Reviews

Really good arcade conversion, very colourful graphics, challenging yet addictive gameplay, even the tune sounds good here. I so much prefer this port over the arcade original, conversions like this do the Speccy proud.

An excellent conversion of a classic shoot-em-up.
It has some extras bolted on, however.
Especially the docking sequences make you really sweat - they are pretty difficult to master and you need to be docked to progress easily.
Very much like the original arcade machine, things get somewhat impossible once you reach stage 3 (i.e. after two "FAR OUT!" messages. The aliens move way too fast on these levels.
But this does not spoil this excellent arcade conversion.
So take your trip to the space war today. Enjoy!

1985 Incentive Software (UK)
by Timothy Walter, Phil Taglione and Peter Carter

An excellent conversion, even better than the original arcade version in my opinion.
Great gameplay, very addictive, it becomes very hard in the later levels. Love the sounds. A classic.

This game comes with a double dose of nostalgia, for the great old arcade game and for the brilliant conversion to the spectrum. It looks and sounds good, and playability is somewhere between sweet and perfect.
It is a space shooter in the same vein as galaxians and space invaders, and one of the best examples of the genre.

I never understood what people see in this game that makes them think it's so good. Even for an early game I find it too sparse and "empty" both in terms of presentation and gameplay. It's not awful, but it doesn't cut it for me either. Even the early Mikro-Gen shooters like Galakzions or Space Zombies are more addictive to me.

I remember this when it first came out. Moon Cresta seemed like a major breakthrough, a colourful single screen shooter that flowed freely, had a variety of attack waves, great collision detection and a nice docking sequence.

Its power ups seemed like an exciting innovation.

Its role as a breakthrough game was short lived, better shooters soon followed, and what we are left with today is a nice high score game that becomes repetitive fairly quickly.

As the precursor of Terra-Cresta this is a very fine shooter ! ! !

The movements are slow but fluid , the shooting is ok . . . only one bullet at a time .

The graphics are a bit primitive but they do the job . . .

This looks like an good old-fashioned arcade-shooter .

Highly playable ! !


4 / 5.

The prequel to the awesome 'Terra Cresta' is a very decent conversion of the great classic arcade by Incentive Software.

The fonts, the graphics and the sounds make a good arcade atmosphere (unlike the crappy tune). The movement of the spaceship is good. The game becomes easily addictive as many space shooters. A nice game.

Well my friends, change is upon us. While this site went through the gremlins again a big change happened elsewhere, World of Spectrum, which unbelievably still exists, changed their overall look and design. First of all, it's shit, what a surprise, and secondly, they removed the random game option which was what I mainly used to decide which game I played and reviewed. This means that Sinclair Randomseek, which was primarily responsible for the majority of my 1400+ reviews, is no more, which is good because it means I can finally stop using that car crash of a website now hooray! What it does mean though is I have to find a new method for choosing which game I play and now I have to pick the games myself, which is no easy task as I have so many on my emulator and picking one can take five weeks! But saying that it does mean I can now cheat and deliberately pick a good game, which is precisely what I've done here.

Ah Moon Cresta, you know what? This is really good, it's colourful, it's simple, it's straightforward and it's nice, I don't mind it. The only thing stopping this from getting a 5 is repetition, it's pretty much killing the same enemies and docking and repeat. This ultimately comes down to personal preference, if you don't enjoy these type of games, you won't, if you enjoy these type of games, you will, and I do so thumbs up from me.

Moon cresta
It was so good that even if you had it ... you kept putting coins in the machine if you saw it in a bar or in an arcade

Without any trace of doubt, one of the two or three biggest classics if we speak about arcade or ported to ZX.


i.e. not a "native" game but an external one brought to ZX to continue exploiting its success

...and probably much better than it would have to be, viewing another similar efforts