Review by Dieter Koenig

An Alien fleet has landed in the capital city of the United World Nations. You are an elite fighter in your REX tank and have to defeat the Aliens as long as possible.

The game starts with a map of the city that you have to defend. On that map appear flashing points (hence the name of the game), those are the areas that are attacked by the aliens. You have to move your tank to one of those points and enter it. Now the game switches to the action screen. You find your tank in an area of green parkland, surrounded by concrete terrain.

A horde of aliens will almost immediately start moving towards your tank, aiming to wreck it. And additionally they destroy the terrain on their way. Try to shoot all the aliens before they get you, and try to save as much parkland as possible.

Once you have eliminated all aliens on the screen, you will be put back to the city map, where you have to move to the next flashing point. The points will flash faster and faster, and will finally destroy that part of the city, if you don't fight the aliens there.

The graphics are great for a Videopac game, leading to a comment from well-known Atari 2600 collector Marco 'Videopac sux' Kerstens when he first saw the game at Eurocon 2004: "That picture cannot come from the Vidpik machine, it must come from the Gamecube that stands next to it!"

Beside the fact that it runs only on Videopac+ and Jopac game computers, this game is very special also in two other ways:

First, it is the only Videopac game that features two-joystick-control. The Odyssey3 would have had integrated joystick holders, but the European Videopac machines don't have those. So the cartridge release for the European Videopac+ computers comes with a simple joystick holder, that works pretty well and gives you fantastic, fast-paced arcade feeling on your Videopac+ machine.

Second, the game features a highscore list with 30 entries. The highscores even stay in the memory of the Videopac+ game computer, when you play other Videopac (not Videopac+) games in the meantime!

Oh, and as one of very few Videopac games it features more than one life, and you can even get extra lives at every 30,000 points. Like I said, Arcade feeling! Flash Point brings like no other game (except for Killer Bees) real Arcade action to the Videopac game computers.

No doubt, this is a real milestone on that system!

 

Flash Point Philips Videopac + Graphics 85% Sound 80% Rating 90%

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