Nebulus was an arcade adventure/puzzle game developed and released by Hewson in 1988.
You took control of Pogo, an odd 2-legged, hunched-over, bug-eyed green alien-thing, a sort of deformed alien frog, and your task was alternately to reach the top of a tower riddled with traps and enemies in order to demolish it and then travel in your alien submarine to the next, shooting nets to catch fish along the way.
My abiding memory of Nebulus was it being about the most insanely hard game I had played up to that point with sudden-death traps you needed to memorize, pixel-perfect timing required, pixel-perfect jumps the norm, etc, etc.
.. Little did I know as a kid that this was a game hardcore adult gamers regarded as tough! After lending it to a more adept friend and seeing it was actually possible to complete at least the first tower, I returned to it and began to see the appeal many found in it. The graphics were pretty swish for the time with a decently distinguishable main character and smooth colourful graphics and animation. The game took the form of a side-scrolling platformer but a fairly unique (for the time) spin was put on this by the fact as you walked to either side the tower rotated, giving a strange pseudo 3D type of feel to the environment. There was no in-game music except
a little ditty when you reached the top of a tower but there were plenty of quality spot sound effects.
The starkness of this approach added to the tenseness for me, especially as you could see an “enemy” bearing down on you. Pogo not being particularly fast ramped up that tension as well! The enemies took the form mainly of odd shapes with their own individual patterns of movement, with eyes, spheres and others which defy description variously twirling, bouncing and rolling about the place causing you panic and happy to smack you down to a lower level again or off the mortal coil altogether. Success required a great deal of patience (because as with any tough and slow game it could be very frustrating), near-flawless hand to eye co-ordination and, in the words of Jack Burton for no particular reason, nothing much less than “crackerjack timing”. By comparison the submarine sections which constituted every second level (tower level then sub level then tower level then sub level and so on) were incredibly easy. They took the form of basically a sedate side-scrolling shoot’em-up and were a welcome break from the passive-hectic tension and challenge of the tower levels.
Approach with a great deal of patience and you’ll have fun here. On the other hand if you approach this after a hard day at school/college/university/work or of loafing about, let alone after any sort of row or aggro, this could push you over the edge! You have been warned! If you like mightily challenging platform-cum-puzzle games you’ll struggle to ever find one that’ll meet your needs as well as Nebulus.
