Verminator is an Atari ST exclusive action platform game with cool looking visuals and great sound. The game was released in 1989 by Rainbird Software.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY You play Jake, a professional exterminator that sets off on a challenging quest to vanish all vermin around. Along your way you'll find several teleport systems you can use to reach certain points of the screen. There is a variety of enemy sprites around either shooting at or flying towards you, to get you out of the way. Every vermin you kill means money that can be spent in buying extra firepower or extra lives while there's also gambling (!) to either earn or lose coins. The game is a classic 2D action platform with a quite wide gameplay area and plenty of weapon upgrades.
GRAPHICS The graphics look pretty cool though they use the ST's default 16-colors and the sprites and backgrounds are well animated. Actually, every screen looks rather overloaded with graphics. The game runs in flip-screen mode and this allows the ST hardware to handle many details on screen with ease.
SOUND Verminator's music is what really impresses the most, thanks to the talented David Whittaker. The game's music features two awesome scores (one at the intro and one during gameplay) and there are also a few sampled sound effects when you kill a vermin.
Screenshots
Sounds
Intro/Menu music:
In-game music sample:
Gameplay sample
Hardware information
Atari ST
CPU: Motorola 68000 16/32bit at 8mhz. 16 bit data bus/32 bit internal/24-bit address bus. MEMORY: RAM 512KB (1MB for the 1040ST models) / ROM 192KB GRAPHICS: Digital-to-Analog Converter of 3-bits, eight levels per RGB channel, featuring a 9-bit RGB palette (512 colors), 320x200 (16 color), 640x200 (4 color), 640x400 (monochrome). With special programming techniques could display 512 colors on screen in static images. SOUND: Yamaha YM2149F PSG "Programmable Sound Generator" chip provided 3-voice sound synthesis, plus 1-voice white noise mono PSG. It also has two MIDI ports, and support mixed YM2149 sfx and MIDI music in gaming (there are several games supported this).