Game Review: Pulsoids (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

The aim of the game is to destroy all the destructible blocks in the arena.

Rather than a bat and ball, in Pulsoids, you instead have to deflect lasers with an Energy Mirror (effectively your bat).  This bounces any lasers back (effectively like balls) back into the screen (known as arenas).  This Energy Mirror be moved left and right (and in some fire can be used to activate a barrier.)

The game begins with you having one laser on the screen.  After a few seconds, the occasion alien or two might appear (usually near of the screen).  If one of your lasers successfully hits one of the aliens, you’ll start seeing more moving lasers (which is good!)

Should the final laser on the screen pass your Energy Mirror then you lose a life.  Your Energy Mirror spins around before disintegrating into pieces and vanishing.

Reflexes of a Cat

In the genre of Breakout clones (eg. Arkanoid and Batty), you’ll usually need quick reflexes.

The real tough parts are when the lowest walls are near the bottom of the screen.  You’ll have to be very alert to sometimes deflect the laser(s) and a lot of lives can be used up rather quickly.  Red blocks are tougher as they need to be hit twice, so the low-down block can make it rather awkward.

Pulsoids offers the player a good challenge and the speed of the lasers all build up the excitement of the game.  Hit the yellow lightning blocks and you’ll really see the game go into overdrive!

On The Re-Bound

Due to the way the diagonal direction of the laser(s), I found that it could take a very long while to hit a single block, particularly if it was near the top middle of the arena.  Usually power-up batteries can help but as the batteries only come down when you a block or alien, it meant having quite a lot of patience to progress and becoming frustrating.

When you do finally hit the last block, the laser disintegrates into the sides of the walls, and you move onto the next arena.

Be Ever Ready to Catch Falling Batteries

Power-ups are in the form of batteries.  Hitting some blocks results in rotating batteries smoothly rolling down the screen with a letter on them.  These are namely (in alphabetical order) as follows:

B – Activates a temporary plama barrier behind your Energy Mirror when fire is pressed.  Should you therefore miss returning a laser, you won’t lose a life as it is a wall straight along the bottom of the screen which bounces the ball back up into the arena.

C – Allows your Energy Mirror to absorb most of the energy in a laser pulse and adds to your score.

E – Expands the size of your Energy Mirror, thus making it easier to bounce back the lasers.

N – Temporarily deactivates the laser(s) deflective powers and acts like a wrecking ball wiping out anything in its way.  Very useful!

S – Is a timebomb that distorts time.  In other words, it deliberately slows down the action making it less frantic.  It’s therefore very handy when the game is running at or near full-pelt and puts the player more in control again.

X – Awards an extra life (and trust me, you’re going to need them!)  Fortunately, these are quite frequent, so grab them when you can.

The + and – blocks increase and decrease the strength of the lasers.

Just to note that if you were to play the C64 version, the letters on ther batteries vary slightly although the Amstrad version uses the same ones as the Spectrum.

Sound Effects and 128K Music

The sound effects fit the game what you’d expect from a Breakout style game.  A quick ping, each time you hit a block, alien or just return a laser is all that is needed here.  Losing a life, makes a electrification type sound for a couple of seconds, which is pretty good!

In 128K mode, there is a reasonable tune that plays once the game has loaded.  It’s not too bad, so a welcome addition.

Loading Screen and Graphics

When loading, the game, you’ll just have in capital letters Pulsoids is loading with a couple of blue lines at the bottom of the screen.  It’s nothing fancy but obviously keeps the loading time shorter by about a minute.

The graphics are reasonable with the aliens, looking quite detailed.  Upon each new screen, or losing a life, you’ll see the screen number appear and then a very good fading effect of the arena appearing in front of you.  Apart from that, it’s really just coloured blocks (which is mainly all what the game is, after all).  The Energy Mirror is prone to a bit of flicker at times though.

There is nice use of colour and things move smoothly.  My main criticism, however, is the colour of the batteries blend into blocks they are moving over.  It can be does make it quite hard to see which power-up battery is rotating around until it gets further down the screen where the screen tends to have less objects.

Each different screen has its own alien graphics, so you get to see something different on each one.

I particularly found screen 5 quite awkward.  As the ball always leaves the players mirror diagonal right from the start, on this screen, the laser needs to mainly go up the centre of the screen.  It’s a tough screen.

I’ll have a P, please Bob!

A bit of play on words here, but if you aren’t careful, pressing Q quits the game immediately quits the game with the screen fading away.  Now, to be fair, the front menu screen does let you know that Q does quite the game.  However, pressing if you it accidently presses it, there is no are sure, [Y/N].  With 32 arena chambers, just to blow it all with one incorrect key press is to say the least, frustrating.  So, player beware, because I did that a couple of times!

On the plus side though, pressing P pauses the game.  Yes, it’s simple, but an essential feature should you need to go elsewhere, or someone rings the doorbell or your phone etc.  You get my drift.

Oddly in the menu, when choosing the keys that you want for left, right and fire, it is extremely unresponsive.  You tend to have to hold the key down for a bit longer for some reason to select it.  Rather strange as after all, the Spectrum isn’t doing anything more than reading the keyboard input.  You can’t select Q or P as they are locked in because of the reasons I’ve mentioned above.

A couple of Observations

Although the cassette front cover and text physical cassette tape reads as Pulsoids, when playing the game, it is referred to as Pulsoid.

I think it’s fair to say that whoever drew the artwork front cover of the cassette cover was a Ghostbusters fan.  If you haven’t seen it, take a look and you’ll instantly see what I mean!

Another Pulsoids game that is the related to this, is Pulse Warrior.

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