Nebulus

INFO
Nebulus is a platform game with some distinctively unique features. Your character, a small frog-like, green creature called Pogo, is on a mission to destroy eight towers that were built onto the sea surface.

STORY / GAMEPLAY
As Pogo, you are spawned via a submarine and have to climb from the bottom finding your to the top of each tower. During gameplay, Pogo always remains at the centre of the screen with horizontal movements causing the screen to scroll in a "three-dimensional" circular motion, thus turning the tower around. The towers are cylinder shaped and have ledges on their outside, either horizontal forming stairs or connected via elevators. Along your way there are several enemies (Aliens) flying or jumping around (mostly bouncing balls) and upon collision they will instantly send you at a lower ground or directly into the sea. It must be pointed that there are a few platforms that cannot bear your weight so they easily break and Pogo falls all the way down. There is a bonus game featured in-between the levels, which is a nice horizontal scroller in the deap sea shooting fish and collecting bonus. OK, although the gameplay is quite interesting (and unique), Nebulus is among the most difficult games to play so I think that the 3 lives given are way too short to survive on a time-limited quest!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The Archimedes version is colorful with nicely animated sprites though colors are limited to 32 and in contrast to the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga versions which offer 50+ colors on screen here. As with the Amiga version, you get "rotational" 3D scrolling with precise hidden-surface removal running at 25 frames per second and multi-layer parallax scrolling on underwater levels at about 50 frames per second! Impressive that is!
This version's sound has a pretty nice main menu theme which is differently composed than the other 16bit versions while there are a few catchy sampled SFX during gameplay. The bonus level has a funky-style beat tune, which makes the entire game much more enjoable to the ears, and in general soundwise, the Archimedes version is the best among its 16bit counterparts!