Mega Apocalypse is the sequel to Crazy Comets. It was programmed by Simon Nicol, with graphics by Bob Stevenson and music by Rob Hubbard, and was published for the Commodore 64 by Martech in 1987. It is a single-screen shooter in which you have to destroy a series of planets to complete each stage.

The game is an unashamed clone of Gottlieb‘s 1983 arcade game, Mad Planets, although it’s fair to say that it’s at least a good one.

The aim is to destroy the planets before they collide with you (which they’re likely to do since they ‘chase’ you around the play area, and speed up when they’re ‘mad’).

To make the game reasonably playable the programmer has decided to make your ship fire automatically, constantly. To rotate the ship you press fire and push the joystick left or right*. It’s a very unsatisfactory way of doing things because your ship stops while it’s rotating, making it a sitting duck for a split second. What a game like this needs is a joystick for ship movement, and a rotary, analogue dial for the rotation. Ultimately, you can’t turn fast enough to react to what’s going on around you, so you end up facing one direction and simply snaking around a planet to avoid it. Which is not ideal.

*=Some levels allow you to rotate, while others do not. I’m confused by this.

In two-player, you can choose to be either Dual Allies or Dual Enemies (press F1 on the title screen) and play simultaneously. Which is great fun!

Ultimately, Mega Apocalypse is like Crazy Comets and Mad Planets… A barely playable idea that looked good on paper, but doesn’t really work in practise.

Programmer Simon Nicol made a sequel to this game some years later, for the Super Nintendo, called Apocalypse II, but it was canned before release.

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