Neptune Lander Elite Review

Background

This review covers a brand new Lunar Lander style game called “Neptune Lander Elite”, or NLE, released on Itch.io on November 6th, 2020.  Later on November 29th, the small company “phoenixware”, which is a subsidiary of Bitmap Soft, began selling the cassette tape version.

https://www.phoenixware.co.uk/product/neptune-lander-elite/

This game started out as a community project headed by the Oldskoolcoder who did a video tutorial series on his youtube channel, making a lunar lander style game.  Viewers were encouraged to follow along, take the base code and create their own unique versions.  One such user, Mark Shephard or C64Mark on discord, took up the challenge and for over 12 months worked hard on this “Elite” version of Neptune Lander.

When I first saw the project, Mark had created the title screen we see here, and I was impressed, since, not only is it a title screen, but it’s also a sort of attract screen showing a little demonstration of how the game should be played.  I appreciate how the game’s name is spelled out in graphically enhanced font and I enjoy the mountainous background.

In the months preceding the game’s release, Mark had been taking in-game idea suggestions and even encouraged people to submit new level designs.   At that time he had 20 unique designs and was considering calling it a game at that point.  When I tried the demo, the game was turning out great, but it really needed new levels to feel complete and fully fleshed out.  So a couple of “Discorders”, including “StacBats”, and I, ended up submitting a bunch of new level ideas, to catapult it up to the point where it now has 40 levels.  Believe me, when I say, some of the ideas were just rough sketches, and I mean ROUGH.  Then Mark would go back into his dungeon and pump out a beautiful looking new level, with our moniker on the map.  In my case the levels I designed to have the initials “GRD” etched into the mountains somewhere on the map.  The goal in my designs was for it to be challenging, maybe even a bit of a puzzle to solve.  I wasn’t aiming for them to be “crazy difficult”, but unfortunately some of the landing zones on those designs are just that.  Mark has been really responsive and has shown a willingness to implement all sorts of new gameplay ideas thrown his way.  As we were testing the early builds, he would quickly post new versions with the fixes.

GAME DESCRIPTION:

The game’s back story is printed on cassette tape paper:
“Abandoned in space following a catastrophic accident on the Neptune One mining vessel, you drift from colony to colony in search of supplies and the hope of finding other survivors.  Guide your Neptune Lander spaceship through 40 perilous caverns, dodging malfunctioning doors and traversing dangerous thrust-free EMP zones.  Safely land in each colony collecting power-ups on the way before continuing your journey.  Play for survival using the basic ship and landing on the easy to reach bases or take the hard route to prove that you are ready to join the Neptune Lander Elite.”

The Title screen In NLE has four options.  “Start the Game”, “Training”, “Controls” and “Instructions”.  The controls menu allows you to select between keyboard or joystick controls.  For keyboard, there are two options.

Option 1)

A (Thrust RIGHT), S (Thrust LEFT), and Right Shift (Upward thrust),

Option 2)

Z (Thrust RIGHT), X (Thrust LEFT), and Return (Upward thrust)

Once you have your controls selected and start a game, you can play with either the keyboard or a joystick plugged into port two.  You can toggle left or right thrust control by pressing F7 on the keyboard.  This applies to both keyboard and joystick controls.

Instructions

NLE is one of the rare games that has more than a single page of instructions.  On the first page, there’s a short description including a warning about the beacon zones.  Power-ups are also mentioned.

The second page outlines what the various function keys do:

F1 – Pauses the game

F3 – Toggles the music on or off

F5 – Saves your high scores to disk.  Note: this only works with the disk .D64 version of NLE, not the tape version.  Also, this has to be done from the title screen menus.  When using the Vice emulator make sure “true drive emulation” is turned on.

F7 – Toggles the X-Axis – In other words, left becomes right and right becomes left.

The instructions then go on to explain there are three landing zones, with point multipliers, depending on which zone you select.  If you land perfectly, there is a score bonus.

Neptune Lander Elite is a new variation of a “Lunar Lander” or “Jupiter Lander” style game, with new gameplay elements and obstacles thrown in, some of which take a little bit of getting used to.  Such much so, that Mark decided to throw in a short six-level training mode to help teach players some of the in’s and out’s of the game.   This is the type of polish you don’t often see, even in full retail commercial releases.  The training mode can be accessed from the title screen menu by selecting “Training”, then pressing the appropriate button (either Fire on the joystick, or Return or Right Shift on the keyboard) before starting a new game.

When you are ready to begin your game, pressing fire on the joystick plugged into port two or Return/Right Shift on the keyboard will start the game.  Neptune Lander Elite is a single-player game.

As mentioned in the instructions, there are three difficulties in the game.  “Easy“, “Normal” and, “Hard“.  After initiating a new game, the difficulty can be toggled by pressing left or right on the joystick, or the appropriate keyboard controls.  This will display a different Lander vehicle and some stats.  The difficulty setting selection controls not only the physical size and shape of your vehicle but also the following as well; Fuel Capacity; Vertical Thrust; Horizontal Thrust; and your score multiplier.  In other words, the more difficult the setting, the more difficult it is to control your ship and the faster your fuel runs down, however, you do score more points for the trouble.

Gameplay

After having made the difficulty selection, we are brought to the first level introduction screen.  This is one of those nice bits of polish added to the game.  Each level displays the level number and has its own introductory message.   These messages sort of give each level its own unique name or identifier.  The screen displays until “Fire” is triggered.   This creates a built-in pause between levels, making sure you are ready to continue playing.

When the game begins, your ship appears from a different starting position on each level.  You will notice there are glimmering stars in the background and a mountainous area containing your three landing pads.  Your score, current level, and lives remaining are displayed on the bottom row of the screen.  On levels with bonuses, when collected, the bottom row temporary clears to display the type of bonus you were awarded.  Your fuel and velocity gauges are on the far right side of the screen.  The fuel gauge is on the one on the left side.  When you run out of fuel, you can no longer control your ship.  The velocity gauge is just to the right of the fuel gauge.  It has a “green stripe” in the middle and a black meter that moves up and down.  When your velocity is low enough it enters the “green stripe” area and this is the maximum velocity your ship can be traveling when attempting to land on one of the three landing pads.  If you are flying too fast when attempting a landing, your ship will explode.   Your ship will also explode if both of the ship’s feet are not touching the landing pad, or of-course if any part of the ship touches the mountainous terrain.

Your ship can drift just a tad outside the border areas but not too far.  Should you drift too far out of bounds, a message displays, “the ship has lost transmission”, and you will lose a ship.  In fact, anytime your ship is lost a message will display at the bottom of the screen, explaining why your ship was lost.

Controls

You control Neptune Lander Elite by using either the keyboard or Joystick plugged into port 2.  I prefer to play using the joystick, whereas others prefer to play using the keyboard, so it’s a great option to have.  Controlling the ship with the keyboard is configurable through the title screen to either use “Z/X” and “Return” for thrust or “A/S” and “Right Shift” for thrust.  The controls are responsive, except when you are in the “Beacon” zone.  Here, you temporarily lose complete control of your ship while in the beacon’s sphere of influence.  This can be frustrating especially if you were not paying attention.  I’ve lost many ships in this manner.  You can also lose control of your ship if you run out of fuel.  The default setting in the game are the reverse of what many people are accustomed to, pressing right on the joystick will thrust left, and pressing left will thrust right.  If this is too difficult a hurdle for you, it can be reversed by pressing “F7” during the game or within the menus.  Pressing “F1” will pause the game.  You may also press “F3” to toggle the music on and off.  When playing the disk version, pressing “F5” will save the high scores to disk, but this must be done from the title screen.

Scoring

A large portion of your score is predicated on how much fuel you have when you make a proper landing.  There is also a bonus multiplier depending upon which landing pad you select.   You are awarded a bonus based on how well you land as well.

Fuel:

Playing in “Easy” mode on easy landing pads will you get 1 point per micro fuel unit in the tank, and between 200 and 250 points for a full tank.   Then there’s a ship multiplier on top of that 2x and 4x for “Normal”, and “Expert modes”.

This game contains level “Bonuses” which can be collected starting on level four.  Each score bonus is worth 1000 points up to level 14, then the bonus increases by 500 points each five levels so that by level 40 the bonus is worth 4000 points.

For those interested, I made a chart of the available bonuses for each level and will post it on my blog for quick reference.

Level	Bonus Available	Points
1	None
2	None
3	None
4	Fuel
5	Score	1000
6	Ship
7	Score	1000
8	Score	1000
9	Score	1000
10	Ship
11	Score	1000
12	Fuel
13	Score	1000
14	Ship
15	Score	1500
16	Score	1500
17	Fuel
18	Score	1500
19	Ship
20	Score	2000
21	Score	2000
22	Score	2000
23	Score	2000
24	Ship
25	Fuel
26	Score	2500
27	Score	2500
28	Fuel
29	Ship
30	Ship
31	Ship
32	Score	3000
33	Score	3000
34	Fuel
35	Ship
36	Score	3500
37	Ship
38	Fuel
39	Ship
40	Score	4000

You are awarded a bonus based on how well you land your vehicle on the landing pad.

Dead center = 200, slightly off center = 100, quite off center = 50, very off center = 0 points.

The end game score bonus is a flat rate bonus with a ship multiplier, and a bonus score is awarded for each ship remaining, I believe 1,000 points each.

Spare Ship

You are awarded a spare ship every 10,000 points, which will indicate with a sound effect.  There are also free ship bonuses hidden away on some levels as a part of the level bonuses.  They are usually tough to earn though.

Strategy

As with most games, the ultimate goal of the game is to complete it with the highest score possible.  One of the neat things about NLE is that each level has three choices for you to land, each one a little more difficult than the other.  The strategy you employ largely relies on your skill level.  Landing pads with the highest bonus take the most skill to do and are the most dangerous, with the largest reward.  Learning which levels contain the free ship bonus could help you down the stretch to complete the game.  Knowing which levels contain which bonuses can assist you in making a landing zone decision as well.  At times, going for the Fuel bonus can actually cost you points, had you simply landed sooner on an easier landing pad.   It may seem obvious, especially on the later levels, you have to gauge how many ships you have remaining.  The more ships you have at the end of the game can greatly impact your final score.

Graphics

The graphics in NLE are pretty darn good especially considering how they were done in standard color mode / non-extended mode.

The mountains look like mountains and there are nice color variations sprinkled in throughout the game levels.  The obstacles thrown in such as the laser can theoretically stretch all the way across the screen.  The opening and closing doors vary in color and let’s not forget the shining stars added to the background. The gauge’s on the right side of the screen are animated and colorful.   Your ship appears to glow and its exhaust can also be seen when applying thrust.  It might not be obvious but your ship is multi-colored with varying shades of gray.  The various landscape environments appear in different colors as well, helping to break up the monotony.  Even on the title screen, you can make out the exhaust of the small ship as it maneuvers to land.

On the ZZap! March 2021 Sampler, page 13, they gave NLE the shaft in the graphics department, only 48%, which I don’t think it deserved such a slow score.  The other games in the sampler received much higher scores, but they seemed to employ multi-color mode, so I think that’s where the bias lies.   But overall NLE scored 83% and they said it was “a clever update to a classic game”.

Sounds

Phaze101 on discord did the music and SFX.  I believe they are PrincePhaze101 on Twitch. There are 8 different songs most of which are cycled through as you complete each level.  There are separate songs for the title screen, end game sequence, and the high score screen.   The music grows on you as you play and does not get old quickly.

The sounds effects in NLE are quite nice.  There are separate sounds for thrusting, horizontal or vertical, Fuel countdown, ship explosion, going out of range, a bonus pick up, laser-firing, teleporting, and spare ship.  There is even a sound effect triggered for one of the easter eggs.

https://phaze101.com/category/c64/

Level ramp-ups

The first four levels are fairly simple and sort of get you acclimated to playing the game.  After that, the level bonus makes an appearance, and the landing pad positions start to get placed into more and more perilous locations.  Some levels have stronger gravity than others.  The location of the bonus is also strategically placed.  This continues up until the last level, 40, at which time you are given a break with a bit of an easier final level to complete.

Easter eggs

There are a couple of easter eggs in the game, but I have been sworn to secrecy.  They are documented in Freeze64 magazine an exclusive in ISSUE #42.  Vinny also documents several peek and poke tricks you can test out pertaining to NLE.  Grab your copy today!

Suggestions for Improvements

Well, I pretty much already gave all my suggestions to the game developer and he implemented nearly all of them.  My understanding is there will eventually be a Neptune Lander Elite two.  Mark intimated to me he wants to learn a few new techniques and release another game before tackling the next version of Neptune Lander Elite.

Packaging

Unfortunately, since this is not a boxed release, the packaging is minimal.  The cassette tape packaging does include the back story for NLE, in tiny print which I read in-full earlier in the review.    The cassette version takes about 3:20 to load from tape, not too shabby.

Other Coverage / Awards

Youtuber BastichB 64K has a really nice review of NLE and the history of Lunar Lander style games over on his channel:

Awards:

Retrogamer nation nominated NLE for Game of the year on their website:

C64 Gamers’ Choice 2020 Award – Voting has closed | Retro Gamer Nation

As did Indieretronews.com, which nominated NLE for Budget Game of the year:

http://www.indieretronews.com/2020/12/indie-retro-news-c64-game-awards-2020.html?m=1

NLE took home the Freeze64 Magazine Game of the year 2020 Honors!! Woohoo

Congratulations to Mark and the rest of the development and design team for that.  Well done my friends!

Purchasing Information

There are a couple of ways to officially get your hands on this game.  You can digitally download the game on Marks ITCH.IO page and name your own price.  All proceeds for the digital download will be donated to “the Centre For Computing History”.  Mark chose this charity since he had been there the previous year, liked what they were doing, and since they had been hit hard with Covid and a flood, and since he made a retro computer game, he thought it would be a good fit.

The Centre for Computing History – Computer and Video Game Museum – Cambridge

Mark did put in the effort to support both PAL and NTSC formats.

Neptune Lander Elite by C64Mark (itch.io)

If you would like a copy of the cassette tape version it is still available at the phoenixware website:

Neptune Lander Elite – Phoenix Ware

For 7 pound 99.

Conclusion

I had a great time conceiving new levels and bouncing gameplay enhancement ideas of off C64Mark.  He was extremely receptive and responsive, quickly providing new builds with said enhancements.  Neptune Lander Elite has exceeded the sort of low expectations I had for a Lunar Lander style game.  It is really fun to play and as your skills improve, you have several options to extend gameplay.  You can either land on more difficult landing spots or go for more of the bonuses or you can play again on a hard difficulty.  Some of the levels are really difficult and I’ve actually had to quit playing a few times because my thumb started hurting from all the button mashing. But, having all these options are what helps to make this a great game.  Mark also took the time and care to throw in title screen and end game sequences, which really boosts the overall value in my opinion.

Highly Recommended!

About the Developer

Mark Shephard grew up in Grimsby and is now residing in Sheffield.  He is currently employed as a data analyst for a University in the UK.  His first computer was a Commodore Vic-20 where he dabbled a bit with the Basic language, before moving on to the Commodore C16, and then the C64 and eventually the Amiga 1200.   He had played around with Assembly language on the Commodore 64 even having created a simple character editor back in the day .   It wasn’t until about a year and half ago he started watching some of the OldSkoolcoder videos that he decided to get back into programming again.

Mark is an avid collector of 1980s home computing type-in books, with over 400 books in his collection.

I wanted to thank Mark for allowing me to participate in some small way to his project, taking most of my suggestions, and for answering all my questions.  I really appreciate it!

Photo of a street sign near where I live.  Couldn’t resist posting here.. Not quite the same spelling but reminded me of Mark… Photo Taken 02/14/2021

Youtube Description:

This is my long overdue review of Neptune Lander Elite for the Commodore 64.

Digital purchase link:
https://c64mark.itch.io/neptune-lander-elite

Physical purchase link:
https://www.phoenixware.co.uk/product/neptune-lander-elite/

Oldskoolcoder link:
https://youtu.be/pLvBo3DbBFk

Music & Sound by:
https://phaze101.com/category/c64/

BastichB 64K
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Der-418jEA&feature=youtu.be

GOTY Nomination 1:
http://retrogamernation.com/c64-gamers-choice-2020-award/

GOTY Nomination 2:
http://www.indieretronews.com/2020/12/indie-retro-news-c64-game-awards-2020.html?m=1

Winner!
https://freeze64.com/goty/

Digital download Charity:
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/