ERG: GUNLIGHT
Light the relay towers of the Dusk Belt and send Erg’s homing signal home.
Loading the cartridge (256 KiB)…
Saved states last for this visit. Sound starts with Power.
ERG: GUNLIGHT needs a keyboard or a game controller. On a phone or tablet without one you can read about the game here, but you can’t play it yet.
1
The cartridge · in the fiction
Avenell Playhouse's run-and-gun, Erg's second outing. The Dawn Beacon is lit but the ship is still a wreck, so Erg fights along the Dusk Belt with a lamp rebuilt into a cannon, through four stages of lamp-eyed Gogglets to four Wardens whose big attacks are pools of light that glow, then burn.
- Developer
- Avenell Playhouse
- Year
- 1988
- Genre
- Run-and-gun
- Technique
- lantern
2
Controls
| Cyclorama pad | Keyboard | Game controller |
|---|---|---|
| D-pad | Arrow keys | D-pad or left stick |
| A | Z | Bottom face button |
| B | X | Right face button |
| C | C | Left or top face button |
| START | Enter | Start |
| Save state | F5 | — |
| Load state | F8 | — |
| Power off | Escape | — |
Saved states are kept for this visit only. Controllers use the standard layout (Xbox, PlayStation and most USB or Bluetooth pads). Press any button on the controller after powering on so the browser notices it.
3
How to play
After the Curtain Up splash, press Start (keyboard Enter, or a controller's Start button) on the title screen and again on how to play. Run with Left and Right (arrow keys, or the d-pad or left stick of a controller). Up aims the LAMPGUN up, or up-diagonally with Left or Right; Down crouches on the ground and aims down in the air. A (keyboard Z) jumps: hold it for a higher jump, let go early for a short hop. B (keyboard X) fires: hold it to keep shooting, and while it is held Erg keeps facing the same way, so you can back away while you shoot. C (keyboard C) sets off a FLASH, which costs four lamp cells: a ring of light destroys every enemy bolt on the screen, hurts the enemies it sweeps over and makes Erg untouchable for a moment. Start pauses and resumes. The six pips beside HULL are your suit: a touch from an enemy or a bolt takes one, white-hot light takes two, and when the last pip goes you lose a life and restart at the last checkpoint lamp with the plain PULSE gun. You have three lives and no continues, and one more at 30,000 points. Glow motes, and the ones enemies drop, each fill one LAMP cell. Shoot open the supply lamps on the road: a pod rolls out, and touching it swaps your weapon (SPLIT throws a seed that splits into pellets, NEEDLE pierces every enemy in a line, DAYSEED lobs a bursting seed); take the same weapon twice for its stronger second level; you lose it with a life. The Wardens' big attacks are pools of light: a pool first glows, which is only a warning, then it sears white-hot and anything inside burns for two pips. Jump a low stripe, duck a high one, leave a square or a diamond behind. Each stage ends at a tower and its Warden (SWEEPGATE, KILNJACK, FACETWARDEN and the Long Lamp): shoot its glowing lens, which is open only while the light is quiet. Some gates lock the screen until their wave is dead. Reach the end of LAMP SPINE and bring down the Long Lamp to send the homing signal home.
What is running
When you power on, your browser runs an emulator of the Cyclorama: its CPU, its video chip with the light field, and its Cue sound chip, at the real frame rate. The cartridge is the same 256 KiB ROM the project builds and tests, byte for byte.
gunlight · 262,144 bytes · SHA-256 f022ecde89f4d738a179d7308e10f9528769ac584b30728297b84798a24c7bc5
No account and no cookies. Apart from its own files, the page loads one script: Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts visits and page speed without cookies. The hardware is documented in full: read the HED-0041 hardware and programmer’s manual and the SCRIM language specification. Or go back to the Cyclorama.