E-Motion


Title           E-Motion
Game Type       Puzzle
Publisher       US Gold
Players         1 or 2
Compatibility   All, some graphics corruption on AGA
HD Installable  No (JST patch available)
Submission      Tom Waddington (tom@waddie.org.uk)

Review
There's these coloured balls, right, and you play another ball with an
arrow on it that you can rotate and thrust around the screen in a similar
fashion to Asteroids. You have to knock balls of the same colour together
to make them disappear, but if two balls of different colours come into
contact then even more balls form in between. If you collect the new balls
whilst they're small you get an energy boost, but if left too long they
grow into large balls that have to be cleared like the original balls.
Sometimes the balls are joined to you or each other by an elastic string.
The level is complete when all the balls have disappeared. And all the
time the balls are expanding and contracting ever faster until they
explode, taking huge chunks off your energy bar.

Wherever do they get their ideas from?

This is an extremely hard "puzzle" game. The word puzzle is in quotation
marks because it's usually obvious how to complete the level, the
difficulty comes from having to cope with the inertia of your ship and the
balls and the unpredictable (actually it's all completely predictable, but
you don't get very long to work out how it behaves, so it's as good as
unpredictable) element of the elastic. You need to have near perfect
control and lightning reactions even on level one, and at the first
mistake it's pretty much Game Over.

It's challenging, but for all the wrong reasons. Some people will like the
weirdness and ferociously difficult test of skill, but probably not the
traditional puzzle fan. A test of joystick skills thinly disguised as a
test of brain power.

The sound is good though; a different note is played for different
collisions, so tiny snippets of music can be played quite spontaneously.
Mind you, that's only likely to happen if you've let things get totally
out of hand, so it's not really all that great.


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