How to play Gyruss online
- Move around the ring: arrow keys
- Fire: Z or X (any fire button); tap quickly for rapid fire
- Start a one-player game: Enter
- Start a two-player game: – (the keypad * key)
- Pause and resume: P
- Player 2 (alternating turns): I J K L to move, N or M to fire
- Full screen, save states: the emulator toolbar
On a real 5200 you swing the stick in a circle to send the ship around the rim; here the arrow keys push it round the edge, and short taps work better than holding a key.
Gameplay
You are flying home to Earth from beyond Neptune. Each warp is one battle: four formations of enemy planes swirl in, and once all four have arrived the survivors regroup in the middle and attack again until every plane is gone. It takes two warps to reach Neptune and three for each planet after that: Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and finally Earth. Reach Earth with a ship to spare and the journey begins again.
Planes fire missiles that you can only dodge, and meteors cannot be shot at all. Satellites are the targets worth hunting. Molecular satellites arrive in threes, and shooting the middle one gives you double bullets until you lose a ship. Electromagnetic satellites come in pairs and must both be destroyed before their wave reaches you. After the warps to each planet comes a Chance Stage, a bonus round in which four formations appear one at a time and cannot hurt you.
| Target | Points |
|---|---|
| Enemy plane | 100 |
| Whole formation (1st to 4th in a warp) | 1,000 / 1,500 / 2,000 / 2,500 |
| Molecular satellites (1st to 3rd) | 500 / 1,000 / 1,500 |
| Molecular satellites with double bullets | 1,000 / 1,500 / 2,000 |
| Electromagnetic satellite | 200 |
| Chance Stage formation | 1,000 to 3,000, rising with each planet |
| Chance Stage, all four formations | 10,000 Super Bonus |
You earn an extra ship at 60,000 points and another every 100,000 after that. In a two-player game the players take turns, a turn ending when a ship is lost. The game is over when the last ship goes.
Tips
- Go for the middle satellite. Double bullets make every later formation easier.
- Let formations finish arriving. Whole-formation bonuses are worth far more than single planes. Sit on their flight path and hold fire down.
- Treat the Chance Stage as target practice. Nothing can hit you, so park where the formations converge and chase the 10,000-point Super Bonus.
The story behind Gyruss
Konami’s arcade game, designed by Yoshiki Okamoto, reached North American arcades in March 1983. Its trick was to take a Galaga-style shooter and bend it into a tube, so the enemies spiral out of a vanishing point and your ship orbits the edge. The soundtrack is an uptempo electronic version of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor.
Parker Brothers released home versions for the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit computers, ColecoVision and Commodore 64 in June 1984. The Atari versions were written by On-Time Software after, as AtariMania records, Parker Brothers took the contract away from Roklan; the 5200 cartridge, model 9080, was finished in April 1984. Computer Games magazine gave the ColecoVision and computer versions an A-, calling them a very good adaptation of “Galaga-in-the-round”. AtariProtos is cooler about the 5200 cartridge: it keeps the Bach, but the graphics are blocky, the arcade’s force-field generators are missing, and the controls are hard to get on with, partly because of the 5200 joystick. Its verdict is still that it is not a bad port.
