ShellShock
by Jeremy Hammond
ShellShock v1.0 from Angel Rift Studios is an amazing action game in the tradition of overhead shooters/scrollers.
| The year is 2005. The world is at it's peak. The economy was never better. Crime was at an all-time low. There was no poverty, no social classes, only paradise. Everybody was happy and everybody had a future to look forward to. To avoid future war, all weapons of mass destruction were buried deep under the Earth's crust. It was sealed off from the world above and was guarded around the clock. Throughout the years, it was forgotten. Since there was no communication between the world above and the undeground nation, the guards beneath the Earth's crust had to form it's own society. Suprisingly, population soared to a level even higher then the world above. Generations later, the people had no concept of what was above them and what they were guarding. They thought they were the only people that existed. The greedy stole all the natural resources and built weapons to combat each other. Fortunately, they did not know what the nuclear weapons did. There were many great wars, and the nation cried for order. Eventually, the people formed a communist government. However, the nation's leaders put too much power into war expenses. War leaders embezzled billions of dollars. The original leaders were assasinated. Wars returned to the nation. During the bombing campaigns, the nuclear weapons were sparked and this ravaged the underground society. Many of the nukes were ineffective after all these years, so casualties were low, but more importantly, a great hole exposed what was above their world. People were shocked. War ceased immediately as the people gazed at the new world. Years of underground living has caused the people to become immune to the radiation. But the world above was not so lucky, as many people were killed. When the people from underground saw the society living above them, they became enraged and started taking over many cities. The people above were helpless as violence was never seen before. the nation's leaders aboveground was forced to dig up the old records to find plans for building weapons for proper defense. Since the only plans for modern weaponary was destroyed in the blast, the only defense they had were old weapons from the 1960's. This, coincidentily, was very similar to the weapons that the underground people had, but just a few years older. It took many years for the people above ground to make these weapons. During these years, the below ground people built a nation above ground and stocked it to the brim with anti-aircraft weapons and tanks. It was nearly impossible to destroy. Air attacks became a common nuisance to the original people, and the communist's attacks became inaffective. Soon, they stopped altogether. The democracy above ground send a few scouts to the communists area. They returned claiming that the communists were preparing for a massive attack. The nation decided that a counterattack was neccesary. A large air strike was ordered and the planes were deployed. You are a pilot fighting for democracy in a war-torn time. You are responsible for preventing the communist attack on the democracy's last bunker. | |
| ShellShock is a vertical scrolling shooter. You have to fight
your way through 8 missions. There are enemy planes, tanks, and
flak coming from everywhere at once. Your plane can take about 5 hits before
it goes down. The idea is to just get to the end of the mission, and then you
go to the next. Really simple, but implemented well. Unfortunately, one of the only problems I found was the hit detection. I KNOW that I hit that plane, but for some reason the plane wouldn't get destroyed. As for what you can do, you just move and shoot. There should be some bonus upgrades and such, like extra weapons or some wingmen (which would be cool), or armor. Supposedly you can avoid having anti-aircraft lock on to your position if you use the barrel roll, and it works for the flak, but the missles tend to just spin around, then come after you again. You can't avoid them or the enemy aircraft as easily since you can't move in a barrel roll. There were some options to use the mouse or joystick, although it would have been better if it was a game option instead of having to use parameters. Also, the game is expandable with downloadable maps from the site! Again, it would be nice if there could be an option in the game itself to use them, but you have to type in parameters. I would have liked to see some kind of continues system. This game is tough, and you start each level as badly as you left the last. Being able to continue from the last level would have been great. Maybe a password system or something like that. Other than that, everything was fine. | |
| Very good. I liked the way this game looked. The animations were superb, and there were so many moving objects at once without any flickering. It reminded me of Thunderbirds or even 1942 for the NES. The images themselves were kind of cartoon-ish. I liked it. It was kind of hard to understand the info at the top of the screen, unfortunately. One bar moves when you move, I guess to show the engine's use or something, and I couldn't figure out the other bar. Still, in general, this game had some amazing looking graphics (for QBasic) and it really makes for an enjoyable experience. | |
| Basically, you move left, right, up, or down, you shoot your guns, and you barrel roll (don't!). Very simple. The controls to move are intuitive, but some might find it kind of annoying that you can't choose your own keys for the firing and barrel roll. As for the actual game play, the controls are easy enough. There is hardly any problem with pressing two keys at once and not doing what you wanted. The only exception is the barrel roll, which prevents you from actually moving anywhere while you are rolling. Other than that, the conrols are superb. | |
| The sound effects are quite cool. According to the documentation, they are snippets from websites that have been tailored to this game. This makes them sound professional. There is no background music, but you hardly notice since the game is so action packed. Still it would have been nice. For the most part, this game has done well in this area. | |
| It can seem tough to play this game especially as you advance to the next levels and new weapons come out to haunt you along with many more enemies. It never seems impossible though. This game is very challenging game play indeed. No frustration comes from technical challenges, like no response from the keyboard or such, and the game is not too hard on you. You can play this game through. | |
| This is one of those QBasic games that make you want to shake hands with the programmer. I had a blast shooting out tanks and planes, avoiding missles, etc etc etc. There were very small annoyances, like not having too much varied game play, but as far as this game goes, it is great. | |
| On the whole, this game was well done. There are some things that need improving, but it is easy to forget when you play. I liked this one a lot. | |
| .zip size: 345K | |
| Pete's QBasic Site, V Planet |