Carcharodon: White Sharks
| Developer: Silicon Warriors | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Demonware | Sound: |
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| Year: 1991 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Shoot’em up | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 2 simultaneous | Rating: |
4/10 | |
Carcharodon is a shark genus from the Lamnidae family. It’s also a game singularly lacking in imagination.
I rather enjoy trying a game without reading the manual. A fortiori a shoot’em up, I thought, what’s the risk?
First impressions: I understand nothing about the interface (how ugly it is!), nor why it goes “beep”. Moreover, the spacecraft with a flattened shape have the unfortunate tendency to dodge my shots, whilst theirs are particularly difficult to distinguish from the background.
Visually, it looked lovely … in photographs. In motion, one realises that very few enemies are animated (this is even more glaring when facing a boss). The backdrops are also static (notably, the meteorites in level 2, giving the impression of navigating through jelly).
After consulting the vade-mecum, I can tell you a bit more. There are two sorts of power-ups: the durable (icons represented on the left of the screen) and the temporary (icons on the right). All are accessible from the start, which explains the absence of any bonus to catch during the game. You just press “E” at the title screen to choose and install your weapons for each level, independently. There would supposedly be 37 million possibilities; a concept slightly oversold but interesting, in theory, and perhaps the only original thing to remember about this title. Alas, poorly executed.
Several methods are offered for selecting secondary weapons (pressing “F1” to “F4” at the title screen), as if the developers themselves weren’t convinced: you either hold the button down, wiggle the joystick left and right, or activate auto-fire and change weapons with a simple button press. It is well to want to innovate, but it does not work at all, due to the trigger delay. Even by learning the level by heart, one rarely has the leisure to lose precious seconds (and risk colliding with something) to activate a limited-duration weapon.
Finally, what bothers me most are the obstacles the same colour as the background, combined with forced scrolling … and accelerated scrolling (level 3: seriously … why? Guaranteed migraine!). I pass over the backdrops and enemies, once again copied from Alien and Gradius 2 (arcade, 1988).
By the way, if the current level repeats in a loop, it’s not a bug; it’s because you haven’t reached your quota of killed enemies. Truly, some should abstain from innovating!
To make it run on WinUAE, use the “A500, 1.3 ROM, ECS, 512 Chip RAM, 512 Slow RAM” configuration.
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