Plasmania
Name: Plasmania
Programmer(s): [[]]
Publisher: Sirius Software
Year: 1983
Description:
Plasmania is basically like Fantastic Voyage if it was turned into an arcade game. You control this tiny microscopic ship that's traveling through someone's bloodstream, and your job is to destroy all the viruses and bad stuff floating around in there. It's pretty wild when you think about it.
The game was made by Lewis Geer and published by Sirius Software in 1983. It's a vertical scrolling shooter that plays a lot like Scramble, except instead of flying through caves, you're zooming through blood vessels. The concept is actually really cool and unique for its time.
Here's the thing that makes Plasmania different from other shooters: every time you mess up, your patient gets sicker. If you crash into the walls of the blood vessels or bump into enemies, you're literally making the person you're supposed to be helping worse. That adds this weird pressure because you're not just trying to get a high score, you're trying to keep someone alive.
The graphics are decent for 1983, and the gameplay is smooth enough. It runs on any Apple II with 48K of memory, so it wasn't too demanding. The controls are pretty responsive, which is important when you're trying to navigate through tight blood vessel passages.
The downside is that it can get repetitive after a while. Once you figure out the patterns, it's mostly just the same thing over and over. But for an arcade-style game from the early 80s, it's actually pretty fun and the medical theme makes it stand out from all the space shooters that were everywhere back then.