Gravitron 2

August 31, 2008 · Filed Under Featured, Reviews · 7 Comments 

Alright, alright, I confess that I’m an absolute sucker for gorgeous vector style graphics. It’s likely that any regular readers of this little hovel are already fully aware of this quirk though. What I’ve never been the greatest fan of is Thrust-a-like games. It’s not that I find them bad games, it’s just that my rotating and flying skills are more akin to doing in game Challenger impressions than anything especially useful.

Over the past couple of years though, I’ve been forced to reassess my opinions on a couple of occasions. Weibo turned in the rather superb Thrust Extreme, which blew just about everything out of the water by a country mile, then to top it off along came X-Out with Gravitron and well, it managed to fuckmeld bits of Oids and Thrust together in a gorgeous glowy dreamorama. Very nice it was too and received some well deserved critical praise.

So, here I am today then, sitting with a copy of Gravitron 2 in front of me and not a lot of time to play due to having to work my knuckles raw to ensure the competition launch goes smoothly. Or at least, the latter part was the plan until I started playing.

As usual, my first few moments in the game were spent crashing into anything and everything like a complete tool. You’re probably thinking that there’s a lot to crash into on the first level and you can take my word for it that no, there isn’t. I really am that spack handed with this type of game. Rather than throw my hands in the air and walk away, things started getting better rapidly for me. Soon I was doing rather nifty spins around the level, landing perfectly to collect the scientists and taking out the gun turret with ease. Aha! Fantastic. There’s hope for me yet. And then I destroyed the reactor.

I’ve had “oh fucking shit” moments in games before, but there’s not many that instil such a sense of absolute urgency into the player as when the music ratchets up a notch and that countdown appears on screen. It’s a total “get the fuck out of here, fast” moment.

And that’s just the very easy first level. Half an hour later, despite having many other things I should be doing I was still sitting there playing through Gravitron 2. And I swore. Really loudly. There’s not many games I play that manage to put me quite on edge so well. I think it was around level 4 or 5 with a large rotating rock, filled with turrets, a reactor and a laser flitting on and off where attempting to navigate the level left me twitchy as fuck afterwards. If I weren’t already sitting down, I’d have had to go for one quick. Luckily, I had a lovely pair of warm cups of tea on hand to help soothe my nerves.

I can safely say that Gravitron 2 is a fucking lovely game and at under a fiver, it’d be crazy not to take a punt on it. If you’re unsure, check out the original first (as there’s currently no demo for the game at the time of writing) and imagine the game looking even nicer than that and with some fantastic level design to boot. There’s bits of Oids, bits of Defender and obviously bits of Thrust tucked away in it’s glowing package and I’d be hard pushed to recommend it more.

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Polymaniacs Demo

August 30, 2008 · Filed Under Other peoples games · Comment 

Fuck yeah.

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Riddle Me This

August 29, 2008 · Filed Under Articles · 4 Comments 

Why is it that whenever I stumble across a site on the old intertits proclaiming to either be intelligent, smart, for serious gamers or hardcore gamers or whatever pseudo-intellectual niche that someone feels has a gaping void where their opinion lies…

…why is it more often than not written by thick cunts?

Seriously, why is this? What possesses a bunch of sprout brained idiots constantly to band together and wave their alleged Level 9 Penis Of Intelligence around in folks faces when they quite clearly can’t even be trusted to tie their own fucking shoelaces, never mind be allowed near a keyboard?

At least once a month I stumble upon a new one, be it a blog, a site or a dark hovel of bleak intertwatdom and just once, just for once in this godforsaken life, I’d like to stumble onto a site that claims it’s intelligent, serious, profound or whatever and actually *is*.

Is this some sort of deep human instinct to better oneself by proclaiming the big brain as fact? Or is it, as I suspect, that you have to be a bit backward and not allowed to cross the road without supervision to attempt to place yourself in the position of intelligensia to the masses?

More to the point, why do they always write essays that would break Tolstoy’s word-count-o-meter? Is it, as I suspect, the belief that writing more truly means more substance or is it perhaps that they love the sound of their fingers bouncing merrily off the keys so much that they begin at 1am after mum has gone to bed and don’t stop until the crack of sunlight peers through their muggy spunk stained curtains, shivering orgasmically the entire time?

Even more to the point, is there any way we can make them stop?

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Phew

August 29, 2008 · Filed Under Personal · Comment 

Well, that’s the categories all announced for the RR competition. We’ve still got a few aces up our sleeves to give out before the rules, but at least folks can see what we’re looking for this year… sort of ;)

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Gametunnel Review Weirdness…

August 27, 2008 · Filed Under Articles · Comment 

[update: the "offending" (Christ, I hate that phrase) text has been adjusted since this post. Carry on about your business, people.]

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