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"AUSBRUCH" - a preview of "STEINBRUCH" by Foundation Two
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system .... Falcon o3o, 14 MB RAM (other configs not tested), VGA, Jagpad
genre ..... puzzler
state ..... playable preview ?
release ... 12/2oo4
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Here we go again with a game review for our beloved Falcon, who didn't got that
much items over the past months to play with.
Quite unsuspected Mad Butscher released the playable preview of his game that
was already shown at the Outline 2k4. Interesting enough, the project was named
"STEINBRUCH" before but it seems that this "preview" is more or less the final
game, renamed into "AUSBRUCH", somehow. But who cares about the title really?
The game was developped with Mad Butschers own game development tool called
Nonconform and maybe because of this, it is awfully resource hungry, but later
for this.
So what is "AUSBRUCH" all about? Just read the following excerpt from the readme
file...
---snipp---
The story so far
----------------
Once when the earth was young, the evil emporer from over the mountain
surfed over the Foundation Two page and thought be himself.
I remember the old legend:
Once the 8 Bits were made to rulez da World, but the Carry bit was made
to rule them. So these crazy guys are 9!! They must be stopped.
So the evil emporer from behind the mountain kidnapped the souls of all 9
Members of Foundatin Two and took them to his own world somewhere at the
end of the SIO bus. There he split the souls to thousands of pieces.
This could have been the end of Foundatin Two, but then the lone rider
appears from the north and he weared the great Hammer of Antic.
You are the lone rider and your task is to save all the souls of the
Foundation Two Members. So power on your Falcon and fight the evil
emporer from behind the mountain.
---snapp---
...sorry, I wasn't really able to understand the meaning of this ;)
In fact it is a kind of a puzzle game where your aim is to delete as much items
on the playfield as possible. For this you find a lot of different coloured
items there and if at least two with the same colour are laying there together,
you can merge/delete them while selecting one of them. At next the items above
fall down into the empty places. And so it goes on. If you delete more than just
two or three, you get extras in form of numbers. If you have deleted the lower
row completely, another row appears on top of the screen and with the time some
blocks with numbers apear, too. Those blocks can be deleted with your extras or
while deleting as much blocks of the same colour around them, as the number on
those blocks is. Tricky one, no? You have to play a round to check out the whole
thing and it gets quite mindmelting with the time.
After a while, the playfield looks like this...
Ok, lets take a closer look onto the tech specs. The game wants at least a Fo3o,
but the faster the better. Even though it is just a simple puzzle game, it needs
hardly an acceleration card, as the used development tool seems to be quite
un-optimized. On a not accelerated machine it stays playable but is awfully slow
and you can't speak really of a game flow. You always wonder if the machine is
hanged up or if the game is still running, this goes esp. for the intro and
highscore sequence.
The grafix are, as always on Foundation Two games, a matter of taste. They are
that colourful that your eyes hurt and quite simple at the same. If you ask me,
there could be a lot done better on here. They surely do their job, but in the
end they belong to the worst pixels done in Falcon games so far... sorry to say
so...
The music/fx is just a module with chippy touch by LotekStyle. It is played in
heavy rotation and if you think, that the game is thought to be played as long
as possible, I wonder why there aren't more tracks to choose as it goes quite
fast onto your nerves, esp. since it sounds some kind of distorted to me. The
tune isn't bad, but listening it longer than 1o or 2o minutes at once bites your
nerves quite hard.
The control is quite easy solved with the Jaguar Pad but I wish there would be
more possibilities, just as keys and joystick, as also in 2oo5 not all Falcon
owners have a JagPad too, while -every- Falcon owner has a keyboard unit ;)
And the rest? There is a highscore table implemented, but I didn't reached it
so far, dunno if it is saveable, if yes, it would raise the motivation a bit...
So what to say... The game concept is quite easy to understand after playing
around with the game some minutes, and games that are easy to play are always
fine. Unfortunately the surroundings aren't real killers, so the grafix are far
away from being masterpieces, they are colourful, but... The only one-mod-sound-
track isn't easy to digestible after a while. Furthermore the slowdown of the
whole game on a not accelerated machine break down the motivation to load it
again, too. It would be cool to get some kind of reworking, but as it seems, the
game stays as finished in this way, unfortunately.
Sure, Falcon owners don't have much things to choice from nowadays, if they
don't want to play always the same stuff, but this still makes not all stuff
digestible from the start...
_______________________________________________________________moondog_o3/2k5___
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