Link for description and downloadGrid Wars is quite a marvel of a game, clocking in at merely 3 megabytes - complete with retro graphics and sound effects.
It's an age old concept and game style - you control an amazingly agile spaceship, and armed with a puny antimatter cannon, you have to dodge and destroy the seemingly endless hordes of neon coloured geometric shapes thrown at you.
This game is absolutely chaotic, but the key to playing it is seeing the patterns in the chaos. Each type of "enemy" on the screen has their own subtle behaviour patterns -> the cyan diamonds will move directly towards you, the green squares will actively avoid your attacks, the red interceptors have a frontal shield which repels your attacks, the tiny dark blue seeker circles move at high speed towards you while ignoring gravity wells. There are ways of dealing with each type of enemy, but the trick is surviving when a whole bunch of different shapes are closing in on you. There are literally dozens of different colored shapes to learn to handle in the game.
The real twist that this game has, is the implementation of black holes. They are a random spawn, like the enemy shapes rushing towards you, but they exert a gravity well around them drawing in everything (including you!) while repelling your antimatter attacks. As it swallows more enemies, the gravity field grows more intense, evidenced by the increasing distortion on the grid background and the higher pitched humming the black hole generates. If a black hole hits critical mass it detonates, sending a hail of deadly sharpnel towards you. The black hole gravity field and mass can be diminished by firing your antimatter cannon directly at it, (to counteract the repelling effect of the gravity field on your cannon you must sometimes position yourself dangerously close to the black hole)
Destroying a black hole with your cannon yields points based on how many enemies it has swallowed, on an exponential scale -> a black hole that has swallowed many enemies can be worth a lot of points, however those points are "locked" in the black hole and you risk losing all those points if the black hole implodes or you perish before destroying it.
The black holes are essentially the terrain upon which the game is played -> the gravity field can be a blessing and a curse, shielding you and simplifying your defensive solutions against an insurmountable rush of enemies, yet hindering your movement and sometimes slowing your movement when you need to get away quickly, and sometimes rapidly reaching critical mass when you are not in any position to get near it to pacify it. The game would be close to impossible to play at higher difficulties without black holes shaping the terrain -> a mass of 50 squares approaching you from all directions is impossible to dodge or destroy, however with a scattering of black holes many squares will be deflected and swallowed leaving clear paths of movement.
Playing this game does feel like farming : you are shepherding masses of enemies into the black holes and keeping their size under control, zipping to and fro between different black holes, deciding when one has gotten too dangerous and "harvesting" it for points.
Well enough of ranting =p Great and simple game. Highest score so far is 700,000-ish on Hard difficulty. (found the lower difficulty settings too slow to try playing).
