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| Source // Vizzed |
There's nothing I love more on this long list of video games than a space shooter, and Mad Planets is a space shooter that I'm unable to play. I'm even unable to lazily scroll through Wikipedia for it, for there isn't even a page dedicated to this game that we all must absolutely play.
So thank goodness for YouTube being there to fall back on, and to show me how I'm missing out.
Fun Times
From the looks of it, Mad Planets seems to be an apt description of the obstacles in your way, if nothing else. You sit in a spaceship blasting away at everything that isn't part of the background of space, picking up drifting astronauts for extra points and making planets rather irrate. You know. Those big things that aren't alive, and thus cannot comprehend rage, let alone any acts you could do that would enrage them.
It's a video game, it's not literal, but it does look fun, or perhaps up until the point where you fingers don't move as fast as your brain wants them to. Mad Planets is all about being on the move, dodging and shooting and dodging some more. The more moons you destroy, the madder their parent planet gets, and the madder they get the faster they move around the screen, and the faster they move around the screen, the more likely you are to meet them face to face in a battle of hitboxes that you won't ever win, because being hit in the face by a planet means you die. Simple.
It seems hectic, and hectic is often fun because of that feeling of being on the edge of your seat, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat and all that.
Frustrations
But the physics though...
Of course the physics are game-y, of course it makes no sense to be shooting planets like this, but at least it's different. We've just played Gryuss which also has a fancy star field background to give the sense of speeding through space, but here it's more a case of something to look at that isn't static. Or maybe the developers wanted even more stuff going on at once, I don't know.
Final Word
I want to play it though, if I ever get the chance. From what I've seen I get the impression I wouldn't make a whole lot of progress up the high score tables, but I like a bit of hectic gameplay here and there.
Yes, it's a space shooter, yes it doesn't appear to be doing a whole lot for video gaming, but I think it's easily a title you could pick up and play, having a blast to pass the time waiting for whatever game you want to play to install and download updates, and install those updates, and then connect to the server that you don't intend to use anyway... where was I?
Fun Facts
Yeah, I got nothing. Sorry. The guy who made Q*bert worked on Mad Planets? There you go.
Mad Planets, developed by Gottlieb, first released in 1983.
Version watched: Arcade, 1983.