Amiga Power


E-Motion

Categories: Review: Software
Author: Jonathan Nash
Publisher: Kixx
Machine: Amiga 500/600

 
Published in Amiga Power #42

E-Motion

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a gardener. A nice, friendly, late-middle-aged sort of gardener, sort of fattish, sort of shortish, the kind of gardener who walks about permanently in hardy slippers, except, of course, you don't walk, you shuffled.

You have retired following the multi-million pound sale of your tremendously successful business, and so can devote your whole day to your garden. It is, to be exact, more of a sweep of land than a garden, comprising maybe an acre-and-a-half and, following a large breakfast, you spend most of the morning ambling leisurely past your impressively varied flower beds, your near-manicured bushes and your carefully, placed, oh-so-young trees, pruning a little here, watering a little there, aiming to reach the shade of your central swinging garden seat by noon, when the sun is at its zenith and when your garden looks its most pretty.

There, following a hearty lunch of sandwiches and fruit, sitting and watching the wildlife of your garden, for you have declared all your land, which stretches fas beyond your private arbour, a reserve for all nature, you perhaps spend a pleasant hour in the maze, whose hedges are still maturing, but will make a fine and delightful puzzle when fully-grown, before continuing through the garden to its very boundaries, unfenced of course, but still marked by a succession of attractively irregularly spaced shrubs, and looking back at your garden, which has, oever the years, taken on the warm, open personality of its owner, and then seeing the three men systematically razing the entire place to the ground with flamethrowers and realising there are two more behind you, watching helplessly in their vice-like grip as your beloved garden is annihilated without reason or remorse.

E-Motion

This would not, however, be quite as blue-faced, deep-gulpingly frustrating as playing E-Motion, a game where you try to push balls on elastic around obstacles and into each other to make them disappear, watching enraged as they instead hit differnt-coloured balls and create a third, explosive sphere.

The Bottom Line

It's supposed to be a calming, floaty, back-to-the-womb sort of game, this Asteroids-on-string is.

But it sure isn't. It is, in fact, disastrously annoying, and not even entertainingly so. Exactly the sort of game to put you off physics for life.

Jonathan Nash

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