The Crystal City is one of the most ambitious games ever done for the Coco 3. It featured extremely fast gameplay, hardware horizontal scrolling terrain
(30 megabytes worth - non repeating) throughout the 6 levels, and crunched down to fit on two 35 track disks. It's author, Jeremy Spiller, also did another amazingly fast
arcade game called Zenix as well. The game plays somewhat similiar to the arcade games Scramble and Super Cobra, although at a much faster
pace. Also, most of the game is flying over the planets surface, although you will notice that there are mountain tunnels to fly
through in one of the above screenshots. The main key to doing well in the game is to collect as many of the parachuting fuel supplies as you can; this will
increase your shield power (although you're shields are useless against running into the ground). There are also large boss ships to destroy at the end of each level. On level 5,
Jeremy programmed the colors so they were intense daylight colors when you were outside, but dimmed to dark colors once you entered cave systems. Another nicely done touch was that your
shots (as well as crashing alien planes, helicoptors and other opponents) could actually damage the terrain; on level 6 this becomes mandatory so that you can blast
holes through buildings in order to fly through them.
Please note: some of the screenshots have a garbled up score/shield line - while this did happen to a small extent on a real Coco (there was an option
in the game to subtly change the timing to eliminate most of it), it seems to be more pronounced in the emulator screenshots I took (not that you
have time to look at the score until you die, anyways).
Title: The Crystal City
Author: Jeremy Spiller (Gosub Software)
Publisher: Sundog Systems
Released: Late 1990
Requires: Color Computer 3, 512K RAM, disk ONLY, joystick.
Download ZENIXANDCRYSTALCITY.ZIP from Jeremy Spiller's Coco games website. This contains three DSK images; 1 for Zenix and 2 for Crystal City. For Crystal City, type LOADM"CRYSTAL" from the first disk. When the game prompts you to insert the Levels disk, swap the 2nd Crystal disk into the drive. To start the game, either hit the joystick button, or a number key corresponding to the level you want to start at.