Developed and published by Ocean in 1987

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Ocean's conversion of Gryzor (the name by which we came to know Konami's Contra) was one of my favourite side-scrolling shooters back on the C64. As a new-comer to the Spectrum, I was keen to see how it compared to Commodore's offering.

In terms of features, just about everything from the arcade version has made it into the Spectrum in tact. The levels, bosses, weapons and pseudo-3D tunnel sections are all present and correct, so it at least gains some points for trying to replicate the arcade in this respect.

On a technical level, the programmer (Paul Owens) also managed to execute some very smooth scrolling as the players moves throughout the level and is very impressive.

The game also features some very nicely detailed character graphics and animation (Mark Jones). The running and somersaulting animations for the main character are pretty realistic and certainly look better than the C64 version (in terms of detail), although the C64 obviously has better colours. In fact, the enemy troopers and graphics in the Speccy edition are much closer to the art style of the arcade version as a whole.

As for the sound and music (David Whittaker), these are also more than acceptable, faithfully recreating the tunes and atmosphere of the original arcade machine. For some unknown reason, the music suddenly fades out in the latter half of the game's final level and never comes back, leaving the player with just sound effects.

Unfortunately, any fun you're likely to get from the game diminishes rapidly thanks to the way the player, enemies and their bullets blend into the backgrounds. I suspect this is largely due to avoiding attribute clash issues, and it appears as though the technique adopted is to have the foreground graphics inherit the colours from any background. The unfortunate effect of this, coupled with the fact that the bullets are barely bigger than a couple of pixels, is it is almost impossible to avoid incoming shots, resulting in many unexpected and frustrating deaths.

Sadly, this problem is the only thing you'll be thinking about whilst playing and I spent most of the time recording this throwing my hands up in despair as I died from yet another invisible bullet (none of this is the in the recording - it's definitely not fun to watch!).

In conclusion, the Spectrum version of Gryzor offers some initial enjoyment in the earlier levels before the issues become too apparent. Beyond the second level, however, you'll probably want to have a piece of wood to bite down on - a good attempt, but too frustrating for it's own good.
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