Storm

The Good
Storm is one of the very few Dragon games presented with a genuine black background. As such on the promo materials produced by microdeal it stood out. The reason for this is the Dragons' colour suites are determined by which PMODE is chosen, and black is only available in the highest resolution monochrome black and white and black green PMODE 4. On US NTSC versions of both the Dragon and CoCo you can get artifact colors in this mode, so most US games use the hi res mode at the cost of color when played on a PAL machine. Most Dragon games that originate use either use the lower res Green/Red/Yellow/Blue suite or the monochrome suite, a few daring to use the buff suite, which is certainly an experience, although not one I would recommend. Storm achieves the arcade conventional black background by going one step further, giving us very low res semi graphics mode, so there is a lot of credit for trying something new. Theoretically this game could have worked out fine, a couple of later games managed to produce a decent fist of shoot em up games in this mode.

The Bad
Sadly, whilst the publicity shots may have been fine compared to most Dragon games- it was after all a case of photographing a TV screen back then and black looked much more enticing than green- the game itself is a crushing disappointment. The clunky, block-ish graphics are accompanied by very little sound of note, and an intro screen in bog standard text mode, as was admittedly as common back then in the earlier era of the Dragon. The game play lacks the "one more go" addictive quality, and it is slow to react, essentially repetitive and offers no feeling of progression, and despite being in machine language it feels more like a BASIC magazine type in. It takes a few moments to work out what you are controlling, and it took me longer to work out that the screen was trying to represent - a "tunnel vision port" according to the blurb. Even Microdeal's slick presentation can't hide the fact that this game was disappointing for its time- a time that produced Devil Assault, Danger Ranger and Cuthbert in the Jungle. The game was developed by Computerware, who at the time licensed Dragon Data and later Microdeal to distribute Junior's Revenge, a game that exceeded this in every department.When games and especially graphics dominated the minds of consumers on the home computer market, you could argue that it was games like this that really helped drive consumers away from the machine and into the arms of its competitors.

The Bottom Line
Pointless low effort arcade clone, poorly realized that would have been better in a games compendium than a single release.