Amstrad Computer User


E-Motion
By U. S. Gold
Amstrad CPC464

 
Published in Amstrad Computer User #69

Time to knock the balls together. Don't titter, madam.

E-Motion

There are times in your life when you think it would be nice to just sit in front of your CPC screen, with a harmless, friendly little game and just vegetate for a few hours.

If that's what you're after, don't even think about sitting down in front of E-Motion. Yes, it may look harmless enough to start with; a simple spaceship encased in a globe, pretty coloured balls and an elastic band, but make your first move and the tranquility is well and truly shattered.

As you guide your extremely sensitive rocket around the wrap-around screen (that's right, if you disappear off the top, bottom or sides, you reappear on the other side), your task is to make the brightly coloured balls collide with other balls of the same colour. Reminiscences of the old Asteroids game may come to mind as you pilot through the nongravity void, but the gameplay is something else.

E-Motion

When balls of the same colour collide, they simply disappear and, once all of the balls are gone, you've completed the screen. Now comes the tricky part. Not only is there no gravity, which means that if you knock the balls too hard, they start flying around at a rate of knots, but if balls of different colours go bump, an extra ball of a different colour is produced.

Catch these while they are still small and you can gain much needed energy, but once they have grown, they become lifesize problems with no matching coloured ball to do away with them. That is, unless you cause another ill-matched bump.

If you leave any of the balls unattended for too long, they will explode, draining away vital energy from your ship. Just to make matters even more frantic, on some levels, balls and even your ship are connected by an elastic lifeline which allows you to go just so far, but also drags the connected balls around as well, causing whiplash and many an unwanted crunch. if this happens too often, you'll end up with a very pretty multicoloured screen full of balls - fatal.

E-Motion

Watch out for the tubular steel constructions as well; get the balls wrapped around those and your troubles really have started.

There are 50 mindbending screens in all, with a special bonus level every fourth screen, which have easy to follow instructions of what to do. Well, you have the instructions may seem easy enough anyway.

The game in itself is incredibly simple, but also incredibly addictive and frustrating as you watch your every move going wrong and coloured balls start boggling your eyeballs. For extra special results, however, try two player mode. Instead of fighting against each other, points on each level are shared and you have to work together to finish the task at hand. Just you wait, I can hear the screams of exasperation now as your partner starts screaming instructions at you. E-Motion is excellent. The sound isn't up to much, but the gameplay is everything and will keep you enthralled for hours. This certainly wasn't what Albert Einstein had in mind when he started juggling with molecules, but he wouldn't half be proud of it.

Chris Knight

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