Uridium Commodore 64 Graftgold Andrew Braybrook 1986


Uridium C64 1986



Andrew Braybrook released Uridium on the Commodore 64 in February of 1986. A C64-original shoot 'em up, Uridium has the player maneuvering a highly-mobile manta craft over the surfaces of hostile dreadnoughts rendered in bas-relief.

The object of Uridium is to strafe back and forth over the dreadnoughts, dodging fire and out-flanking and shooting down craft. Once the waves of enemy craft have been shot down the manta must land on the runway and enter the fuel rod chamber aka reactor core in order to destroy the dreadnought. In sum, a fleet of 15 dreadnoughts must be destroyed.

Uridium scrolls horizontally, bi-directionally and at variable-rate. Thus, Uridium is a super-scroller in the vein of Defender. Uridium scrolls over 200 screens of playfield.

Uridium IBM PC 1988


Graftgold released Uridium on IBM PC in 1988. Converted by John Friedman and Joe Hellesen to i808x CGA/EGA from Andrew Braybrook's 1986 C64 original, Uridium was the first super-scroller on IBM PC.

Requiring 384 kbytes RAM, Uridium runs from a 126 kbyte executable. See that Uridium logo below? It's a full-screen scroller. :)


Uridium was ported to Atari ST in 1987 by Joe Hellesen. And while the scrolling is not smooth on the 8 MHz Motorola 68000, it's still a good shooter.


Uridium 2 Amiga 1993



Andrew Braybrook of Graftgold released Uridium 2 as an Amiga-exclusive in 1993. Uridium 2 is one of the most technically impressive shoot 'em ups on the Amiga; its preeminent super-scroller.

Uridium 2 features sampled speech, 2-player simultaneous play and six fleets composed of 24 dreadnoughts with playfield dimensions of 4096x176 and 4080x448. Thus, Uridium 2 features some vertical not just horizontal scrolling. Uridium 2 also employs an impressive logo-plasma.

While its pixel art is not on the level of the likes of Xenon 2, Uridium 2's 50 FPS parallax scrolling is much smoother and faster. As well, its gameplay is more dynamic due to the sudden changes in direction.

The manta's looping maneuver increases its height over the surface of the dreadnought, thereby allowing it to avoid enemy fire. In addition, banking allows the manta to negotiate confined spaces.

Uridium 2 was distributed on 2x 3.5" 880 kB diskettes and requires 1 meg of RAM. With more RAM Uridium 2 reduces load times via RAM disk, and its audio employs extra chip RAM. AGA chipset Amigas such as the A1200 unlock Uridium 2's Mayhem Mode, which features even faster scrolling and more on-screen ships and projectiles.

Uridium 2 Weapons System (Pick-ups): Shield, Bomb, Torpedo, Chaser Drone, Cyclone Spiralling Laser, Ionizer, Twin Laser Stream, Twin Plasma Stream, Scatter Laser Bolts.

cf.


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