Homebreviews - part 2
Entry posted by Nathan Strum
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The reviews continue...
Crazy Balloon
4/5
Crazy Balloon was an obscure arcade game from the 70's, from a time when videogame genres were still being invented. Game companies hadn't settled into reusing the same formulas over and over again, and unique, quirky games like Crazy Balloon were the result. While essentially a maze game, Crazy Balloon is more than simply finding your way from point A to point B. It's a devious mix of needing to be patient, while beating the clock. The first few levels give you the feel for moving your balloon carefully through the maze, but then the levels get trickier as obstacles push and pull at your balloon, and threaten to send you careening into a wall. Manuel has managed to include all of the levels from the arcade game, and the result is a whimsical, yet fiercely challenging game, unlike anything else on the 2600.
Strat-O-Gems Deluxe
5/5
A great, colorful puzzle game requiring strategy and fast reflexes, Strat-O-Gems Deluxe is a welcomed addition the 2600 library. The game starts you out slowly, but this allows you to build up potential chain-reactions of gems which are the key to scoring big points. The manual, although a bit wordy, is full of useful tips on how to get the most out of your game. As you get to higher levels, the pace picks up and you'll have less time to strategize, and barely enough time to survive. Nice touches like bomber and wild-card gems give you even more opportunities for strategy and scoring. The sounds and graphics are all first-rate, with some cool visual effects. The gems change shape each level, which not only adds visually to the game, but keeps you on your toes as you have to adjust to each new shape. When you score a particularly impressive combination, the game stops to congratulate you, but I found this to be disruptive to the flow of the game. Fortunately, you can turn that option off using the right difficulty switch.
Warring Worms: The Worm (Re)Turns
4/5
It's Surround meets Combat - with enough variety to keep you busy for months. This is a great game to play head-to-head, and the single-player mode has pretty decent AI as well. The concept is pretty simple - box your opponent in, or blast him to bits. What makes this game a keeper though is the sheer number of options available. There's a mode for everybody here, from indestructible walls to constantly changing arenas, wide-open vistas to confining spaces, weapons or no weapons, scoring variations, and a mode that generates random options for each round in a game. This is one game you may never play the same way twice, but if you find a mode that's your favorite, the game selection menu makes it easy to dial in exactly the settings you want.
Swoops!
5/5
A fun collection of three mini-games: Splatform, Crash 'n' Dive and Cave 1k. You can play each separately, or as a "3-athlon" where your scores for all three mini-games are combined.
Splatform alone would be worth the price of the cartridge. It's a fun, addictive game which requires deft control and patience (but not too much patience, since time is against you). The more you play, the better you'll learn the layout of the platforms, and the higher you'll score the next time. But there's also a random platform mode that ensures you'll never completely master this game, even if you manage to beat all of the regular levels.
Crash 'n' Dive is a surprisingly fast-paced game where you plummet past (and into) colored platforms. If you hit the same color multiple times in a row, your score will increase faster. Miss a platform, your score goes down. The trick is picking the right colors to run into, without letting too many of the other ones go by. The platforms can race by at a breakneck speed, and the paddle control makes it a pretty fun twitch game. It would be nice to have more than just one life though.
Finally is Cave 1k, where you use only the fire button to control the altitude of a helicopter flying through a cave. It's a pretty good mini-game, but it would have been nice if there were more to it. Fuel to pick up, objectives to accomplish, people to rescue, or maybe more complex terrain (like the platforms in Splatform). Even so, as an addition to the other two mini-games, it rounds out this collection nicely.
Up next... three more games!
Or is it nine? 
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