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Review

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Sphera is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up. Sphera is also the Emperor's most feared artificial prison planet and the player happens to be one of its inmates. Sent there by a scheming business partner he wants no more than escape and get his revenge.

The player gets his chance when suddenly a supply ships breaks down and before it can be repaired the player takes control of it. Now the goal is to fight through the game's three levels full of defence droids and guard ships and find freedom.

The gameplay is typical of the genre. The player controls his space ship and has to shoot down the many enemies that appear around him. The player has an energy bar indicating how much damage he can take from enemy fire. When it's empty or he collides with an enemy ship he loses a life. The player starts with five lives and can earn more. Other pick-ups include energy and weapons. There is an end boss for each level and these include a giant crab and a scorpion. (From Mobygames)

This game could have been totally awesome, but a few things is pulling it down – The background graphics and scrolling is stunning, but the things moving around the screen is only in mode 2 graphics, which means that your ship, the enemies, the enemy bullets and everything is in monochrome.

Other problems is that you fly under big objects, instead of flying over them, making enemies and enemy bullets hard to see those places, and an attack wave coming from the bottom of the screen at the speed of lightning is rather annoying.

When you first try the game it seems insanely tough, especially because you die all the time because of the attack wave coming from the bottom of the screen, but once you figure out to try to stay in the middle of the screen most of the time, because then this attack wave can not hit you, the gameplay is actually quite decent.

The soundtrack is super, and the controls are good, and it is also possible to collect power ups to upgrade your ship. The biggest problem with this game is the gameplay difficulty, but compared to the difficulty of the shoot em ups that came out for the Commodore 64 I guess Sphera is not any more difficult than these.

If not for anything else, this game is worth checking out for the nice background graphics and great music, but once you figure out how to play it, and stay in the middle of the screen, it is actually pretty good. And you also have to consider that it came out in 1990 and was one of the first games for the SAM. A poke is used for completing this game.

Rating 84%

The game was published by Enigma Variations in 1990.

I have all the old SAM games on original disks, but to avoid wear and tear on these rare disks and the SAM disk drive I usually play digital versions from the "GoodSamC" roms collection in an emulator.