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Electronic
Zoo never produced much decent stuff
on the C64, but that was to change with the stunning
'Orcus'.
A
sideways scrolling shoot-em up which featured a shop with 29
(!) different add-ons on offer. Haydn
Dalton informed GTW that the game also featured over 5,000
sprites altogether and many levels of awesome graphics.
JCH
supplied
the music, an incredible array of tunes, some of which sound almost
human like. Luckily these slipped into HVSC, and are available
from here to listen to in a suitable SID player.
So
basically the game featured the full works and playability to
kick Armalyte's butt, and judging by the preview, it had it in
it to do so.
Mike
Ager contacted
GTW and told us that the game was never completed due to him,
Haydn and JCH not being paid, and the tight deadlines included.
He
has also informed me that somewhere at his home he has a much
fuller version, compared to the versions that we have seen so
far... and he will hopefully be sending a copy in the future to upload to the site. Contact has been made in 2005, so we hope for more luck.
In the meantime, Jazzcat has uncovered a very rare and much more advanced preview of level one. Infact, level one is stated to be 90% complete in this DCS crack (See a pattern here?). This is a superb look at the game, which gives a much better indication of how it was shaping up. There are colour splits, sfx, more enemies and sophisticated attack patterns. Check it out!
Interestingly enough, all the previews we have were cracked by Donut Cracking Service. It seems that Haydn passed on previews to a guy called Micheal (Mik) Bailey, who MAY have more of the game. Haydn believes he passed a much fuller version onto him... so could there be a more complete DCS crack out there? Hopefully soon we will be able to bring you ORCUS
in its final state, which many C64 users have been wanting to
get hold of for years. Contact unfortunatly has been slow with
Mike, possibly due to commitments and deadlines for his new projects,
but soon more will happen eventually.
For
now, you can play some early previews of the game, with some basic
attack forms and early previews of the main game's shop.
As an additional bonus, Jazzcat has uncovered some rare music and SFX demos done by JCH. Although the music is already in HVSC, the SFX is not!... and there is a bundle of SFX which has not been used in the game and are quite unheard of. This includes a very cool GET READY and GAME OVER set of effects which sound like speech, but have been cleverly generated using the 3 SID voices. Enjoy!
Overall,
very promising indeed.
Appearing
in GTW hopefully sometime in the future...
Frank.
(Additional
source credits - Mike Ager, Phil Davis, Jazzcat, Kenz, GRG)
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