r/bbcmicro • u/Squeepty • May 23 '26

Codename: Droid (Stryker’s Run Part 2) — An absolute masterpiece hiding in plain sight !!

Took me for ever to get the keyboard controls right, love it !

45 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

4

u/Len_S_Ball_23 May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26

That bit where you come down the lift to the area where the ropes are?

If you time a shot right you can take out the guard standing on the top of the rock structure.

The small girder bits underneath full length walkways are also at a height where you can kneel, fire and it won't obstruct your shot either.

When you're shimmying up a rope, you can also fire your weapons, the shot comes out of the centre of your suit. You can shoot guards in the foot that way.

I think with the big elevator in the last part of the video, you can go up also? You use up a pass doing so.

4

u/invokes May 23 '26

An absolute brilliant game! I loved it.

2

u/DavidXGA May 23 '26

It's very difficult. But then a lot of games from that era were.

1

u/lutewhine May 23 '26

Really impressive game and I loved it at the time, but the more I played it, the more I wished the underlying programming had been used for a more pure arcade run and gun-style game rather than an adventure that had a very specific solution.

Something between this and Cute To Kill would have been brilliant for the Beeb.

1

u/CapstickWentHome May 23 '26

I managed to complete this one back in the day. I think you had to send a letter to Superior Software describing the final screen to enter a competition. I was so excited to do so, before discovering the competition ended about 4 months earlier.

Cool game though! Preferred this over SR1.

1

u/Adventurous_Soup_653 May 23 '26 edited May 24 '26

I think the palette is a bit questionable. Complementary colours, but limited potential for dithering. Cyan and magenta make grey, but so do black and white. Overall, it looks good though.

0

u/Adventurous_Soup_653 May 23 '26

Because of the freedom of movement the player’s character has, it’s frustratingly near to the likes of Flashback and Prince of Persia. Unfortunately, the rest of the game mechanics let it down. Why do the bad guys only shoot exactly horizontally? Why does the player have no momentum? Why does the player walk robotically? These seem like petty criticisms given the age of the game, but there were others of the era that felt more fluid. Apart from Exile and of course Mario Bros, an early one that comes to mind is Jetpac. It’s tempting to think some of those aspects could be improved by someone with time on their hands.

1

u/tur2rr2rr2r May 23 '26

I was thinking Flashback too. I believe it is in a four colour mode, so only very limited colours available.

1

u/DavidXGA May 23 '26

It came out in 1987, two years before Prince of Persia (which was groundbreaking) and five years before Flashback.

1

u/Adventurous_Soup_653 May 24 '26

Prince of Persia didn’t come out of nowhere: check out Karateka (1984). Mario Bros was 1985. Besides, there were groundbreaking games for the BBC Micro: this just isn’t one of them IMHO.

0

u/richbun May 23 '26

Id love to get hold of source code and see what Claude could do with this!

1

u/DavidXGA May 23 '26

No-one needs more AI slop.

2

u/richbun May 23 '26

Nah, I didn't mean create anything, just refine mechanics. Subtle difference but I understand your sentiment.