Pooz Preview
Watch out drug addicts! Pooz is coming to your machines with lots of
multicoloured prescription free medication pills. You might even get some free
Viagra, since there are blue pills included too. And beware, from what I saw it
would be very easy to get addicted to it.
Pooz is an arcade conversion developed by a joint venture of Cooper/Paradize,
STS, Exocet and DMA-SC. As the name is indicating it’s a port of the strategy
-action game "Zoop" by Viacom.
Obviously Cooper is doing the code, which is mainly GFA-Basic. The graphics are
painted by Exocet and STS. The latter seems to suffer from a creative outburst
since he left Alive :). The sound is done by DMA-SC which adds another quality
aspect to the production.
The game will run on any 16/32 bit Atari platform and hopefully on the CT60 too.
The Pooz preview looks very promising and could easily have passed for a
professional project in the 90s. I bet, if someone hit the front door of Thalion
or Eclipse with a demo of Pooz in the pocket, signing the contract would have
only be a matter of minutes.
Pooz will feature nicely drawn graphics, lots of game modes including 1 and 2
player options. A planned four player mode was dropped during development.
The preview already had some nice demo-like effects build in, and if I wouldn’t
know its GFA Basic I would say it’s done in pure assembler.
How
do you play Pooz?
The key element of Pooz is colour. There are four colours of pills that appear
on the screen (blue, green, magenta and orange). The player starts with one of
these colours too.
He is placed in a square at the centre of the screen. The player figure wears an
arrow which can point up, down, left or right, accordingly to the movement on
your joystick or keyboard. If you press fire you can make pills in front of the
player disappear if they are of the same colour as the player. If you aim at
pills with a different colour your own colour will be exchanged with the pills
one.
The aim of the game is to stop the pills from piling up against the centre area
by making them vanish. Sounds easy? Give it a try. You will see it’s very
addictive.
What have we got
so
far?
The rendering engine seems to be finished and a lot of surrounding coding has
been done too. Beside the game, we have a nice intro screen with new school
colours and some effects plus a working main menu and a high score system, which
is already able to write your precious scores to disk. Pooz runs fine from any
subfolder of the harddisk and worked rock solid for me. I have to admit that I
really liked the game, and I hope the team will care as much about the game
design as it did for the technical realization.
Cyclone/X-Troll for Alive 2004-06-20
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
____ ______ __
/ __/__ ___ ____ / __/ / ___ ___ / /_
_\ \/ _ \/ -_) __/ _\ \/ _ \/ -_) -_) __/
/___/ .__/\__/\__/ /___/_//_/\__/\__/\__/
/_/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Game Title: Pooz
Genre: Action/Reflexion
Supported Machines: [x] ST [x] STE [ ] TT [x] Falcon [ ] CT60
Minimum Memory: [ ] 512 kb [x] 1 MB [ ] 2MB [ ] 4 MB [ ] more
HDD Installable: [x] yes [ ] no
Coding Language: GFA Basic
Description: A multiplayer Zoop clone for atari, with many game modes
and nice features (STE enhancement).
Game Design: Gfxmen
Coding: Cooper/Paradize
Artwork: Exocet/JFF^Checkpoint^Spaceballs^Industry, ST Survivor
Sound: Dma-Sc/Sector 1
Current State: 70% of work done perhaps, anyway the hardest part is done.
Already playable, but some polishing to do on game modes.
Planned Release: Around Outline 2005 I hope :D
Website: -
Contact: st_cooper (at) voila (dot) fr
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
