“Fantastic! Who needs 16-bit machines when Hewson and Raffaele Cecco can produce games like this on the 8-bit Spectrum?” CRASH made Cybernoid a Smash in April 1988, with 96%, and its contents page sold it on its author: “Exolon author, Raffaele Cecco, produces his best game ever!” The game is a shoot-’em-up played one screen at a time, crammed with pirate ships, gun emplacements and explosions, with a ship that carries half a dozen weapons chosen from the keyboard. It is also very hard. One CRASH reviewer found that after a while “progress inevitably becomes a matter of sacrificing a life to find out how to negotiate new screens”, and years later Cecco agreed that it had been too harsh.
Fast facts
- Designer and programmer: Raffaele Cecco, for Hewson Consultants.
- Released: spring 1988 on the ZX Spectrum (£7.99 on cassette, £14.99 on +3 disc) and Amstrad CPC; the Commodore 64 version, by Nick Jones, came out the same spring. Amiga and Atari ST versions followed at the end of 1988, and there was a NES version.
- Music: Dave Rogers on the Spectrum, Amstrad and Atari ST; a new theme by Jeroen Tel on the C64.
- CRASH: 96%, CRASH Smash (April 1988). Your Sinclair: Megagame (May 1988).
- Sequel: Cybernoid II: The Revenge (1988), 88% in CRASH.
Pirates and cargo
Pirates have raided the Federation’s storage depots and made off with minerals, jewels, ammunition and weapons. Your Sinclair‘s David McCandless pointed out the initials of the Massive Federation Intergalactic depots: “MFI to you”. The player flies the Cybernoid ship through the pirates’ territory, which CRASH called “flick-screen”: each screen is a fixed room of rock, metal and alien plant life, and flying off its edge replaces it with the next. Shooting pirate ships makes them drop the stolen cargo, and at the depot at the end of each level the game checks whether you have brought back enough. There is a time limit on every level.
The screens are puzzles as much as battlegrounds. Gun emplacements, missile launchers and plants spitting plasma guard narrow gaps, and some can only be passed with the right weapon. Your Sinclair explained the catch: each screen has a safe route out, “and once you’ve left it there’s no turning back”. You start with five lives, and one touch of an enemy or a bullet costs one.
The weapons
Cecco wanted every weapon to be chosen with a single key and to look different on screen. “At first I thought about using a joystick, but in the end this was too cumbersome,” he told Retro Gamer. “It interrupted the flow of the game, which was very fast, so I went for key presses.” Keys 1 to 5 select bombs, impact mines, a defence shield that makes the ship briefly invulnerable, bouncing bombs and heat-seeking missiles. Stocks are limited, and yellow canisters dropped by pirate ships add one to the weapon in use. Other pick-ups change the ship itself: the rear gun, and the CyberMace, a ball that swings around the ship on a trail of sparks. The mace took him about 20 minutes to write: a circular table of X and Y offsets from the ship’s position, with the trail added.
Making it on the Spectrum
Cybernoid took about nine months, Cecco said, and most of the problems were speed and memory. He solved them with compact data structures for the screen layouts and a long period of optimising, until the sprites moved at 25 frames a second. To keep attribute clash down, moving sprites took on the colour of the background they crossed, and when one sprite passed over another the game moved so fast that the flicker “barely lasted any time at all”. He wrote the program on a CP/M development system linked to the Spectrum, as he had Exolon, drew the graphics with a custom editor from his days at Mikro-Gen, and later said they looked like Exolon’s because “my graphics abilities were limited”. CRASH found the graphics “so colourful and detailed you’d be forgiven for thinking it was an arcade version”.
On the 128K Spectrum Dave Rogers’s tune played all through the game unless the sound was switched off, and CRASH praised “an amazing 128K in-game tune”. Rogers later wished there had been an option to turn the music off and keep the effects, which Cecco added in the sequel.
Cecco looked back on it in 1990: “Perhaps not my best technically, but still very playable, I think, because it had so much in it. It’s the first game I actually enjoyed play-testing! It’s another flip-screen shoot-em-up.” By 2012 he was harder on it. “A three-hit energy bar would have made it less harsh and annoying.”
Other machines
Nick Jones’s C64 conversion was The Games Machine’s conversion of the month in May 1988. ZZAP!64 found it “fast, appealing and very, very addictive”, with one complaint: having to “blindly grope along the keyboard to select extra weaponry” in the middle of a fight. Its soundtrack was new, written by the Dutch composer Jeroen Tel of Maniacs of Noise, and Cecco said later, “The C64 version was great. And that music…” The C64 version gives the player four lives, not five.
The Amiga version, at £19.95, had 155 screens, The Games Machine reported in November 1988; the Atari ST version followed at £19.99 and scored 76%. The C64 game was later reissued on the Wii’s Virtual Console.
Cybernoid II
Cybernoid II: The Revenge followed within six months, with new music by Rogers. CRASH gave it 88% in October 1988, and Cecco’s verdict was brief: “Um, the same as the last one, really. Only more so.”
Sources
- CRASH issue 50, March 1988, p. 111: preview (“From the Exolon author”; “very much in the Zynaps style”).
- CRASH issue 51, April 1988: contents page (p. 7); Hewson advertisement with prices (p. 9); review, CRASH Smash, 96% (p. 13).
- Your Sinclair issue 29, May 1988, pp. 46–47: David McCandless, review (MFI; five lives; keys 1 to 5; the safe route out of each screen).
- ZZAP!64 issue 37, May 1988, pp. 24–25: C64 review (flick-screen; four lives; time limit and cargo; weapon selection).
- The Games Machine issue 6, May 1988: C64 version by Nick Jones, conversion of the month. Issue 12, November 1988: Amiga version (£19.95, 155 screens). Issue 13, December 1988: Atari ST version (£19.99, 76%).
- CRASH issue 57, October 1988: Cybernoid II review, 88%.
- Your Sinclair issue 52, April 1990, p. 11: Cecco on Cybernoid and Cybernoid II; Cybernoid a Megagame.
- David Crookes, “The Making of Cybernoid”, Retro Gamer issue 102, May 2012: the weapons and key selection; the CyberMace; nine months’ development; 25 frames a second; sprites taking the background colour; the development system and graphics editor; the difficulty; the music on each version; the NES version and the Virtual Console release.