Often times it takes a bad game to show a journalist’s true literary skills. Great games tend to write their own reviews, they command you to write about the same excellent features that everyone else is writing about. Bad games on the other hand allow journalists the freedom to exercise their creativity. It takes real skill to slice hundreds of wafer thin strips of flesh from the still living (and writhing) body of a game without killing it. The deserved victim should suffer until the very end of the review if the reader is to understand the full depth of its awfulness. As a prime example I give you Quintin Smith’s review of WET http://videosgames.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/wet-review/

“All told, Wet is a man who vomits on you on the bus and doesn’t even say sorry.”

Obviously as a developer I feel for the guys who worked to make the game. I know only too well how many factors outside of the developers control can result in a game failing to meet its design goals. Having said that, gamers do need to know and if you are going to put yourself/your game out there you need to take the resulting knocks.

I don’t think I have enjoyed a review quite as much since the 1992 release of Domark’s AV8B Harrier Assault for Amiga (developed by Simis). After all these years most of it is long forgotten but the line in the review which bemoaned the slow frame rate is forever burned into my mind…

“If i chopped my legs off and nailed the stumps to the floor, I could still run round the block faster than this game.”

We couldn’t do a reboot of the 80s arcade genre without fruit bonuses – lots and lots of fruit bonuses. But the fruit in Space Ark does more than just give you bonus points because the key to a good arcade game is depth within simplicity. You get fruit as a bonus for creating Combos and collecting the fruit gives you points – simple. But fruit also increases your power meter (show on the left of the screen in this screen shot).

The meter has multiple levels and each level you reach multiplies the points you get from collecting DNA, combos and any lives remaining at the end of a level. This means that fruit has an impact on every other scoring element of the game and is an essential part of your Space Ark game play strategy if you want to achieve mega high scores.

But beware – gravity is a harsh mistress. The good work you do collecting fruit can be undone if you let your Arkonaut hit the ground. The level meter will drop one level every time you drop your Arkonaut (and you will lose one life as well.)

Previous Space Ark design posts:
Space Ark – Introducing combos