PebbleDash
by Lutasarts
An addicting puzzler from Lutasarts!
| Try to get find the exit while collecting jewels. Beware of enemies and falling boulders! | |
| While I never played the original Boulder Dash that this game is based on, I
still found it to be well designed in general. Everything occurs in real-time. What I mean by
this is that if you were to walk under a boulder, it will fall as soon as you walk away. If it hits another boulder, it will move to the side and keep falling. I found this to be more or less unpredictable. Sometimes the boulders move, other times they don't. You would expect them to move more consistently, but it apparantly depends on the type of object below. The game is tile-based scrolling, which usually makes for choppy animation. In this case, it is usually not a problem. After you find the exit, you move on to the next level. Most of the levels ask you to find a number of jewels before you can do so, and finding the prerequisite number is kind of fun. You can usually go after the jewels already spread out around the maze, but if you can drop boulders on some of the enemies, you can usually get nine jewels out of them. Some enemies don't give any jewels, but still. I found this to be a real treat, since I might not want to go through the entire level. |
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| Tile-based scrolling. Little animation. Basically the same look maze after maze. Of course,
this game uses some colorful graphics, as can be seen in the screen shots, and they attempt to make up
for it. I found it kind of fun to actually break holes through walls when I kill an enemy, but then was disappointed when I was not allowed to walk through some of them. That was more of a design problem,
but the tiles were not drawn to show that the wall still exists. The player character is the only animated part of the game. It was not done as well as it could have been, though. Overall, the graphics do not hinder the gameplay but do not make it all that much better either. Still, I found it quite nice, and I am not sure if more animation would have made this game worse. | |
| Simple controls. The only problem I had was that the detection of my key presses weren't always consistent, causing me to lose the level and starting it over again when an enemy was chasing me. If the controls could be improved in this aspect, it would be a much better game. | |
| No sound. Would have been fun to have sound effects, and a very catchy tune would be a great plus. | |
| The main driving force of the game. The easier levels are more of a tutorial. The later levels tend to get tougher with more and more enemies thrown in, along with tough to reach jewels. The only real problem is that the controls aren't always as responsive as I would have liked, but that is easy to get adjusted to. Overall, the game owes its gaming value to the challenge of getting through each level. You might never want to say, "Aw, this is too hard" since you will more likely say, "Almost! Gotta try a little harder!" or "I think I figured this one out!" | |
| I had a lot of fun with this game. I remember playing this when it was first finished. It was basically my first QBasic game in a long time. It was not an attempt at an RPG, nor was it some dinky little text based "action game." Before I knew it. I found that I had spent an entire day at work playing it. The gameplay is great, the graphics were alright, and the challenge kept me going for awhile. The only thing I didn't like was that the controls needed some tweaking. I want to be able to concentrate on the game itself instead of how I am playing it. | |
| Basically the game is really good. There is a Windows version out, which you can also get at Lutasarts' site. It has more features, such as a few better graphics and some "dark" levels. The QBasic version does not have these features, but it does have the same basic gameplay. For what it does have, this game has something that QBasic games lack: gameplay. And that gameplay is makes this game more fun than some commercial games. | |
| .zip file: 98KB download | |