Gridrunner

Gridrunner
Developer(s)	Jeff Minter
Publisher(s)	HESware Quicksilva (Spectrum)
Platform(s)	VIC-20 (original) Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, Amiga, ZX Spectrum,
Release date(s)	1982
Genre(s)	Shoot 'em up

Gridrunner is a series of shoot 'em up games written by Jeff Minter. The original Gridrunner was published for various 8-bit systems in 1982 and 1983 with Gridrunner 2 following in 1983. A third installation, Voidrunner was released in 1987. Confusingly, Gridrunner 2 was released in the US under the name Attack of the Mutant Camels, which was also the title used for a totally different game released the same year by Minter.

The original game was written in a week.^[1] The series was revived in 2002 with Gridrunner++, for modern platforms, and followed by later games in the series. In August 2012, a Mac OS X port was released via the Mac App Store.

Gameplay

The game is similar to the Atari game Centipede, in which the player controls a green ship, the Gridrunner, at the bottom and shoots at enemies which zigzag down from the top. The player must also avoid pulses emitted by the X-Y zappers which patrol the edges of the grid. The game has twenty waves of enemies to complete.^[2]

The player's ship is at the bottom centre as a string of enemies descends.

The player controls a small, constantly firing, ship that can be steered around the whole of the playfield with swipes of the iOS touchscreen. Various enemies appear on the playfield and will attack the player's ship. The game is divided into a number of levels (or grids) with set patterns of enemy attack on each grid. At the end of each level a bonus life is awarded and the next grid begins. To aid the player shooting certain enemies will release spinning coloured disks that increase the player's attacking powers, these power-ups are short-lived but collecting multiple disks will increase the potency and/or duration of the power-up. More enemy types are introduced as the player moves through the levels of the game, enemies also become more dangerous as the game progresses. The game can be played in Pure or Casual mode. In Pure mode the player has to start at the first level and progress through each level consecutively until all his lives are lost, after level 4 and every 4th level thereafter the game will create a save point. In Casual mode the player can resume the game at any of the save points he has created when playing in Pure mode with his score and lives set to his best performance at that point. Pure and Casual modes have separate high score tables.

Development

Llamasoft released Gridrunner in 1982 for the unexpanded VIC-20. Although it draws its inspiration from the arcade game Centipede^[3][4] with the concept of a snake-like enemy descending the screen through a series of obstacles (mushrooms in centipede, pods in Gridrunner) it plays much faster. Versions of the game appeared for many of the home computers of the early 1980s along with sequels such as Matrix and Voidrunner. In recent years Llamasoft have revisited the game with Gridrunner++ and Gridrunner Revolution extending the game play in both cases.^[3] Gridrunner for iOS is part of Llamasoft's Minotaur Project to revisit classic gaming platforms with modern hardware.

Reception

Ahoy! called Attack of the Mutant Camels the product of "a fiendish mind", with "serviceable" graphics ("so if you're wondering what a mutant camel really looks like, forget it") and excellent sound effects, and concluded that it was "all in all, a fine game".^[5]

Eurogamer called the iOS release "the best shooter on iOS,"^[6] and Touch Arcade described it as "a retro remake done right".^[7] As of March 2012, it has a MetaCritic score of 83.^[8]

References

External links

• Moby Games - Gridrunner series