How to play Sirius online
- Fly your ship: arrow keys
- Fire: Z
- Start: F3 (Reset)
- Make it even harder: F5 flips the left difficulty switch
Gameplay
Sirius is a one-player shooter that scrolls from left to right, in the style of Gradius and R-Type. There are four levels, each ending with a boss: an asteroid field, a space station with ground turrets, a living, organic world, and a set of ancient ruins guarded by a crab-shaped ship. Powering up is the key to survival. You can collect rapid fire, spread fire and a small remote ship that follows you and shoots at enemies, much like the Options in Gradius. The game is very hard, and the prototype has no ending.
A lost prototype
Tynesoft was known in the UK for Atari 8-bit and Atari ST games and seems to have been trying to enter the 7800 market with Sirius and its sister game Plutos. The company left the games business before either came out. For years Sirius was one of the best-known “lost” 7800 games: a collector owned a copy, but it only ran on a 7800 development kit, crashed often, and was never shared. In 2008 its source files turned up on a hard drive, and the game was patched to run on a normal 7800.
