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Review

Duration: 23:43

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Huge playlist archive with Kempston Mouse games: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxOanVBhqd3tM1Ov2sGHI177WdlY0wali
INTRODUCTION (From the manual):
They never took the Dork menace very seriously. First they thought they would never dare to attack, then that we would easily beat them... mankind never learns. Now the Earth is invaded by those creatures, and you are the pilot in charge of saving everyone. Does it sound familiar to you? Maybe one of those combat simulators said something similar.

But things could never be that easy. When they first attacked, the definitive weapon was designed, something that could free us from the Dork: the Genesis spaceship. But, why building it in the Earth? That would be too simple. It is much better to outsource the job to other planets, and then we would assemble the ship. Well, they never expected the invasion to be that fast, and they did not think that someone would have to go and collect the Genesis parts... Guess who.

So this is the situation. You are on your good old spaceship, in a secret hangar, getting ready to try to escape from Earth, visit five planets to gather the Genesis parts, assemble it and finally come back home, to free the planet from an angry alien invasion... all on your own.

THE GAME
Your mission is quite simple: kill as many enemies as possible, while trying to stay alive. First, you must escape from Earth, to visit five planets and get a part of the Genesis on each one. Once you have successfully assembled the spaceship, you will use it to get back to Earth and free us from the Dork menace.

Your ship has two different shoot types: normal shoot, which will be used to fire the weapons equipped by your ship at any time, and a megablast, which will kill every enemy around you. To activate the megablast, keep the fire button pressed, until the power bar located on the lower-right side of the screen is filled up. The bomb will be launched when you release the fire button. You have an unlimited number of normal shoots and a very limited amount of available megablasts, so use them wisely.

Somewhere in the planets you will find capsules that, when shot, will release power ups for your ship. Those power ups are determined by the character found inside them.

REVIEW:
You alone against the whole enemy army, as in so many other shoot em ups! Graphically this is disappointing, a side scrolling shoot em up from 2010 should not be in monochrome, check out Zynaps and R-type from the 80s to see how to make games like this in full color. The game also exists for the MSX in full color, but the scrolling is not very smooth in this version, so I prefer the monochrome Spectrum version.

Apart from the monochrome graphics this is actually a good shoot em up. There is no problem with seeing the enemy bullets because they are always on black background and not hidden in other graphich with the same color. The game has lots of different in game music and there are seven levels which all have an end of level boss. Your ship has unlimited normal fire power and limited megablasts and it is possible to collect all kind of cool power ups.

The game played in this video is a special Kempston Mouse version and it plays really well. You can take good advantage of the extra speed, especially on the later levels, and the controls are fast and precise.

The game was published by RetroWorks in 2010.

Rating:
Original version: 85%
Unofficial Kempston Mouse version: 90%

If you do not have a Kempston Mouse for your Spectrum you can play the game in an emulator that supports Kempston Mouse and play it with your PC mouse.

Original version: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games/g/Genesis-DawnOfANewDay.tap.zip
Unofficial Kempston Mouse version: https://velesoft.speccy.cz/kmouse/kmvelesoft/genesis-km.zip