Space
by Unknown Author
An Asteroids clone with some very nice animations!
Premise |
There was no readme.txt or anything provided but the general idea is to shoot all of the asteroids and the other stationary spaceships. |
| It would have been nice to see a point to this game, or at least a high score table. You apparantly move around, shooting other ships and asteroids. The other ships are usually stationary, so it is more like firing on space stations. The asteroids move, but at varying speeds, so it is more interesting. There are basically two ways to destroy things: shoot them or crash into them. Crashing into them causes damage to your ship while you destroyed them, but what is interesting is that nothing else happens. By that, I mean I was expecting to get thrown off of my current velocity, either by being slowed down, or at least turned somewhat in another direction. Also, this game has no intro, nor a menu system. You are dropped immediately into a playing field which is randomly generated. Unfortunately, you might have to start moving because an enemy ship might be attacking you and so you will lose 15% of your health right there if you are not paying attention. There are no real goals or rewards in this game at all. You shoot and shoot and move and move until you die. It would have benefiited from having a top ten score, or at least a set number of ships needed to destroy. It would also have been nice to have a number of lives instead of just one. What is cool though is that if you want to exit the game, you can press Esc, and watch the self-destruction of your ship. |
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| Which brings us to graphics. This game includes the source, so if you want, you can check out how it was made, and how it loads the .PCX files. The graphics look pretty good, and there is a star field that moves in varying degrees to create a feeling of depth in space. There are quite a few frames of animation in this game, and so I found movements of the ships and asteroids to be quite smooth. The shots that fly around the screen are not as graphically nice but they move so fast that they do not have to be. The explosions themselves look great and seem realistic, as far as explosions in space go. Graphics have to be this game's strong point. | |
| If you use the arrow keys, make sure you have Num Lock OFF!! It will make your experience a lot easier! Otherwise, using the number pad to control the game is better. You do not have to worry about your velocity as much since you do not keep going if you let go of the up direction. Pressing CTRL allows you to shoot. That is it. There is not too much to moving, but just make sure you have Num Lock off as I said, because it will otherwise be a wild and crazy ride (and probably short lived!). | |
| None. | |
| Well, as I have already said, there is no real object to the game. You simply destroy all of the moving objects on the screen. In that, however, is some difficulty. The other ships tend to end up in groups, which makes it tougher to dodge attacks since they are coming from more than one direction. Even if there is only one ship, it can sometimes be hard to find a good place to attack while avoiding shots yourself. I still would have liked to have a goal though. | |
| I didn't really enjoy the game too much because I had no objectives and no reason to play. I mean, it was fun for a few minutes because it looked great and it played easy enough, but it was quite a simple engine and there was not enough gameplay to keep me in there. | |
| What this game needed was more, plain and simple. It seems that this was simply a demo, but it is a playable game in itself. More options, more enemies, more plot, more of anything would help this game out a lot. Luckily the source is provided. What that means is that someone can take this engine and probably come up with something like it. | |
| .zip file: 119 KB download | |
| Pete's QBasic Site |