Rocks – Can you smell what the rocks are cookin’?

June02 Obviously rocks can’t cook, I mean, they have absolutely no utensils.  You could cook some rocks though.  Well it wouldn’t make for a tasty meal, but you could toast them with laser fire!  You know.  Beep…… Boop…… Beep……. Boop……. Jing-jing-jing. Beep… Boop… Beep… Boop… Jing-jing. Do-de-do-de-do-de-do-de-do.  Beep. Boop. Beep. Boop. Jing-jing-jing. Pash!  Next ship.  Okay so the beeps and boops is the music or background ambient sound, the jing-jing is the sound of the laser fire, the do-de-do is that little flying saucer that comes out for extra bonus points, and the “Pash” is the sound of your ultimate demise.  Okay so it’s hard to faithfully reproduce the sounds of Asteroids in text, but I did the best I could, did I not?  Asteroids one of the founding fathers of games.  Well I guess it’s not a person, so it wouldn’t be a founding father exactly.  Part of the bedrock of games.  Or something.  Rocks by Ooeyug.  Is generally an Asteroids clone.  Of course shooting rocks isn’t the only thing you can do in it.

What I think of it:  It’s great, the graphics, and sounds (and the few musical snippets) are frosting.  It also has a few things inspired by games like Geometry Wars.  It’s fun, but with a warning.  It is EXTREMELY challenging.  My butt got handed to me quite early.

So read on, all you rock blasting fanatics!

On, all you rock blasting fanatics!

So you knew I was going to pull that joke.  Well I’ll keep doing it until I run out of them, but until then, let’s continue with the review.

RocksSS01 Firstly the hard work.  It’s simple to play.  You can use the keyboard arrows or the mouse.  Right mouse button accelerates the ship, and just rotate the ship with the mouse.  Left button fires.  You can also use up to accelerate, down to decelerate, and left and right arrows to rotate left and right respectively.  Simply to play doesn’t mean easy to master. Oh no!  To me running through the tutorials proved the hardest.  At least with the game itself I can actually play before I get tired.  That’s probably how you should play.  Play the normal game first.  Then after realizing how much it kicks your butt, go to the basic training mode, and let that kick your butt for a while.  Basically your goal, as in Asteroids, is to destroy all the, you know, meteorites.  Hah! Bet you didn’t know I was going to say meteorites. 

RocksSS02 There are three types of pickups too.  First would be a shield one, it looks like a little blue diamond.  Another is the red one which increases auto-fire rate.  And the green ones increases your multi-shot if you collect four of them.  Now the cool thing is the developer added other things to shoot.  Blue-green rotating triangles.  Single floating magenta diamonds.  Magenta squares that have squares inside them that leave little asterisk-looking mines which blow up.  There’s just a lot of stuff.  None of it was written down, so I can’t tell you exactly what objects are in the level.  But this stuff gives you a chance to maximize your score because they only show up if you haven’t destroyed the asteroids totally in a given time period.  The difference between this and say something like Geometry wars, is that this isn’t typically a “bullet-hell” shooter.  It partly relies on good flying.  It’s good but extremely hard fun.

RocksSS03 Secondly the paint job.  The graphics are flashy, glowy, showy bits of eye-candy.  There’s cool particle effects.  You get engine glow when you accelerate.  It practically makes the whole ship glow more than it does normally.  Almost looks like glow given off by a flare that’s been fired from a flare gun.  The whole game has that cool vectory look that we’ve all come to know and love.  There’s music on the main menu, and music when you end a game, but doesn’t seem like any in the game itself (unless it happens later).  But this is just as well as without it you can hear all the bleeps and bloops this game has to offer.  It, of course, does not sound like Asteroids.  It has it’s own sounds.  But that’s more than enough.  When you get low on shields an alert sounds to show you, you need to pick up some blue pickups.  Well that’s about it.

If retro is your thing, then Rocks is the game you want to play.  Even if not, it’s still colorful and lively enough for almost anyone who likes shooting things!  It runs on Windows and Macs.

Name: Rocks

Developer: Ooeyug

Price: Free (one of the few games that actually say freeware)

Where you can get it: Right here – Rocks

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One Response to “Rocks – Can you smell what the rocks are cookin’?”

  1. Matteo says:

    Hi, I really love your game “Rocks”. But I am experiencing a lot of video problems with it. Since I upgraded to Snow Leopard and then to Lion it started to become blurred or fuzzy and so not playable. Are you planning to update Rocks? Please solve the problem.
    Thank you.

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