Apidya - Amiga

[Reg]

 

[johnparker007]

Great music from Chris Heulsbeck on this one, gets more then the standard 4x Amiga sound channels using his custom audio engine  

[jabbathehut]

Frustrating game .Incidentally continue doesn't do anything unless you get to the second stage.

[Reg]

The music was very good gotta give it that, the sprites were pretty buy so madenning. 

I don't think I'll ever see the second stage - lol !

[Chopaholic]

I played Apidya right back when it was released in 1992 and TBH was never really much of a fan of it. I gave it a fair crack of the whip as I liked the graphics and music/sound so much. but the game simply isn't that much fun.

It's brutally difficult, which isn't necessarily a problem in and of itself, but Apidya just feels unfair.

The developers of the game wanted it to be a Japanese style shooter and whilst they got the aesthetics mostly right they didn't really understand the game style itself very well IMO, the main problem being the lack of dynamic difficulty based on how the player is doing.

If you go back even to a game such as Nemsis in the arcades (a 1985 Konami shooter), the game adjusts its difficulty based on your performance, if you do really well, get all your options maxed out and are laying waste with the lasers, the enemies start moving faster, fire more bullets that move quicker and so on. (Just get to the end of Level 1 in Nemesis without losing a life and having all your goodies, it really tries to kill you.)

The flip side of this that if you're doing badly, you've lost a life or two, have an underpowered ship or whatever, the game will dial things back a bit to still give you a fair chance, to the extent you can take out the boss at the end of the first level with just a single speed up and the basic gun.

Apidya doesn't do this (not as far as I could ever tell anyway), and you can see this in @Reg's video, he knows he's stuffed at the end of Level 1 because he's got a basic ship, the boss fight an exercise in futility. (You can also see how it leaves a residual enemy from the level itself on screen still attacking him, Nemesis despawns anything else around before throwing the boss onto screen.)

And it's not even like it's a resource issue (i.e. lack of CPU or RAM or whatever), the Amiga is a more powerful machine in every regard than the arcade hardware that Nemesis was built on - the coders of Apidya just didn't get this critical element of Japanese shooters.

So for me Apidya looks and sounds lovely, but it's not a great game to play.

[johnparker007]

1 hour ago, Chopaholic said:

I played Apidya right back when it was released in 1992 and TBH was never really much of a fan of it. I gave it a fair crack of the whip as I liked the graphics and music/sound so much. but the game simply isn't that much fun.

It's brutally difficult, which isn't necessarily a problem in and of itself, but Apidya just feels unfair.

The developers of the game wanted it to be a Japanese style shooter and whilst they got the aesthetics mostly right they didn't really understand the game style itself very well IMO, the main problem being the lack of dynamic difficulty based on how the player is doing.

If you go back even to a game such as Nemsis in the arcades (a 1985 Konami shooter), the game adjusts its difficulty based on your performance, if you do really well, get all your options maxed out and are laying waste with the lasers, the enemies start moving faster, fire more bullets that move quicker and so on. (Just get to the end of Level 1 in Nemesis without losing a life and having all your goodies, it really tries to kill you.)

The flip side of this that if you're doing badly, you've lost a life or two, have an underpowered ship or whatever, the game will dial things back a bit to still give you a fair chance, to the extent you can take out the boss at the end of the first level with just a single speed up and the basic gun.

Apidya doesn't do this (not as far as I could ever tell anyway), and you can see this in @Reg's video, he knows he's stuffed at the end of Level 1 because he's got a basic ship, the boss fight an exercise in futility. (You can also see how it leaves a residual enemy from the level itself on screen still attacking him, Nemesis despawns anything else around before throwing the boss onto screen.)

And it's not even like it's a resource issue (i.e. lack of CPU or RAM or whatever), the Amiga is a more powerful machine in every regard than the arcade hardware that Nemesis was built on - the coders of Apidya just didn't get this critical element of Japanese shooters.

So for me Apidya looks and sounds lovely, but it's not a great game to play.

Good point about the dynamic difficulty man - I don't remember actually playing Apidya much myself (I had a copy for my Amiga) - it was just a wow fest on the gfx/audio, I was always particularly intrigued by the additional sound channels.  Back in those days, it was more a case of 'git gud' - it was hot on the heels of the Speccy and C64, and they had some shocking difficulty issues on games!

[Chopaholic]

Yes I fired up Apidya from time to time because it was such a nice looking and sounding game, but then I always quickly remembered it wasn't much fun to play

On the tangent of getting sound hardware to do impossible stuff, were you aware of the 'multitracker' Tim Follin managed to program for the 48K ZX Spectrum?

Personally I was always more a fan of the C64 with its amazing SID chip and then later the Amiga (over the Atari ST), but you've got to admire talent like this.

 

 

[johnparker007]

33 minutes ago, Chopaholic said:

Yes I fired up Apidya from time to time because it was such a nice looking and sounding game, but then I always quickly remembered it wasn't much fun to play

On the tangent of getting sound hardware to do impossible stuff, were you aware of the 'multitracker' Tim Follin managed to program for the 48K ZX Spectrum?

Personally I was always more a fan of the C64 with its amazing SID chip and then later the Amiga (over the Atari ST), but you've got to admire talent like this.

 

 

I've seen the various more modern zx beep trackers (no stranger to tracking myself, spent many an hour on the Amiga noodling away!) ... this one is a little more basic I think (it is from '87 before there hardly was a 'scene'!), but the actual song is also really cool   Pads work very well in this one... to write one this good, this early - guy had serious skills!

[johnparker007]

Been checking out a couple more of his while doing my work - here's one where he's using his usual beeper engine for the pads etc, but is using the 128k AY chip for some amazingly realistic (for a Speccy) snares - never heard that approach before!  Doesn't use the 128k AY chip for any tones - just the snare instrument.... Admittedly 128k only, but those snares sound lit   ...and as a bonus, at the end it jives into a remix of the Chronos music above, but with the awesome layered AY snares... this guy is a bit of a legend, thanks for the heads up!  

 

Edited March 15, 2022 by johnparker007

[CompostCORNER]

Good video. I quite enjoyed that one.

Now being heavily into the Amiga, I can remember a similar side scrolling shooter that graphically was very odd. Now be forgiving, as this has to be almost 30 years ago so the old grey matter isn't performing quite like it used to... The game in question, I wondered if it was a clone of Apidya. Maybe even Project X. Thing is, the background was made up of ribs, flesh, blood, as if the ship was flying over or through a wasteland of dead flesh. It's been such a long time since I played it, the enemy that the ship is shooting could well have been bugs and viruses. I've tried in vain to see if i could find the game. I'm beginning to think it might have been a Public Domain game.

[Chopaholic]

Sounds a bit like Menace to me @CompostCORNER ?

 

[CompostCORNER]

I found it. 'Disposable Hero'.....

Apparently a Gremlin Graphics game thats now abandonware.

A very difficult game and a weird looking one too....