (1994)(Future Publishing)(GB)(Disk 1 of 2)[Jun 1994]