Denaris

The R-Type clone that eventually was. After threatened legal action, original game Katakis was pulled as copyright infringing the Irem arcade game. Denaris is the version they did allow as long as they also programmed their version of R-Type which they agreed to but did a less than stellar job on.

Katakis Lives! ... In this game.
Famous for getting whacked by Activision only to be resurrected once R-Type was out the door. Denaris is one classy side scrolling shooter, which has more in common with the arcade game Darius than R-type. Gameplay is a lot of fun, and the difficulty is balanced just right. There's great music throughout the game, and some really large and graphically detailed bosses at the end of each stage. It's just a lot of fun, if graphically a little rough around some of the edges, but nonetheless one of the best blasters on the C64.

I never liked this game at all, don't ask me why! It looked and sounded fine but I think the difficulty was too high and the weapon power-ups never made much difference. Overrated!

Rewind side B. And re-load every time you die, WHY???
madness.

Another very playable, high quality copyright infringement from Rainbow Arts. Great presentation, music and graphics but too hard due to unforgiving collision detection and a cramped playing area.

This was a great shoot-em up with excellent graphics and music. I completed it after weeks of effort. I sent my impressive score off to Zzap, and the buggers never listed it on the Scoreboard. This is up there with Armalyte and Dropzone in my opinion.

Katakis was created first! The company that owned the rights to R-Type (Activision I think) thought that the elements in Katakis were a bit too similar to the arcade classic so took legal action to stop distribution.
Rainbow Arts then wangled it so that with some graphical amendments the game could be released (this is the version call Denaris) To allow them to do this the programmers had to produce the R-Type home conversion on the C64 in a very tight timeframe.
If I was in that position I too would have turned out a lame conversion if only to sell more copies of the superior rip-off.
Anyway a very good game, but there are quite a few shmups on the C64 that are better.

I've never understood the hype with Denaris/Katakis. The collision detection is shoddy and you die for no reason at all half the time. The graphics aint that brilliant either. Could be a lot better! (And what the hell is the difference between this and Katakis anyway?)

This game looks like a rip-off from Katakis. Theres are too many rip-offs around!

Forget my previous comment: it was just a very lucky go...
Excellent shmup.

This has to be one of the best shoot 'em ups ever, on any format. 12 levels of full screen scrolling (with at least 8 levels of parallax, on some), loads of power ups, some of the best bosses around and one of the best C64 soundtracks. Many of the levels (graphics & music) were inspired by hit movies of the time: Aliens, Terminator & Delta Force.

I wrote the review for this game, but after a few days of intense play I must admit I overrated it a bit on the lastability front. It is a tad too easy, although when I played it to death at that time (1988-91) I never noticed. Perhaps I was a crap player then and now I’m a better one (a retrogamer is better than a gamer … Still, a very good game.

How can this game possibly take only 6/10???
You have to be crazy! The second best horizontal shoot 'em up (after Armalyte) and one in the C64 top 10!

Denaris a. K. A. Katakis is an excellent Shoot'em Up. Probably one of the best I've ever played on the C-64. The music is even better. This is no surprise, as it has been written by Chris Huelsbeck.