“6 Classic computer games for all the family”, my bollix.
Yesterday I bought a sunday newspaper that had a free CD-Rom containing “6 classic arcade games”.
The reality of the CD-rom indicates that whoever commissioned this piece of crap CD-rom has never played an arcade game in their life.
the 6 games on the CD range from Unplayable pieces of crap to… well, unplayable pieces of crap. the games were quite clearly written to mimic such greats as Space Invaders (imaginatevely called “the Invaders”, pacman (imaginatively called “Mazeman”) and Hangman (Imaginatively called “The hangman”) amongst other things.
the Invaders starts off looking good, but is let down by abysmal controls and a difficulty rating set somewhere near “Advanced Quantum Cryptography”. there is only minimal space between the shields in which to fire at the alien craft, and the fact they are firing about 3 times faster than you are really is annoying. I think I managed 5 minutes before giving up.
Mazeman, was the complete opposite. Rather simple controls (up down left and right, hard to make a mess of, really) but the programmers only animated the character to rotate clockwise, which is annoying if you want to make a sharp turn. Oh, instead of pacman, you are a little two wheeled robot. And instead of power pills you are collecting ammo to fire at the “ghosts” which are other two wheeled robots. And instead of the ghosts running away when you eat a powerpill, you have to shoot them. And instead of shooting them disappearing, they turn a different colour and get “angry”. And instead of them coming after you, the AI of the robots seems to have problems with actually chasing you and instead bump into each other for about 5 minutes while you are rotating clockwise in order to turn left.
In short, complete toss.
The Hangman would have been playable, if it wasn’t for the fact that the words chosen don’t appear to be in the English dictionary, and that the Hangman gets words which are 5 letters long, and you get 11 letters without repeats.
Alien lander looks like it was designed in two minutes. It plays like it was designed in two minutes. and the fact that it is 4 levels long (including the training level) and each level requires less than 30 seconds of interaction, is completely redundant in 2 minutes.
Game 5, Pluto Control, didn’t even get two minutes of playability. The Intro seemed to be written by a 10 year old, including such gags as “there is an invasion of Uranus by Hammeroids which come from a brown hole”. that was enough for me to exit rather quickly back to the main menu (which is 6 screenshots of the games which enlarge when the mouse is moved over them. At least thats supposed to happen. In reality they pop up and down like residents in an old folks home when someone shouts “grampa”.
onto Game 6, Spheros Maximus. “Giant Balls” is not only a translation, but a rather apt description of this complete and utter claptrap. the idea is your standard one on one beat 'em up. Unfortunately, that doesnt happen here. the controls are your standard ASDF style, however Spheros Maximus diverges from all convention by making the S key do nothing, and your attacks work by pressing the Shift key and the choice of D, A, w and E to do anything.
Not that you need any other key aside from A, which does a twirling sword decapitation move.
10 levels of sword twirling decapitation fun later, I discover that the only thing that changes really is your rank, (from “Nancy boy” beginnings to “Supreme champion” at the end )
and the colour of the sword of your Rather homoerotic opponent. indeed, it looks like the designer spent more time designing the baby-oiled muscles and short short pants of the fighters instead of on things like, say, the game.
Yes, you get what you pay for. but it’s rather pathetic that someone got paid for creating this crap, when you can get absolutely brilliantly made games on places like www.mousebreaker.com for free.
classic Arcade games indeed.
