Darius (pronounced [də.ˈɹai.əs]) is a horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up arcade game released by Taito in 1986. It is the first game in the Darius series and it is played using a unique three-screen arcade cabinet setup. Scrolling shooters are a type of video game, a subgenre of shoot em up . ... Centipede by Atari is a typical example of a 1980s era arcade game. ... The Taito Corporation (タイトー株式会社, taitou kabushikigaisha) TYO: 9646 is a Japanese developer of video game software and arcade hardware. ... Year 1986 (MCMLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link displays 1986 Gregorian calendar). ... The Darius series is a series of horizontally-scrolling shoot em up video games, released by Taito. ... This arcade cabinet, containing Centipede, is an upright. ...

Story

After years of pollution and the depletion of natural resources on Earth, humans decided to search beyond the solar system for inhabitable planets to live on. A space program dedicated to this premise eventually found a solar system similar to the one in the Milky Way galaxy and selected a habitable planet they named Darius. The Milky Way (a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, in turn derived from the Greek Galaxia Kuklos; or simply the Galaxy) is a barred spiral galaxy in the Local Group, and has special significance to humanity as the location of the solar system, which is located near the Orion...

After settling on Darius, the inhabitants learned to start a new life and thrive in both society and technology. However, their peace was disturbed by an armada of malevolent maritime shaped space craft controlled by the Belser Army, who wished to exact revenge on the Darius inhabitants for making Earth uninhabitable for their ancient relatives.

The Darius inhabitants' only line of defense were the Silver Hawk series: single-piloted fighter craft designed for long space travel with the ability to wield different weapons at the same time. Two of the fleet's top pilots were selected to defend Darius: Proco and Tiat. Together, the two must succeed in thwarting Belser's attack on Darius.

Description

A section of the first level of Darius

Uniquely among shoot 'em ups, the game screen is three times wider than conventional size, and the arcade version uses an arrangement of three screens to accommodate it. Image File history File links A screenshot of the arcade game Darius. ... Image File history File links A screenshot of the arcade game Darius. ...

The player flies an ornate fighter craft called a Silver Hawk. The craft is equipped with two attack weapons: Missile, which refers to the forward gun, and Bomb, which refers to ballistic bombs dropped from the craft. A third capability of the craft is referred to as Arm - a green energy shield that can absorb damaging impacts without harm to the ship.

During the course of the levels the player must navigate the terrain, and battle a variety of fighter craft, ground vehicles, turrets, and other obstacles.

At the end of every level, the terrain fades away and the game issues a textual warning of the form "WARNING! A HUGE BATTLESHIP x-y IS APPROACHING FAST.", where x is the name of a boss and y is a letter identifying the current level. The player then arrives in a tunnel where the boss resides, and must defeat it to progress to a new level. The bosses in Darius, although mechanical, are frequently in the form of aquatic animals, such as fish or squid. There have been exceptions in later games - most notably a foetus(Bio Strong), a Terminator-style robot torso (Galst Vic) and a gigantic Silver Hawk (Mother Hawk). Flag Ship from the video game Gorf A boss is a particularly challenging computer-controlled character in video games. ... A giant grouper at the Georgia Aquarium Fish are aquatic vertebrates that are cold-blooded, covered with scales, and equipped with two sets of paired fins and several unpaired fins. ... Suborders †Plesioteuthididae (incertae sedis) Myopsina Oegopsina Squid are a large, diverse group of marine cephalopods. ... Foetus can refer to: a fetus, an embryo in later stages of development Foetus, a band fronted by industrial music pioneer J.G. Thirlwell. ... The Terminator (also known as Terminator in some early trailers and posters) is a 1984 science fiction/action film featuring former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger in what would become his best-known role, and also starred Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn. ...

If the player defeats the boss, the tunnel splits into two and the player must decide whether to take the upper or lower tunnel, both of which lead to a different stage. This allows many different paths to be taken through the game.

Power ups

In Darius, there are three power-up bars; one each for Missile, Bomb, and Arm (Armour). Each bar has seven divisions.

Power-ups can be obtained by shooting enemies of a certain colour. The power-ups are in the form of coloured bubbles, and the colour corresponds to one of the three weapons, as follows: Power Up, the Professional Organization of Women in Entertainment Reaching Up is an organization with the stated mission to promote the visibility and integration of gay women in entertainment, the arts, and all forms of media. Power Up provided funding and assistance to the 2003 short film . ... Soap bubbles Bubble may refer to: Soap bubble, spherical liquid film, also possibly of bubble gum Cavitation, pocket of air caught in a liquid Bubble (economics), where speculation causes prices to rise to unsustainable levels a (normally) transparent dome Light bulb, in theater lighting terminology [1] in poker tournaments, the...

• Red - Missile
• Green - Bomb
• Blue - Arm

Collecting a bubble powers up the corresponding weapon, and highlights a new division on the corresponding power-up bar. The Arm, if it is diminished or absent at the time of collecting the Blue power-up, is regenerated and powered up.

If the player powers up a weapon more than seven times, the weapon changes to a new, more powerful type. This then becomes the player's default, and can be powered up further.

There are two other colours of power-up bubble - white, and orange - which can be obtained by shooting at certain points of the terrain; there are, however, no visual clues as to where these may be in the level.

• White - gives a score bonus
• Orange - a smart bomb; kills all enemies on screen

BOLT-117 laser guided bomb Precision-guided munitions (smart munitions or smart bombs) are self-guiding weapons intended to maximize damage to the target while minimizing collateral damage. Because the damage effects of an explosive weapon scale as a power law with distance, quite modest improvements in accuracy (and hence...

The Silver Hawk

The game's attract mode displays diagrams and statistics on the Silver Hawk, providing the following physical information: An arcade games attract mode is the display it shows when nobody is playing the game. ...

• Length: 65.6 FT
• Height: 26.2 FT
• Width: 49.2 FT
• Weight: 77160 lb

Trivia

• The names of the lead pilots Proco and Tiat spell TaitoCorp when written backwards.

External links

• Destroy All Monsters - Darius Series
• Huge Darius Battleships
• Hardcore Gaming 101 - Darius
• Darius Twin at MobyGames
• Darius at PCBdB*