Transmuter

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.