Apidya (1992)

Apidya is a horizontally-scrolling shoot 'em up computer game developed by Kaiko and released by Play Byte in 1992 for the Amiga An unofficial GBA Apidya technical demo followed years later and an unofficial Windows remake of the first level was released in 2002 but both were never completed.

The name Apidya appears to be styled after Japanese. The four katakana characters on the title screen, (pronounced "abija" but romanized "abidya" under the Nihon-shiki system), might be an attempted transliteration of the Latin Apidae, which is the name of the taxonomic family to which the honey bee belongs.

Gameplay

The gameplay is standard for a horizontally-scrolling shooter, with some elements borrowed from early, classic shoot 'em ups. The player controls a magical honeybee that can spit damaging energy projectiles.

The game uses the power-up bar system pioneered by Gradius. Destroyed enemies sometimes leave behind a power-up in the form of a red-and-yellow flower. The player may collect these flowers and activate new weapons and enhancements using the power-up bar at the bottom of the screen.

The game also uses a 'build-up' weapon very similar in operation to the 'beam' weapon in R-Type. If the fire button is held down for a second or two, the player's bee makes a hissing noise. Releasing the fire button will then cause the bee to fire a large, organic rocket which can wipe out waves of small enemies, or damage larger ones.

The game consists of five levels: a meadow, a pond, a sewer pipe filled with mutated enemies, a bio-technological machine, and a final level where the player must battle five final bosses, and each level is divided up into a number of stages (usually three). There are also a number of secret bonus levels. In the first two levels, nearly all the enemies are real insects and animals that can be found in a meadow or pond. During Techno Party, the bee morphs into a more mechanised form for the duration of that level.

When the difficulty is set to "Easy", the game skips the last level and the ending sequence, and goes straight to the end credits.

Music

The musical soundtrack to the game was composed by game musician Chris Hülsbeck. It was released as a CD album in 1992. The soundtrack of level 4 features several samples from L.A. Style's James Brown Is Dead. An Apidya suite was performed live by a full symphonic orchestra in 2003 at the Symphonic Game Music Concert-series in Leipzig, Germany. Music from Apidya was also part of the 2006 PLAY! A Video Game Symphony concert in Stockholm, Sweden. A new version was also recorded for the CD 'Symphonic Shades' which features other music by Hulsbeck.