An obscure arcade remake

[Taehl]

Went to visit a friend of mine that collects old arcade machines, he was going on and on about some really rare game he just bought. Had fun with old classics like Dig Dug and Galaga, then tried out the new one. It was really weird and the flashing made my head hurt. No wonder why it never got popular.

I went home and next thing I know, it's twenty five hours later (judging by the dishes, I had one meal along the way) and I'm sitting on a game which is unfinished, but pretty darn similar to it.

Tell me what you think.

[EmmanuelOga]

I spent some time trying to figure out what to do, I picked up that barrely thingie and went around trying to find out the point where everything starts to get distorted. Is that the objective of the game? I'm not sure how to win (or lose). Very cool graphic style!, but unclear objectives.

EDIT: ha, you got me. I guess that story failed to reach the bottom of the Southern Hemisphere.

[bmelts]

aaaaaAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaa

0.1658382490323484242047

cantsleepcantdreamcantblinkcantbreathemakeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstopgoaway

dontplaydontplaydonSINNESLÖSCHEN WELCOMES YOU TO THE WORLD OF POLYBIUS! FIND IT AT YOUR LOCAL ARCADE! TELL YOUR FRIENDS!

[nevon]

Is this real life?

[vrld]

awesome

[Robin]

Is this real life?

You can't win. You can only lose. If you try to get in the middle of things, all hell will break loose.

Pretty fair summary to me.

[kikito]

I liked it graphically and soundly. I didn't like it very much gameplayly.

[headchant]

Very nice game.

The sounds are very very nice.

[Tesselode]

I thought Polybius was supposed to be tempest-like. Maybe I should make my own remake.

[Taehl]

What I played wasn't very much like Tempest, aside from using vector graphics, being pseudo-3D, and having (some) blue levels. I think people get them confused because both games came out at around the same time, and the early version of Tempest also caused headaches (but they fixed it soon after).

I updated my remake a bit. It contains general bugfixes, fixes the zooming-in level transition, adds the other five transitions, adds more effects (I even managed to make a decent stab at the "blood" effect!), and has a working attract sequence (the title shows, then a demo where the game plays itself, then the highscores screen, then back to title). Anyone who's played the real game will immediately notice that my mazes are all wrong, but that's due to me not knowing of a proper maze-generation algorithm. And lacking appropriate mazes precludes putting the transitions in the right places (edges of the maze wrapping around the cube, tunnels, etc.). Anyway, the link is still here.

I can't get very far in the game, to be honest. I keep on failing to keep my score above 0.7 in the higher levels, which always gets me kicked back to level 44... Ugh, at least it doesn't send me back to level 41. It gives me nightmares.