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 Gaxian Spheroids
Review by Mike Featherstone
2/9/2004
Introduction
Following my earlier review of TriBall from Gaxo Interactive, I've now been given the
opportunity to have a look at their new release for PalmOS, Spheroids.
While completely different from the previous game in some respects, in
others it is very similar. Not in the gameplay perhaps, so much as in the
use of good simulations of physical attributes. In TriBall it was magnetism
and elastic, in Spheroids it's momentum and the interaction between moving
objects.
The Game
Spheroids could actually be described as a games pack
as it comprises a number of different individual games, each with its own
rules and objectives. All take place in the same playing area, though, and
have similar characteristics.
The playing area is best described as a box with a hollow
side through which you observe what’s going on. The visible sides of
the box are divided into a number of different squares (the exact number of
squares depends upon the level of difficulty selected in some games) that
can have different attributes (e.g. colour or shade) depending upon the
game being played. The game pieces are one or more coloured balls that move
around inside the box interacting with the sides and with each other. The
effect of these interactions will depend upon the particular game selected,
as will their impact on your score.
Spheroids offers 6 games in total, four for a single
player and another two for two players sharing the handheld.
Looking at each in turn:
SpheroNoid
Each of the panels on the inside walls of the box
starts off lit and your job is to turn them all off by bouncing your ball
against them. Hitting a lit square turns it off, hitting an unlit one turns
it on again – you get the idea. Turning off squares gives you points,
while turning them back on not only deducts points but also reduces the
length of your life (indicated by the bar at the bottom of the screen) and
thus your game. When your life is gone, the game is over.
Completing a level, i.e. switching off all the lights,
will move you on to the next level where you get to do the whole thing
again, but in a bigger arena. This progression continues until your life
runs out. Getting a high score is not as simple as staying alive, though,
as your score continually ticks down as you play. If you wish to get the
highest score, you need to complete the task not only with no mistakes but
also in the shortest possible time. No pressure!
Control of the ball is with the stylus - you have to
catch it on the way past and try and drag it onto a new trajectory. This
only works in two axes however (as you would expect on a flat screen) so
there is no way to affect the balls movement in the vertical plane (toward
or away from you). To accommodate this, one of the cells on the 'end' wall
is a neutral colour; you can hit this with no penalty.
I initially found the movement of the ball very
difficult to gauge and control so wasn't at all good at this game. The
better your 'ball skills', therefore, the better you will be overall.
Bonuses exist but unusually, these can be negative as
well as positive. They are obtained by bouncing your ball against a square
that is outlined in either green (positive bonus) or red (negative bonus).
Bonuses are not straight point additives either, but act as modifiers on
the behaviour of your ball. I'm not going to list them all here, as there
are quite a few but suffice it to say, the effects of some of them can be
most interesting! The other thing worthy of note is that negative bonuses
are automatically applied to your ball while the positive ones sit in a
little 'collection area' at the right of the screen and need to be tapped
on before they become active. It took me a little while before I read
enough of the instructions to realise this!
SpheroChaos
SpheroChaos uses the same arena, but this time there
are multiple balls, all in perpetual motion. You start with one, moving
about on its own collecting points for you each time it hits one of the
squares on the walls, then another one appears and the fun begins in
earnest.
Rather than switching off wall squares on impact and
suffering if you switch them on again, in this game points and life are
lost if you allow your balls to collide with one another. You must prevent
this by dragging the balls with the stylus again, and again I'm not very
good at it. As time goes on and more balls appear, it becomes increasingly
difficult to keep them apart. As points are gained each time a ball hits a
wall, more balls means more points but the risk of a collision obviously
increases as well.
Bonuses are offered as in the last game and the method
of collection and use is the same. Manoeuvring your balls to not only miss
each other, but also miss the negative bonus squares on the walls is a
mammoth undertaking!
This game is not easy and of all the ones available, it
is the one I have taken longest to adapt to. Whether that's because I
hadn’t fully grasped the interface at the beginning, or whether it's
just because I’m not very good at this sort of game, I’m not
sure.
SpheroHopper
This game is different to all of the above in that is
uses a 'snooker-like' approach to ball control, if I may describe it that
way. There is a 'cue ball' and an object ball and the interface requires
you to aim the one at the other, select a power level and then shoot. The
sides of the playing area start off as lit, the point of the game being,
again, to turn off all of the squares as quickly as possible. If your cue
ball is correctly aimed and the balls collide, both will be capable of
switching wall panels off on impact and earning you points. If your aim is
off and no collision occurs then your chance of earning points on that shot
is zero.
Each shot uses up two points, however, so if you do
miss the object ball, the impact on your score is guaranteed to be
negative. Hitting cells that are already unlit will also reduce your score
so accuracy is everything. Additionally, unlit cells will not be relit on
impact, so you aren't provided with extra scoring opportunities as you are
in the first game. Once you're down to the last couple of cells to
extinguish, therefore, you really need to get your aim right in order to
retain any points at all otherwise, they will all be gone in penalties.
Bonuses (both positive and negative) are again
supported though there are only two of each in this game.
One odd thing - despite having played this a few times,
I can’t categorically state what the criteria for the end of the game
actually are. Certainly, hitting a score of 0 is not a handicap as play
just continues (though your score isn’t reduced any further). I was
edging toward the idea that the lighting of all cells was the closing
sequence but as I've now managed to complete a game without doing this, for
the moment I'm at a bit of a loss. An email to Gaxo on the topic has, so
far, elicited no response.
SpheroDual
In the first of the 2-player games, each player is
allocated a different colour with the aim of colouring as many of the
squares in the area to their own colour as possible. Once again, the
interface is based on the 'cue' and 'object' ball with the same rules for
activating the balls as described above. The object ball always assumes the
colour of the player currently in play.
The game is won by the player with the highest number
of coloured cells at the end of the game. If one player manages to light
more than half of the cells in the arena, the game is halted at that point
and he is declared the winner. Having completed a game, play may continue
into another and a tally of games is maintained so that the ultimate winner
may be decided.
As a slight inconsistency, the in-game help talks about
the use of Bonuses but in reality, they don't apply here.
SpheroTussle
In the final game, again for two players, each of you
takes control of a different coloured ball once again, only this time both
balls co-exist in the arena and there is no cue ball. The point of this one
is not to light as many squares of your own colour as possible by hitting
them, though this is involved, but to gain the largest point score.
You both start the game with an initial score
(dependant upon the level you are playing at). Each square has a point
value associated with it and when you hit an unlit square, you not only
light it; you pay for it from your points score as well. Points are earned,
as a sort of rent (or tax), in a similar way. If your opponent hits one of
your coloured squares, he pays you. If you hit one of his coloured squares,
you pay him. Thus it is possible to finish the game quickly by lighting the
most squares but you will almost certainly lose if you do this, because you
will have paid out the most points in fees.
Initially, I played this straight as a
miss-the-other-colour type game until I realised that snooker-style impacts
had a big part to play as well. Now it has become a mission of knocking my
opponent's ball onto my coloured cells and so forcing the rent to change hands.
Knocking the opponents ball onto blank cells can also work to reduce their
score but as this colours those cells in his/her colour you will need to be
careful if you want to make this a major game tactic. Overall though, this
tactical element to the game makes it much more interesting than it
otherwise looked.
Analysis
I must confess that, as I've already implied, my
initial impression was that this game was not as good as most others I have
reviewed. Clearly, that is as much a comment on my ability as it is on the
content and format of the game as I am simply not as good at these types of
games as some others. (If you ask my old school PE teacher, you will learn
that as far as ball sports go I have the co-ordination skills of a small
lemon so perhaps it’s not so surprising that I haven’t been
able to grasp the requirement of this game fully.)
Excuses aside, however, this means that the challenge
offered by Spheroids is all the greater and as time has gone on and I've
looked more closely at the game for the sake of this review, it has begun
to seriously grow on me.
As with TriBall, the simulation of the physical forces
involved is good. The balls move and collide, as you would expect in the real
world (unless some of the more bizarre negative bonuses have come into
play) and while the sound is minimal, the taps and beeps as things hit each
other are appropriate and do help with the overall feel of the game (the
other advantage to minimal sound is that it is not missed too much when
muted for a quiet game in the office).
Control is not easy, as I've already said particularly
when trying to drag a ball in the situation where multiple balls are
passing across each other's paths. Nine times out of ten, I end up dragging
the wrong ball in these situations. Having my T3 set to accept Graffiti
input in the playing area didn’t help in this respect, admittedly,
but even without that hampering play it has taken me a while to finally
reach the stage where I think I am comfortable.
All of the games use a 320x320 display area so there is
nothing to be gained by using HiRes+ devices such as mine. It's a shame,
but I imagine it simplified the game development and made the 'port' from
the original PocketPC platform easier to manage. There would be nothing to
prevent an 'extra' game from being added for HiRes+ machines, of course,
but I can understand why the developer may have been reluctant to do this.
The graphics themselves are fairly simple but it's hard
to imagine how much more complicated things could be made, given that the
main components of the game are a set of balls and the inside of a box.
Having said that, the simplicity is itself deceptive as while the component
parts are simple in themselves, the production of a smoothly rendered
representation of the whole probably takes more work than is initially
obvious.
Each game maintains its own list of high scores and as
each means something different, this is sensible. Personally, I find the
score is almost a secondary target with some of these anyway as I
concentrate so much on the state of the coloured tiles on the walls that
the score can skip up and down without my really noticing. Having said
that, there is another possible explanation for my lack of 'score
attention'. My copy of the game seems incapable of either retaining high
scores or carrying games across an application change. Whether this is
because it's a review copy and is limited in some way, or whether I've
loaded up an incorrect version of the software, I don't know.
As a final comment, as with TriBall this is a big game
at 4.9Mb, I have installed it on my card rather than in memory and it seems
happy to run in this way with no ill effects evident so far.
Conclusion
For what you get for your money, 6 games, Spheroids is
a good deal. At least one of them should carry some sort of appeal for you.
As I’ve said, initially I wasn't very good at any of them which made
them harder to review, but added a certain challenge to the whole
endeavour. As time has gone on and I've spent more time trying to
master them, their appeal has grown. Not only because I'm getting better,
but because the sheer replay-ability of a game like this is almost
infinite. There is no one secret or trick to learn that will make the game
redundant and it isn't something you can 'complete' such that you can then
easily repeat it forever.
Ironically, having finally reached this point in my
relationship with Gaxian Spheroids, I'm going to hit one of the main
problems of being a reviewer i.e. once a review is written, there never
seems to be time to go back to previous review items and have another go.
There is always the 'next piece of software' to look at or the 'next
review' to write. Despite this, Spheroids will stay on my device and I
hope, one day, to find more time to spend improving my 'ball skills' still
further.
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