Dead Moon is a great horizontal scrolling shoot 'em up game that showcases the PC-Engine / SuperGrafx-16's hardware capabilities back in 1991!
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY The game starts somewhere on Earth and then launches the player into space to intercept the alien invaders. During aerial fights, supply ships will periodically enter the screen (near its top or bottom) and, if shot down, they will grant upgrades. Multiple pickups of the same color/upgrades will increase your current weapon's power to a maximum of three levels and allow the ship to take one more extra hit per pickup to a maximum of three hits. Actually, this might get a bit confusing since you almost cannot avoid certain upgrade pickups. This will make you change your already selected weapons, lots of times! There are six different levels to fly through, each with a mid-level boss and a bigger one at the end!
GRAPHICS / SOUND Dead Moon's graphics are really good. They feature a large variety of colors and lots of huge sprites simultaneously on screen! There is also parallax scrolling involved on the background. The action is quite fast and sports smooth sprite animation at all times. The game uses nice and catchy in-game tunes surrounded by some great Sci-Fi sound FX. Dead Moon is a fantastic, arcade-style, shoot 'em up game for the NEC PC Engine and Turbografx16 consoles.
Screenshots
Sounds
Intro/Menu music:
In-game music sample:
Gameplay sample
Hardware information
PC-Engine / TurboGrafx-16 / TurboDuo
CPU: HuC6280 8bit at 3.6MHz MEMORY: 8KB RAM GRAPHICS: Dual 16-bit GPUs (HuC6260 Video Color Encoder, HuC6270A Video Display Controller), 64KB VRAM, 482 colors at once out of 512, 64 hardware sprites, Supports: 256 x 256 to 320x256 flicker free interlaced screen resolution. A 512x256 mode is possible through fiddling with registers, but not SOUND: Capable of generating clear digitized sounds and harmonized music. Use of "Turbo Booster" add-on, could generate stereo sound.