Reviews

Nemesis was my favourite arcade shooter of the late 80's. I thought the game had everything, speed, colour, great sound, power ups...I dread to think of how many 10p's Nemesis and its sequel, Salamander extracted from me.

Imagine (ie Ocean) had done a fair job on a few Konami conversions when Konami decided to have a go on their own. They started with the terrible Jailbreak and sadly Nemesis was only marginally better.

I was too impatient though, and couldn't wait for the Crash review. I rushed out and bought Nemesis and have cursed it to this day. The main problem with the Speccy conversion is the terrible controls - it's just so sluggish compared to the arcade version. The sound is pap and power ups are missing. It could have been a great shooter with that extra bit of effort which is what makes it even more disappointing.

Nemesis for the Spectrum is a reasonable conversion of the Konami arcade game, although it does not reach excellency status for a number of reasons.

Graphics are adequate; sound is limited to a grating beeper rendition of the coin-op first level music and a few blips; gameplay suffers from a collision detection which sometimes seems too sensitive, especially considering that enemies' bullets are pretty tiny and hard to avoid. Power-ups are all there, with the partial exception of the Option add-on - you're only allowed to have one, when the original allows for four of them.

A conversion not to be ashamed of, but it could have been better with some more polish.

This left me with a mixed feeling in that it doesn't really stand out as a great arcade conversion yet stands out as a decent shoot em up, despite playing a bit clunky and despite the dodgy tune. Not all bad though.

If it wasn't for the scandalous collision detection and other minor flaws, this could have been a good horizontal shooter.

As it is, it doesn't deserve the Sinclair User Classic it's got.

1987 Konami (UK)
by Cyclone and Stuart Ruecroft

This Spectrum conversion of one my Konami favorite arcade games is as reasonable as it is disappointing.

The game is playable, fun, looks good, but it's missing the addictiveness of the arcade game. True, the Spectrum as it's known limitations, but I've seen better conversions made for the Spectrum than the originals themselves, and the same could have been applied to Nemesis. Nonetheless, the game is still lots of fun, although graphics are just suitable and the limited sound (reduced to a few beeps) turns me off sometimes, but if you put that aside together with some unpolished collision detection, sometimes too sensitive,sometimes not working, you get a pretty good shoot 'em up.