Katakis (aka Denaris) Review

By Kristan Reed Published 26 October, 2007

The real R-Type.

Version tested: Retro

Poor Rainbow Arts, poor Manfred Trenz.

In the space of three tormented months, two of the very best C64 games ever released had to be pulled from the shelves. Following on from Rainbow Arts' run-in with Nintendo over The Great Giana Sisters, it then faced another copyright infringement conundrum after Activision considered that Katakis was way too similar to R-Type - a game it owned the rights to and planned to release a port of. In both cases, Trenz was closely involved in their creation, so he can't have been too impressed either.

But such annoying trivia didn't stop most C64 owners enjoying the game, and both of these legally dubious titles more than justify their place among our line-up of Commie favourites.

'Katakis (aka Denaris)' Screenshot 1

Did Activision have a point? Was it just a rip-off of R-Type? Hell yeah, and in actual fact was miles better than the eventual C64 port that came out later (that Trenz and Escher ironically also had to code - albeit within a ridiculous six week deadline). But rip-off is a bit much - Katakis was merely guilty of being too much of a tribute to R-Type for its own good, but as a result was easily one of the most stunning horizontal scrolling shooters ever to grace an 8-bit machine.

In basic gameplay terms it was the same game, with the same sort of enemies, the same power-ups, same style of backdrops, and those trademark huge bosses. Booting it up for the first time, it was hard to fathom how so much detail could have been lavish on each level - but then the next level would load in from scratch (hopefully on disk - you'd have to be a patient panda to stomach waiting for it to load from tape) and the penny dropped. Taking their cue from American developers who'd been using multiload techniques for years, it opened up the 64's capabilities to the max, with lavish levels packed with detail which would have previously not been possible with any normal game that loads in one go.

Needless to say, this sub genre has been honed and refined to a ridiculous degree now, but if you blur your eyes a bit, Katakis plays as well as it ever did. Just be aware that Denaris is effectively the same game, but with some graphical tweaks and level changes to appease the angry Activision.

9 / 10

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Picture of Kristan.

About Kristan Reed

Kristan is a former editor of Eurogamer, dad, Stone Roses bore and Norwich City supporter who sometimes mutters optimistically about Team Silent getting back together.

Read more articles from Kristan by visiting the Kristan Reed archive page.

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Comments (4) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • mkreku #1 4 years ago

    Yeah, Manfred Trenz was an absolutely fantastic Commodore 64 coder. Noone could squeeze out the performance that he could. This was even more obvious in his later efforts, namely Turrican and Turrican 2. Those games are still impressive even compared to today's efforts!

    I cant believe you failed to mention them in the list :(

  • monkie_king #2 4 years ago

    There was meant to be a Katakis demo on Zzap64's first-ever cover-mount cassette. But apparently legal got involved and pulled it after the magazine had already gone to press, so I was one of many confused readers who found that their Katakis demo was in fact a full version of the ancient Time Tunnel game.

  • Retroid #3 4 years ago

    Yup, I remember that happening.

    The buggers.

    Still; meant we got a better version of R-Type on the '64 as they hired the team behind this to do it instead :)

    I still have a (I think) C+VG covertape with a soundless playable demo of the original C64 conversion which just wasn't as good.

  • krudster #4 4 years ago

    The question is, was Turrican and Turrican II a C64 game ported to the Amiga or the other way around? We were looking to put them on the Amiga list you see.