Transmuter
Description official description
In Transmuter humanity had to leave earth's surface and retract into the underground because the sun transformed into a red giant. To make matters worse, deadly machines want to destroy the humans. Finally the survivors were able to leave the planet and find a new one to live. Now, years later, the player takes the role of Overlord Tenz to go back to earth and kill the machines.
This game is a side-scrolling shooter in which the player's space ship moves from left to right while shooting everything in sight. In some sections it is necessary to carefully navigate the environment - touching walls is just as unhealthy as getting hit by an enemy. Ship upgrades are gained by racking up points from kills: After reaching a certain amount of points, the first upgrade, speed, lights up. By pressing a button it gets applied to the ship - but if the player is more interested in one of the other four upgrades (the most expensive being protective shields), he needs to wait until he has enough points to afford it.
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Credits (Atari 8-bit version)
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Reviews
Critics
Average score: 60% (based on 3 ratings)
Players
Average score: 2.1 out of 5 (based on 8 ratings with 1 reviews)
The equivalent of rubbing salt into a wound
The Good
Transmuter is a space shootemup, a low budget clone of Nemesis (aka Gradius). That sounds like one of the most trivial things ever... except for Atari 800 users. There is a disturbing lack of scrolling games on a system that was to compete with the Commodore 64, NES, et cetera. So, a game like this theoretically COULD have been be more than welcome in this scene.
So here is this game, which does bear with some semblance/qualities of Gradius.
The music and sound was done by David Whittaker, so it at least sounds like it COULD be a good game.
The Bad
HOW ON EARTH DO YOU MAKE A SHOOTEMUP AND IGNORE ALL THE STRENGTH OF THE ATARI 8-BIT HARDWARE!? THE GAME ENGINE IS A TOTAL JOKE!
What they did is, took the assets of the ZX Spectrum, and did minimal effort to make it work. Imagine the Spectrum graphics, in a blocky low resolution, with even less colors, all a choppy, slowly moving, ugly mess. Hit detection? It exists. Sometimes.
Look at that lame title screen. I assume those agonized looking faces in the bottom are the faces of the people who bought this game.
The Bottom Line
Such a wasted potential. I can say that there is a game under the crud, but you have to try very hard to pretend it's acceptable. At least there is Zybex to redeem.
Atari 8-bit · by 1xWertzui (1135) · 2024
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Patrick Bregger.
Game added October 17, 2011. Last modified February 22, 2023.