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was the last in a series of games Potter wrote for
Synapse. All make use of smooth scrolling and demonstrated an evolution in technique, growing more graphically complex over time, and becoming much faster paced. Potter's royalties were shrinking over time, eventually reaching 80 cents a game sold.
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If the crystal touches the ground it mutates into a "colonizer" which cannot be destroyed by shooting it. These colonizers constantly emit seeker drones, acting as a defensive station protecting new seed crystals that are dropped. If five seed crystals manage to land and form colonizers, the planet
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explodes. The seed crystals also drop a surface skimmer which begins to collect the tricasmium nuggets found on the surface. The skimmer can be destroyed to save the supply of nuggets, which can be picked up and dropped on the colonizers to destroy them.
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in 1983. Players are defending their planet from an alien invasion. The game supports two players at once, splitting the screen vertically into two halves, and merging them on the fly when both players are in the same location.
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Even in early stages, the screen quickly fills with enemies. The large blue diamond is a seed crystal. The pile of blue blocks below it is a crystal that has reached the ground and mutated into a colonizer.
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was rampant. When he saw that his own brother in law had made unlicensed copies of all his games, he decided to leave the video game market. He turned to the nascent
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has much more action with significant numbers of moving objects. The game also shares elements with his earlier game
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gave a brief review of the game in
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adds a limited amount of vertical scrolling motion as well. Compared to
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market, but also released a few more Atari games with other labels.
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The player's fighters, shaped either like the fighter from
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The game shares elements of Potter's first Atari game,
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399:Video games developed in the United States
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404:Multiplayer and single-player video games
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121:written by Mike Potter and published by
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148:, itself based graphically on the
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379:Atari 8-bit computer-only games
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348:Shadow World User's Manual
202:) or the helicopter from
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384:Cooperative video games
394:Synapse Software games
222:copyright infringement
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345:Potter, Mike (1983).
319:"Mike Potter's Story"
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119:Atari 8-bit computers
354:. Synapse Software.
231:Mike Potter called
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220:At the same time
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40:Publisher(s)
25:Shadow World
301:Morgan 1984
289:Potter 1983
212:Development
67:Atari 8-bit
62:Platform(s)
56:Mike Potter
363:Categories
272:Hague 2000
252:References
198:(and thus
239:Reception
196:Protector
168:Protector
145:Protector
200:Defender
177:Nautilus
160:Defender
155:Defender
130:Gameplay
82:Genre(s)
158:. Like
93:Mode(s)
73:Release
226:IBM PC
352:(PDF)
337:ANTIC
245:Antic
113:is a
101:co-op
117:for
76:1983
183:In
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Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Additional terms may apply.
