Reviews

After wowing us with the first couple of Filmation games, Ultimate developed a follow-on engine called, imaginatively enough, Filmation 2. Where Knight Lore and Alien 8 were essentially a collection of single room puzzles, this allowed for a large multiway scrolling maze and even a bit of colour in the backgrounds.

However, the price for this was that it had essentially lost the puzzle element of the earlier games. Rather, all you could do in Nightshade was wander around an absolutely enormous maze, pick up weapons and shoot at things. Once the novelty of the graphics has worn off, this becomes decidedly tedious and the game just becomes a map traversing exercise.

A bit of a backward step for Ultimate in terms of gameplay, despite some innovative graphics.

Nightshade was the first game by Ultimate to use the famous Filmation 2 , which allowed the same freedom as filmation 1 but with a scrolling play area .

The object of the game was to find objects to defeat the phantoms that lurked around the town , graphically it was a joy to behold , smooth scrolling , large detailed characters and great animation. But somehow the game was lacking addictive qualities or playabilty (certainly compared to other ultimate games) .

It is probably my least favourite ultimate game (not counting the us gold efforts) , its not terrible , just lacking sparkle.

Dispatching the four arch-enemies in the plague-infested village can be very difficult, considering that each one requires a peculiar weapon you have to find first. Great presentation - the Ultimate flavor is still strong here - but somewhat sparse gameplay, and the strategic element which the different effects of the antibodies should have on the nasties ends up being somewhat annoying. Still, it's a good game, just not as great as other Ultimate offerings.

I was quite fascinated by this game when I was a kid, just wandering around surrounded by these sinister little creatures crawling everywhere, and encountering, very rarely, one of the big monsters, or the superfast shoes or whatever. Ultimate tried to improve furtherly under the technical aspect, with the scrolling Filmation 3d engine - and a couple of colours, but the gameplay regressed instead of improving.

After some consecutive successful games, this time Ultimate failed. The usual quality in graphics and sounds, creating, as always, a great atmosphere isn't enough. We face a game with poor gameplay and a monotone map. Collect magic items to kill different ghouls in a doomed village. The result, a game that didn't meet the expectations. The beginning of the end for Ultimate.

The game looks very pretty but the gameplay lacks execution. You're just wondering around entering doors for dead ends while collecting stuff to throw at baddies. My interest wore thin about about two minutes. I may be getting senile but I swear Ultimate game were better than this.

Gunfright, along with Nightshade were two great technical achievements. Indeed Nightshade was the first game to implement this way of displaying graphics (*)


If you read my reviews of Pyracurse (spectrum20.org/reviews/8849) and Where Time Stood Still (spectrum20.org/reviews/9497) you will see that I regard them worse that Nightshade. In fact, they are actually better but I leverage the pioneering factor to let Nightshade sports a better qualification.

In any case, what a pity not to take advantage of this advance to enrich the game mechanics and improve gameplay. Still, an enormous advancement and a true ancestor of current ways of displaying action and scenes.

* A very similar although slightly more primitive form can be found in Ant Attack