Here is Programma’s Phasor Zap cassette, another game of the “shoot alien spacecraft in space” variety.
Here are the audio files. I have not tested the WAV files but the AIFF file loads fine in Virtual II. I have also put it on a disk.
- Programma – Phasor Zap AIFF (*200.2000R)
- Programma – Phasor Zap WAV (*200.2000R)
- Programma – Phasor Zap DSK
The premise of this game is pretty simple. You control the aim of a phasor, and space is full of enemy ships that you must destroy. You only have a certain number of shots to do it in, before you run out of energy.
One thing that makes this game particularly difficult is that you don’t actually have any kind of crosshairs that show you where you’re aiming. So you operate mostly blind, the only way to know where you are aiming is to fire and see where it goes.
Even given the no-crosshairs handicap, sometimes you can still hit the enemy ships.
And in case you were worried that maybe we should have tried diplomacy instead, they do shoot back. If you leave an enemy on screen long enough for it to reach the middle of the screen, they will shoot you, which you are alerted to via a big “ZAP” screen flashed up overtop the play field.
Even without the crosshairs, I was able to get an intuitive feel for where the aim was going to be pretty quickly, and in the end I think I did ok. My current high score after only playing it a couple of times is 390, taking 6 hits. My guess is that will stand as my high score for some time to come.
