


Overkill and Lunar C, by Mindscape Int. Distributed in North America by BMD.
CD-32 format.

	Shovelware is here. This CD-32 offering from Europe's Mindscape contains two spaceship shooters on one disk, Overkill( one of the first AGA games) and Lunar C. Aside from AGA utilization, neither game has any other upgrades added to them at all- except that they are together on one CD. Also, this disk is in PAL mode, so a monitor will be necessary to display it in it's proper form.
	Overkill is a revamp of the venerable old one, Defender. It's essentially the very same game, only with 1990's upgrades. Overall, it's a fair shooter, but certainly not great by any means. The game revolves around the player's ship moving either right or left to help the ground troops that are blowing up little structures on the planet floor. The player must re-supply the little guys on the ground with bombs, all the while evading and destroying the many enemy ships, gaining power-ups and just generally staying alive. 
	In addition to the standard weapon systems, which can be upgraded in only a modicum of ways, there is a shield available with a very finite amount of energy available to it. The only power-ups that I've seen in the game are basically an increased frontal laser and a ground shooter. Once a planet is cleared, the game moves to a stellar system map, where the player chooses the next planet they wish to fly to in that particular orbit. All of the planets found in the same orbit have the same background and essentially the same enemies, which is rather disappointing. Neither the graphics nor the sound in the game were great, but gameplay was both quick and responsive.
	Lunar C is, by a large margin, the better of the two games. Lunar C is very much like the Gradius series of shooters, in both it's look and it's power-up system. In Lunar C, after shooting a full wave of enemy craft, a small pod will appear for you to collect. Once the pod is taken by the player's flying saucer fighter, the line of various power-ups at the top of the screen will light up, one segment at a time. Get enough of the power pods and you'll be able to suddenly equip your ship with blistering plasma cannons, aft shooters and homing weapons, in addition to being able to get more health and speed.
	Lunar C, oddly enough, has a built in slow motion feature which is extremely nice to have during some of the very intense fighting that will go on during the course of the game and I appreciated both this feature and the excellent power-up system. In addition, Lunar C uses passwords to continue play on the higher levels. The password feature is made so that it actually remembers the weapon systems that you used to conquer the previous level, which is another definite plus to playability.
	Both Lunar C and Overkill are entertaining enough to warrant some interest by shooter fans, though I found Lunar C much superior and more interesting to play. But, this is a 32 bit, CD-ROM system and while both of these games might have been thought of as high tech in, say, 1990, now they just seem and feel rather dated. All this disk has really done is wet my appetite for something that really uses the technology and provides a true, 1994 arcade shooter experience.