Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy

The Good
Your space-fighter, the enemies, and the various bosses are large, colorful pre-rendered sprites. Although these characters are built-up with only a few frames of animation, I think they look reasonably attractive. The "outer space" background graphics look impressive; obviously some gifted artists were involved in painting up the beautiful bitmapped pictures. Unfortunately, while these 2D 'space' bitmaps look fantastic, the admittedly pretty planetary levels look static and fake. Trevor McFur's programmers put in some scrolling foreground objects, but they don't really help improve the flat appearance of the background images. Still, when compared to the 2D shooters available on other systems back in late 1993, Trevor McFur looks terrific.

The Bad
To be honest, Trevor McFur's game play is, well, average at best. If you've played any type of 2D scroller, then you know what to expect: you need to keep tapping the fire button as fast as possible while dodging up or down to avoid the oncoming barrage of alien fighters, asteroids, or monsters. It's all very typical, but one feature that stands out is the variety of power-ups. There are about ten different weapons that you can find, and some of them are quite unusual. My personal favorite is the 'magnet': when you use this, a gigantic horseshoe magnet flies out from your fighter from left to right. As it zips across the screen, its magnetic pull sucks all onscreen enemy objects into it, destroying them in the process! I have to say, though, that overall these initial space stages are relatively easy, especially if you use the power-up weapons you can catch.

The Bottom Line
So overall, what do I think of Trevor McFur? Hmm. It’s actually not bad; frankly, after all the negative comments I’ve read over the years I expected a lot worse. It has some charm and it’s a decent, though run-of-the-mill, 2D shooter. If Trevor McFur had been released for a 16-bit system such as the Genesis or the Super Nintendo, it would likely have won some acceptance, but thanks to Atari’s “Do the Math” 64-bits hype, it was ridiculed and mocked: where are the other 48-bits?