Uridium is by the quite prolific Andrew Braybrook, creator of other games including Paradroid. Given that his twitter handle is @UridiumAuthor it’s clear it has a special place in his career. As with the music charts you can see a pattern where #1s are not the product of a release being exceptionally successful – many big sellers never make it – but of momentum built that means something new getting immediate attention. For games this usually applies to games within a series, and means we’ll be seeing a lot of sequels. It’s not as easy for a game developer as for a singer or band to get the same following, since they’re not emphasised in the same way, but sometimes it works, as we have seen with Ultimate.
In Andrew Braybrook’s case it’s also interesting because Uridium is not an obvious game to see at the top. It’s a space shoot-em-up, which is a genre that kind of goes right back to Space Invaders, in this case turned on its side and scrolling, but we don’t see a whole lot of those at the top in the mid-80s. In the context of Paradroid, a which uses a shoot-em-up as a base for a complex game about taking over droids and exploring, Uridium is back-to-basics. It seems that he’d earned players’ trust that this was an exciting prospect.
Your more simple task involves taking on enemy defence drones and doughnut-shaped fighters above the backdrop of the enemy’s larger transporters. Without reading up I wouldn’t have known that the parallax scrolling – the transporter moving on screen, the stars staying in place behind it – was considered a major technical triumph, but partly that’s because Uridium looks and plays smoothly enough not to seem like a tech demo. Its limited colour palette with occasional details brightly picked out works very nicely, including the way it changes up each level.
Relatively simple as its gameplay is, Uridium is not quite a typical shoot-em-up, and my learned response that I should get from the left to the right of the level as quick as possible and prioritise avoiding enemy ships led in short order to repeated failure. Compared to other games I was familiar with, the enemies are really underpowered. You can even fly through them, or rather over them – 3D space! However, I initially kept getting wiped out by the more impenetrable defence that is walls, or getting to the end of the transporter and having to turn around.
The twist comes from the fact that the goal of each level isn’t just to get through and survive, shooting as needed, but to destroy docked and defenceless enemy spaceships on the transporter on your way. Do enough of that and you can come in to land and do whatever mysterious action it is that leads to the whole lot disintegrating as you sweep away. That means the better strategy is a lot of slowing down, which the game lets you do to the point of turning around and heading back where you’ve just come from. There’s still enough danger to keep that from getting dull, though. The other effect of the set-up is to place you more clearly in the role of an aggressor than these things usually get, which is an odd feeling when any explanation for the need for such pre-emptive strikes takes place off-screen. Careful, methodical death and destruction, with a high score table to track it.
