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 underwater game featured in-between the levels, which is a nice horizontal scroller in shooting fish and collecting bonus. 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 Atari ST version is (as expected) more advanced than the 8bit versions, with greatly animated sprites. As with the Amiga and Archimedes versions, 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 30 frames per second (in contrast to the Amiga and Archimedes which offer 50 frames per seconds in this stage). The game here features a number of 50+ colors on screen on the backgrounds that apparently are missing on the Acorn Archimedes (!) and DOS (EGA graphics) versions! The sound consists of some low quality sampled SFX and no in-game music while the introductory tune is pure AY-chip tune, and it sounds a bit better than the AMSTRAD version.

GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO
On our video below you may watch the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64/128 and Atari ST versions of the game.