Game Video: Killer Bees! - Odyssey 2

My 2nd review:

_________________________________________________________________



This time I'm reviewing a game for Odyssey2 / Philips videopac / G7000/74000 Killer Bees!

The games for Philips Videopac are graphically rather basic and the sounds could be described as "bleep bleep". So the developers of these games had to put all their effort in making a game packed with as much gameplay as possible in limited lines of code.
In some cases they succeeded and made terrific games that we can still enjoy many years later. One of the best examples is Killer Bees!.

The Game

In The Killer Bees you are a swarm of bees that needs to destroy some robots that run around the screen. You destroy them by attacking them. The robots will not die immediately, first they will lose power and run increasingly slower (as long as you attack them) until they are destroyed. Once you've destroyed a robot, a nice gravestone will appear. Your mission is to destroy all robots, if that succeeds a new level starts.

Fortunately there are some baddies that will make this a little harder to accomplish. The baddies are swarms of bees as well. If you touch an enemy swarm, a couple (or all) of your bees will be killed, that way your swarm decreases in size and will have less attacking power. It's possible to attack and kill the enemy swarm with an electric force-field. The force field needs to be recharged so you need to use it wisely.
You will die when all your bees are killed. Every new level you start with a renewed full sized swarm of bees.

Sound

Bleep bleep

Graphics

Well... not very good, but very clear sprites with no distractions (if you play the G7000 version)


Gameplay

I think it's a great short break game, that I tend to play a lot lately. Because the game will rapidly become harder to play, it's not boring and will not last for ages. You can finish one level in a couple of seconds, so very rapid gameplay. Even though the quality of sound is bad compared to more modern games, I prefer playing the game with the sound on. Guess I like the bleep, bleeps.
The game is really original and feels and plays fluid on the excellent o2em port from Spoyser here. The emulator has save states, great compatibility, it's fast and integrates well with gmenu2x.

Overall 8/10

And a very nice video of the game: