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Another banner entrant another day another asteroids clone.  This one entitled Meteors from Platymuus Software.  Who hasn’t played some variant of Asteroids?  No really who hasn’t because when I find you I’m going to come to your house and punch your lights out!  Okay maybe turn your lights off.  Literally like flip the switch which will teach you to not play Asteroids. Wait that didn’t turn out right, we WANT you to play Asteroids at some point in your life.  THE Asteroids – only one of the defining games of the last century.  One in which an indie game company made a similar game called Debris and got caught up in a lawsuit by Hasbro who then owned Atari and was suing anything that moved, story is here.  Anywho, Meteors is another Roidlike (no not Roguelike, that’s another genre entirely) and we will see just what it is like after the the break.

Meteors has three game modes.  Classic, Powerups, and Timetrial.  Classic is supposed to be representative of the game style from which it’s name derives.  Only you can’t go off the screen, and there’s a line partway on the screen you can’t cross, and asteroids come at you from the right side of the screen instead of all over.  Powerups is like classic mode, with, you guessed it, power-ups.  There’s hearts and plus signs, and really I don’t know what these do because I couldn’t catch any.  Time trial has well a timer or counter.  Except no power-ups and you can’t get killed.

The game seems like a half-hearted job, probably just what I will do when I finally make flash games.  Graphics are pretty crude and black and white.  There’s no music, and really crude sound effects.  Gotta give some respect to the fact it is a finished and playable game unlike some people I know (read: Myself).  I can only really recommend this as an example of what not to do.  No actually I’m kidding, it would be a decent example at the bare minimum you could get away with and still be a full game (and I mean that in the nicest possible way).

There is one annoying part about it, if you’ve used the menu with the mouse (which you have to) you have to click in the window a game once the game starts to actually play, but that’s pretty much the only real problem with it.  If you’re an Asteroids nut, go ahead and play it.  If you’re an aspiring game developer go ahead and play it.  If your definition of fun is fragging your team-mates in yet-another-round-of-Halo-multiplayer then umm… go play that instead.

Name: Meteors

Developer: Platymuus Software

Platform: Browser

Price: Free, and free is good (another reason to play it)

Where you can play it: Right here!

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Tags: Asteroids, game reviews, Indie, Indie Flux, Meteors, Platymuus, retro styled, Shooter, Uhfgood

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 12:33 pm and is filed under retro, Shooter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.