Shoot'em Up! / Shoot'em Up! - Horizontal Scrolling · 1983

Tail of Beta Lyrae (The)

Published by Datamost, Inc. · Developed by Paradise Programming

atarimania.com — atari-400-800-xl-xe-games-tail-of-beta-lyrae-the-5240

Information

Genre: Shoot'em Up! - Horizontal Scrolling
Language: Machine Language
Controls: Joystick
Players: 1, 2 (alt.), 2+, Demo
Programmer(s): Price, Philip
Graphic Artist(s): Price, Philip
Sound: Gilbertson, Gary
Cover Artist(s): [unknown]
Year: 1983
Publisher: Datamost, Inc.
Developer: Paradise Programming
Country: USA
License: Commercial
Medium: Disk
Rarity: 8
Serial: -

Votes / Statistics

Rating: 7.6/10 · Votes: 162 · Downloads: 3,644 · Hits: 34,341

Additional Comments

Released in Germany as Beta Lyrae - Kampfstern der Galaktik.

Photo of the unbelievably rare early release in Paradise Programming packaging courtesy of Rob Catron!

Thanks to Greg Bendokus for the manual and disk scans.

Screenshots (13)

Tail of Beta Lyrae (The) — screenshot 10

Tail of Beta Lyrae (The) — screenshot 11

Tail of Beta Lyrae (The) — screenshot 12

Tail of Beta Lyrae (The) — screenshot 13

Cover Art (4)

Ads (2)

Here at last. Games with real music for your Atari. · 1983

Tips (1)

Type TRACE POWER at the title screen to reach higher levels.

Book / Magazine Reviews (1)

Computer Fun · May, 1984 · Rating: 2 / 4

A tired game with an even wearier story behind it, The Tail of Beta Lyrae is yet another reworking of the classic Defender motif of ships vs. ships in aerial combat. Beta Lyrae also employs play elements first seen in Scramble, its successor Super Cobra and the thematically related Apocalypse. The result is a game that strives to be different but, in the end, fails to do so.
The instruction booklet is all of two pages but still contains more hot air than a politician. Of the one page containing text, three-fourths of the space is devoted to the storyline, the remainder to instructions. The facing page sports renderings of all "known" alien installations, complete with point values.
With all the loquacity of an army recruiter, the booklet explains the situation which, of course, is dire and growing more so with every passing moment. You, a Galactic Wing Commander assigned to the Beta quadrant, are part of a force committed to the destruction of the alien war machine that now occupies the mining colonies on Beta Lyrae. The colonists are being slaughtered on sight. All will be lost if you fail in your mission. The opposition boasts the usual machines of destruction: ground-based lasers, missiles and what have you. If this game does enjoy one distinction, it would be the odd point values assigned to some of the targets. Vessels, for instance, score "697 to 700" points when hit while a destroyed alien miner earns the player 111 points. Judging from this, power generators are twice as important since they're worth 222 points.
The Tail of Beta Lyrae isn't bad as far as shoot'em ups go: you've got a ship, a conflict, ammo and enemies. What it lacks is originality.

Comments (13)

Gildahl — 23 Jul 2022
The reviews here capture my opinion of this game pretty well. A decent Scramble type game with cool and different music that sticks in your head. I played this a lot back in the day, though I didn't tend to get too far. If you haven't played it, its one of those titles you ought to at least try out. I put it in the pseudo classic category. Good nostalgia value here.
eppy2000 — 3 Jul 2015
Not the most original of games, but it was still a fun shoot 'em up that had variety, probably more so than the games it was inspired by. Of course, you also had that great musical score by Gary Gilbertson to accompany you. I hadn't played this in a long time and forgot about its scoring quirks, such as you LOSING points when you fire arbitrarily without hitting a target (probably to curtail the players that would frenetically do the rapid fire method to plow through the levels, or as we'd say today, "beast mode"). I've always liked the two different "game over" music themes. The first (if you didn't progress too far) was that funeral dirge, followed by the a playful rendition of the "nah nah nah nah nah nah" taunt, as if to tell you to do better next time. The second one was a more heroic fanfare.
Kathleen — 3 Jul 2015
I don't care what it is or isn't a clone of, Tail of Beta Lyrae is one of my two or three favorite games I ever played in the history of games. The music I know had a lot to do with this.
Daniel Thomas MacInnes — 11 May 2011
Tail of Beta Lyrae is always on my short-list of all time favorite Atari 800 games. Exceptional graphics, animation and music, some of the best of the system's '80s heyday. The random layouts are a masterstroke. Oh, and the escaping aliens at the end remind me of Girl Scout Cookies. I like cookies. My teeth hurt.
Greg B. — 2 Feb 2011
Houdi, no offense, but I think Caverns of Mars II is a MUCH better Scramble clone than this. TOBL is the only game on the 8-bit where the intro is better than the game itself.
Gwobby — 27 Nov 2010
Whart we need is an image of a new or not played much disk - someone must have one - Please, please post it! The game is much more fun with the Gravity balls!
FrakAttack — 23 Aug 2008
I believe what some have mistaken as a copy protection scheme, harder enemies, flashing screens, etc., was actually a gameplay feature. One of the selling points of this game was that it had a primitive form of adaptive difficulty, meaning, the game kept count of how many times you played it (hence, the need to write to disk) and introduced new challenges as your play-count grew. Not sure if there was a way to reset the difficulty, though. Still can't get that music out of my head!
Karl Heller — 5 Feb 2008
This game did have a copy protection scheme. In addition, it had to be run from a notched disk so the program could write to it as you advanced. If you played it with a w/o a notch (or if you copied it) the gravity balls (?) would appear more often and kill you quickly.
Ben Combee — 24 Jan 2008
IIRC, this game had a copy-protection scheme where if it thought it was playing on a copied disk, it would turn the background light, making it harder to play. Unfortunately, this scheme would sometimes also affect legitimate disks, including the copy I owned. This would explain the "metallic look" comments.
Jonny EOL — 2 Jul 2007
This horizontal scrolled wasn't the best graphically, but the action-packed, varied gameplay and excellent music more than made up for it. The aliens had all kinds of weapons to throw at you, and you needed lightning reflexes to be able to dodge them all at anything other than the easiest difficulty levels.
Yungstar 2006 — 28 Aug 2006
i never liked the game, but the music is great
Jesse — 4 Jan 2006
I had a different version of this and graphics looked very different... It had two modes of play... one scramble type and the other very mettalic and dimensioned in the city scene itself it was awsome and lost it seems now. Please if anybody can recover the awsome version I remember it ran on my 800XL but there was a problem with the DOS they used causing it to corrupt over time. It made me an 8 bit addict.
Houdi — 7 Aug 2005
Don't agree with the above comments. This game is based on Scramble not Defender and is easily the best Scramble clone on the 8-bit machines. The accompanying music themes (a different end theme depending on the the score achieved) are worth playing the game for alone. Don't know about the validity of the screen shots above as I seem to remember everything being much more 'metallic' in appearance.