The Tail of Beta Lyrae for the Atari 8-bit family
9Came also out for:
---
Game description:
The Tail of Beta Lyrae is a side-scrolling shoot'em-up game that puts you in the role of "a Wing Commander assigned to the Beta Quadrant." Alien forces have occupied the mining colonies in the asteroid fields of the Beta Lyrae binary star system, and it's up to you to pilot your fighter through the fields, destroying the alien invaders and their installations.
Though not strictly a clone, The Tail of Beta Lyrae closely parallels the concept and feel of 1981's popular Scramble arcade game and its successors. As the landscape scrolls past, the player uses a joystick to move the ship around the screen, avoiding attacks from laser and missile emplacements and destroying buildings, power generators, vessels and alien miners. The landscape and configuration of objects is generated pseudo-randomly (within both design and game play difficulty constraints), adding a degree of unpredictability to the game. Game design also added new objects to levels already played after the user had owned the game for a time in order to add new excitement to experienced areas.
What I think:
Quite fun shoot'em-up and I love the fact that the layouts of the sectors are always different each time you play.
However, I don't like those anti-gravitation ... things.