Recently I played through the registered version of Hocus Pocus by Apogee. I'd had the shareware version as a kid but never the registered.
I have to say, the game is a bit disappointing. It has nice graphics and sound but its really let down by poor level design.
A recurring theme seems to be pits of spikes or lava in between short platforms of equal length and height, with enemies spawning on them. This will go on for over a dozen pits and it seems every second level has this. Gets very repetitive quickly.
Its also quite annoying how enemies warp in, and often they don't start warping until you're in midair heading for their platform. So you have to be very trepid, jumping towards each platform and then landing back on the previous one, to make the enemies spawn - then you shoot them from across the gap before jumping across and repeating the process ad nauseum.
I also found there was a lot of backtracking in some of the levels and a few of them had elevators, which were possible to get stuck under, or left in an inaccessable position requiring you to restart the level.
Finally, I played it on normal but I found the enemies to be damage sponges. Enemies would take 6 or so shots to die, which isn't so bad, but when you have a couple of hundred enemies on each level to go through, and rapid-fire is only available as a limited powerup, you get very sick of tapping the fire button. On those repeating platforms I mentioned before, you'd often get 5 or more enemies on each one.
Overall pretty disappointing, best to stick to shareware for this one.
If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.
