Paramax

STORY / GAMEPLAY:
Humanity took the first steps to create a computer-generated artificial world. But not its time get to get out of it! There is only one way out of this world: through the intermediate worlds that the computer uses to useless data. These worlds are inhabited by terrible creatures though which you have to destroy along your way with your plasmatronic mega gun. Of course, not to forget various other hazards and deadly pits too.
Along your way to finish each stage, you need to hurry because each stage has a time limit. There are various opponents to cope with, and various goodies to collect on the way, e.g. shoes for a higher jump, smart bombs that eliminate all enemies on the current screen, extra time or extra lives. You can collect bombs that gives a bonus at the end of the level, floppy disks (!) and gold bars to extend time, shoes that allow higher jumps (probably the best item to collect), extra lives and weapons to increase shooting power. Controls are reasonably good, while most of the opponents are of a rather simple mind. Of course there are some quite tricky areas to avoid the danger of either get shot or fall into a deadly pit.
Paramax was one of the pocket-money games back then, an option that may excuse the lack of finesse in terms of gameplay (visuals and sound are catchy though).

GRAPHICS / SOUND:
The graphics offer colorful areas with sci-fi sceneries, smooth parallax foreground and background scrolling that give no reason to complain, while gameplay corresponds rapidly to the standard of jump and run games of the time. Sprites are cute and fast, although tiny enough in size to make you feel a bit frustrated at times. The game is acoustically accompanied by various pieces of music and sampled sound effects (however, music is quite annoying in the long run).