After the release of Hyperzap 2018 there were a few comments about it’s simplicity; that was a deliberate design choice on your correspondent’s part – the intention was to replicate the kind of game a newly-minted C64 assembly language programmer would possibly write – but in an effort to make people happy, those features were duly added around a week after the game was released… and promptly forgotten. Fast forward a little to a couple of days ago and your correspondent remembered that he was planning on releasing a couple of C64CD things during 2018, so nefarious “plans” have been laid to push them out of the door during the “festive season”.
So dear reader, the first of those deliveries is Super Hyperzap, a slightly upgraded version of the original Hyperzap 2018 which, along with swapping the soundtrack out for a more recent one, adds some variety to the enemy designs and allows them to animate , includes explosion graphics when enemies or the player are destroyed and, most importantly of all considering the aforementioned feedback, has the enemies moving horizontally as well as vertically. This latter amendment fixes a fairly major design flaw in the original which it in turn had inherited from the first Hyperzap.
The author recently made the rather amusing but false claim that he “tell[s] it like it is, trying to uncover the mysteries that Commodore created surrounding the C64” but the main problem with that statement is that there aren’t any mysteries because Commodore themselves and the various third parties have documented it extensively and, because of that, there’s a plethora of games similar to Super Hyperzap out there from programmers learning their craft and actually putting it to practical use in the process.
