Here’s the first of my Star Citadel galleries, showing screenshots of my remake of the fantastic old skool vector arcade game, Star Castle. If you were a fan of vector arcade games back in the day, or video games on consoles like the Vectrex (which, by the way, had a great conversion of Star Castle), you’ll probably like this.
Note that Star Citadel has two variants: a modern version, from which these screenshots are taken, and a classic version, which is designed to play as much like the original Star Castle as possible.
Click on the images to see larger versions.
Here we go. Note the Full Screen button which, as its name suggests, allows you to play the game full screen.
You might gather from these two screenshots...
...that I'm a bit of a fan of Cowboy Bebop. The in-game music somewhat reflects this as well.
Here's our ship materializing at the very start of the game. In the original Star Castle it just appeared out of nowhwere.
No messing around here. Our little ship is going straight in to attack the cannon and is making mincemeat out of the outer shield ring. Note that a couple of mines have already spawned and are sat on the inner ring.
Having made a bit of a hole we're going to duck out and swing in from a different direction to try and punch all the way through the shields. The mines are still sitting where we left them - it is, after all, only the first level.
We've come in for a bit of an opportunistic strafing attack. You can see we've now managed to punch a small hole all the way through to the cannon. You can also see that all three mines have been spawned and are moving outwards.
A few more of our shots have hit home and made the hole bigger, which is good, but it's afforded the cannon the opportunity to fire back at us (the expanding blue energy projectile just in front of it).
Coming back round for another attack. The cannon's energy projectile is heading off slightly to the left so doesn't present any real danger. There's a good chance if we press our attack we can take the cannon out because we've done a pretty good job of shredding its shields.
Here we go. The shields are disintegrating under our onslaught, and it looks like we've taken out one of the mines too. Note that the cannon can't fire again until it's first shot disappears.
Success! The cannon is annihilated in a hail of fire from our ship. As per the original Star Castle when you destroy the cannon you're rewarded with a truly spectacular explosion as the cannon, shields, and mines are all obliterated.
The carnage continues here as we arc away from the destruction. Note that I just love me some particle effects so, as you'll see when you play the game yourself, this does all get a bit ridiculous, but (I hope) in a good way.